Location: Ljubljana / Cvetličarna / Slovenia
Concert date: June 14, 2012
Attendance: 1000
Ticket price: €5.00
What hasn’t our good old »Cvetličarna« been through? And no, not the one from the famous Alan Ford comic, the secret hideout of the TNT Group, although the two Cvetličarnas share one more thing besides the name. A fat boss. We’re talking about Ljubljana’s »amusement park«, which keeps getting shut down, opened up, shut down, opened up.,… you get the picture. Watching that kind of yo-yoing over the years, you can only marvel at how it’s even possible. Ljubljana desperately needs a nightlife. Ljubljana is dead at night, dead already in the evening hours. On a Sunday there’s nowhere to pop out for a modest drink after eight p.m., and midweek isn’t much different. The nation goes to bed with the cartoons. The kids gather at Metelkova, on the plaza between the Slovenian Philharmonic and Židovska ulica,… They’ve got nowhere else to go. Cvetličarna has always been seen as the ideal refuge, where you can catch your breath, unplug, forget the troubles of everyday life. It counted as a valuable addition to the city’s night-time pulse. Even parking is less of a problem here than you’d normally expect. It’s far enough from residential neighborhoods that Cvetličarna can raise hell loud and long into the night, and even the dogs can howl at the top of their lungs. The only one this partying could possibly wake is some corpse at the nearby Ljubljana Žale cemetery, which one way or another counts as an act of humanitarian aid (Lazarus knows the press). All the »juggling« over the fate of »Cvetka« is now just a reflection of the past.
Anyway, it all went the right way in the end. A full renovation! A raised ceiling, an opened-up interior that now packs in almost 2,000 heads. You could say it’s pretty much the ideal concert venue for the Slovenian capital, with exactly the kind of capacity we’ve sorely missed all these years. The evening entertainment on offer will grow, and the concert lineup most of all. The enviable variety of the concert scene in Slovenia certainly has a whole bunch of gaps that can be filled more than effectively with a thorough upgrade. I’m aiming especially at classic rock, old bands from the seventies (Uriah Heep), the still-kicking new wavers of the eighties (Utravox), even the old warhorses of prog rock (Yes) and above all melodic (AOR) rock. For Scorpions, Aerosmith, ZZ Top, Cvetličarna is still too small, but not anymore for Mr. Big, Foreigner or Journey, maybe even Def Leppard, considering that in recent years Leppard have basically been forgotten in Europe. The list of acts is far from complete,… And then there’s all of metal!
If I borrow a few details this once from the promo texts that were bombarding the media a few days ago about the revitalization of Cvetličarna, the final picture of the renovation work looks something like this: the hall’s capacity went from 800 to 1,900 without a single wall coming down, the new stage is square, the new smoking area is bigger, and a whole 30 tons of steel were built into the place. The investor spent 15 times less on the renovation than some public institution would have (so says the PR text).
Given the huge importance of the restrooms at Cvetličarna, their number has also gone up, and supposedly you even get a view of the stage from the intimate quarters through panoramic windows above the sinks, so nobody misses anything important while their body enters the relief phase. For music consumers, though, the main gain from the renovation, besides the square stage, is probably the improved acoustics of the space.
The Cvetličarna staff will welcome you with open arms with all the details on the revamped website at the familiar address: www.cvetlicarna.info , which has already come back to life with the opening date.
The first test of the hall’s acoustics at the opening, on the famous Thursday, June 14, 2012, Cvetličarna passed with a performance by the quartet Terra Folk. And quite successfully. The band, which is an absolute oddball on the scene with its peculiar style – an unbridled and provocative fusion of many genres – provided a great warm-up, gliding through a pleiad of its heartfelt numbers stuffed with mischievously sparkling, sharp-witted arrangements and coherent interpretation that confirmed its long concert mileage and the quartet’s remarkably self-assured character. The band is supposed to release its 7th studio album this year. The evening was stretched into a proper party by DJ and producer »Jasarov«, a great knob-twiddler with a feel for drum n’ bass, the paradigm of hip-hop, night bird of »party« spaces, and current member of Evil Eve (keyboards, programming) and the jokers Leni Kravac.
The opening was a success. The walls held, even the plaster on them, unlike Slovenia’s newly opened tunnels (hello, Šentvid?), which keep getting built, built, built and never get finished (that’s what happens when Zidak builds, pardon, a bricklayer, but that’s another story). Cvetličarna is ready to cover up many acts of musically sinful lust! May it stay that way forever and ever!
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