Location: Prague / Forum Karlin / Czech Republic
Date: Friday, February 15, 2019
Day two of a five-day epic of gigs along the Austria-Czech Republic route (with one more stop back in Austria before returning to Slovenia) continued for RockLine, after the Uriah Heep show in Vienna on February 14, 2019, with the next day, Friday, February 15, 2019. Same undiminished punch, same crystal-clear focus, fully locked in. Why the hell travel so far if there’s no reason to? Because that day in Prague, Uriah Heep were playing together with U.D.O. Both bands put out excellent new studio albums last year. Their tours overlap in both location and timing, so it turned out to be the perfect chance for the two bands to join forces in Prague for one spectacular joint concert night. Uriah Heep with the album “Living The Dream“, and U.D.O. with “Steelfactory“, one of the best studio achievements in the career of a band commanded by the one and only Udo Dirkschneider.
So in the morning we set off from the Moravian corner of the Czech Republic (Dolni Dunajovice), and by three in the afternoon we were already checked in somewhere on Pernerova Street in Prague, a good hundred meters from the Forum Karlin venue. Which, as the name itself hints, sits in the city district called Karlin. Then we took a quick jump into Prague’s old town, where the prices are seriously jacked up, and the gap between the price of a beer in the very center, where you shell out almost four euros for one, and the outskirts, where it costs barely a euro or less, was a fairly shocking, though not unexpected, experience. Luckily, tourism in the middle of February isn’t as rampant in Prague, though you still literally step on “Asians”, who dominate all the retail shops too.
This time the trip to Prague was a total must, because last fall none other than the Slovenian bassist Tilen Hudrap joined U.D.O. Tilen is hugely respected in the metal world. So. The world found him (and he found it), and once it discovered his talent and quality, it gave him this recognition. He was first spotted by the old school US speed/thrash metal veterans Vicious Rumors, with whom he put out live documents and a studio album; the legendary Bay Area thrashers Testament noticed him around that time too, and he helped them out on tour, filling in for the “bass guitar deity” Steve DiGiorgio. Later the Teutonic German thrashers Paradox invited him to collaborate on their new studio album, and after that even the pioneering Dutch death metallers Pestillence paid our musician the honor, recording an album with him and playing a heap of tour dates. But getting taken under the wing of the most illustrious Udo Dirkschneider himself, a sharp-eyed and pedantic German who is absolutely unwavering when it comes to following the principles of order and discipline and faithfully fulfilling every commandment, let alone joking around, is a special honor and recognition. So. With our arrival in Prague, RockLine was in a cheerleader kind of mood, we simply had to be there, because on that day our Tilen was defending the Slovenian colors in metal. What Tilen Hudrap means for Slovenian metal, in everything this musician has achieved to date, is no less than what Dončić means for basketball. Except Slovenia and Slovenians, once again, don’t know how to see it, don’t want to discover it, or simply don’t want to admit it. And once again, it took a foreign country to do the job for us. Like with Laibach or Jože Plečnik. Tilen is writing the history of Slovenian metal beyond our borders too, and he’s our only musician (we could even say, more broadly, the only musician from the so-called “Balkan basin,” from Slovenia to the Black Sea) who has managed to achieve what his peers dream about. And there are quite a few of them. To reach that position you have to be extremely good. At everything. The competition is fierce and flubs are not allowed. All of this needed saying up front. If only so that the Republic of Slovenia might one day at least print postage stamps with his face on them.
Time flew. It was eight in the evening. Sadly we missed the excellent Australian hard rockers Dead City Ruins, who are supporting U.D.O. on the European leg of the “Steelfactory” tour. They had already played at seven. Next up were U.D.O. A gigantic stage. Not so much deep as long. Decked out with the “Steelfactory” tour backdrop. A big spectacle was in the cards, in the company of a vocalist who is one of the definitions of heavy metal. Udo Dirkschneider. The man, the myth, the legend. No less, no more. When he steps on stage, everything shakes. From all his charisma and unique voice, which is, as said, a term that defined metal. Udo Dirkschneider is playing every show of the new tour with an injured knee. The doctors told him to stay home, but in his dedication and stubbornness the man doggedly ignored all advice so as not to let his fans down. So the “Steelfactory” tour is in full swing. One more reason for enormous respect for a legend.
In clouds of smoke and red light, Udo’s son Sven appears behind the drum fortress, Karlin starts to roar, and a crowd of at least 3,000 heads has gathered at the venue. Sven is joined by three young guys: the newest guitarist Fabian “Dee” Dammers on the left guitar, Andrey Smirnov on the right, and between the German and the Russian, but more to the left toward Dammers, the Slovenian, our Tilen Huidrap on bass. The band sinks its teeth into Tongue Reaper, and the eye naturally lands on that famous silhouette and unmatched charisma. Udo Dirkschneider. Totally unhinged. Tilen, Dee and Andrey scatter across the stage under Sven’s cannon-torpedo drumming, and Udo screams like a little devil, and that’s despite the not-insignificant fact that he turns a solid 67 this April. And through the hour-and-a-half set, his strength never lets up.
So the band is seriously refreshed, and at the same time more potent than it has been in a long time. Dammers has effectively complemented Smirnov on stage. In the solos too. He complements him in charisma as well, and quite simply. He fits the stage phenomenally, and with that, the U.D.O. crew. Something we’ve been missing since the days when Kasperi Heikkinen played there. At first glance, the harder job in this regard fell to our Tilen, who had to fill the gap at bass after the departure of the famous Fitty Weinhold, who served in U.D.O. for a full 22 years of his career. But Tilen is by a wide margin the better bassist, and on top of that incomparably well-versed technically and considerably more accomplished in that sense (not everyone can step into Steve DiGiorgio’s shoes). Given the elemental sacred simplicity followed by the famous riff-chiseling by which you recognize the musical character of U.D.O., Tilen keeps to straighter lines in U.D.O. and digs into the bass more heavily with a pick. That also lets him be more relaxed while running around the stage. The three agile young guys use the stage with incredible sharpness and move around it very instinctively, even if it all seems perhaps rehearsed. When one of the two guitarists is on a solo, the other two move shoulder to shoulder to the opposite end of the stage (Udo takes the other one, of course) and the stage looks fully used the whole time. Udo, in his usual style, often leans a shoulder on one guitarist, then the other (especially during solos). He’s always loved doing that. Even back in the Accept days. The intro before Hungry And Angry is especially interesting, since it belongs to the rhythm section. Sven drops into the groove first and fires up the crowd. In less than half a minute he’s joined by Tilen, who, all alone, with his punchy dictates, raised the 3,000-head crowd of Forum Karlin to its feet. That’s precisely where you could feel that Tilen, despite his youth, already has a huge amount of live mileage, experience, and routine. That’s how confidently, loosely and zealously he engaged with the audience in that moment.
Udo has now really gathered a crew of top young musicians around him, bursting with the urge to prove themselves and, above all, to simply enjoy themselves on stage without limits. No matter how nastily his knee was gnawing at him that night, in such a crew Udo seemed very regenerated, refreshed, rejuvenated, like he’s going through a new spring. In his famous stage pose, he fired off one classic after another. With his extremely high-pitched screech, at moments suitably ominous, just the right amount of dark and occult, he instantly tied the crowd to himself. His delivery remains piercing, he successfully hits even the highest registers, holding the required power at the top level. A voice that shakes you. Literally.
The new album “Steelfactory” takes up a nice chunk of the setlist, and rightly so, since it’s truly excellent, and it’s hard to pick its highlights, the tracks stand side by side with that much quality. After the bristling opener Tongue Reaper, the band moved on to the excellent Make the Move. Those two were joined from the new album by the catchy Rising High, the melancholic In the Heat of the Night, the sharp and fun Hungy And Angry, while the band solemnly closed the regular part of the set with the anthemic One Heart One Soul, with one of the most successful “sing-along” choruses.
Longtime fans of the band of course got their fill, since the band nicely loaded the rest of the set with songs from different eras. As always, one of the band’s best songs holds a special place in the set, “Solid”, the Independence Day classic. A song with an extremely catchy lead phrase that the bass digs into, and an excellent graduated build-up with a big chorus crescendo. The superb semi-ballad I Give As Good As I Get (“Rev-Raptor”, 2011) also holds a special place in the band’s catalog, and with it the band discharged the tense atmosphere in the middle with octane-fueled burning. Interestingly, when Udo asked whether anyone knew the album “Faceless World”, he met a very cold response from the sizable crowd, and the band then launched into the excellent Heart Of Gold, which delivered one of the concert’s highlights. Of course Udo and company saved the “Animal House” classics for the finale. With the exception of the great ballad In the Darkness, which was slotted in the middle of the show. The first encore opened with the superb Holy (“Holy”, 1999), which was predictably followed by the smasher Animal House, and the second was opened by Man And Machine (“Man And Machine”, 2002). The band ended the show (as expected) with They Want War (“Animal House”, 1987). The albums that missed the setlist were “Mean Machine”, “Time Bomb”, “No Limits”, “Thunderball”, “Dominator” and “Decadent”, but the band did play two “Steelhammer” tracks (Metal Machine, A Cry of A Nation), the lewd 24/7 from “Mission No. X” thundered out quite early in the setlist, and U.D.O. also didn’t shy away from two tracks off the album “Mastercutor” (Mastercutor, Vendetta).
Bomb. A brilliant show. Udo has obviously found a winning formula in this crew, and the band put on a truly top-notch gig. In everything. Maybe they were further fired up by the fact that Uriah Heep were taking the stage after them. To be honest, I’ve personally missed U.D.O. on stage tremendously all these years. I first saw them on May 25, 2004 in Ljubljana, when there were barely a hundred people at the show and then twice more in 2009 at festival venues (Bang Your Head!!!, Wacken Rocks South), but they played shortened sets back then. A convincing show reflecting newfound strength and drive, courtesy of the new crew and a visibly rejuvenated vocalist of legendary pedigree, who, as expected, moved around the stage more cautiously and preferred to stick to his own spot “solo”, which didn’t stand out at all. If you didn’t know his knee was giving him trouble, you wouldn’t have guessed anything was wrong with Udo at all. Simple as that. The voice commands all the attention. A piercing, utterly unique voice that serves Udo fantastically in his mature years. Let’s hope the man has found new vigor with the new crew and that he’ll stick it out in the music business in the years to come. He has young, hardworking and incredibly talented musicians on his team, loaded with youthful zeal, performing hunger and passion, and Udo simply has to know how to make use of that.
It should be said that both bands’ sets were a little shorter because they were co-headlining. U.D.O. dropped Timebomb from the setlist, while Uriah Heep, after the opening charger Grazed By Heaven, surprised quite a few people by continuing the show with the “Abominog” classic Too Scared To Run. Return to Fantasy fell out of the setlist, and so did the excellent newest song Knocking At My Door in the middle. But the band unleashed more energy than the day before in Vienna. Bernie, who swapped his red boots for zebra-striped ones, also sang at a higher level, the one required of him. The crowd stayed in Karlin, and interestingly, the audience wasn’t all that hung up on favoring one band or the other, which could have resulted in “extreme” acts, such as a share of the crowd heading home after the U.D.O. show.
Mick Box, with his trademark gestures that make him look like a medicine man, a true guitar shaman, once again stuns with his magical touch, and once again Bernie theatrically blows out his guitar after the atmospheric ending of the unique July Morning. This time Bernie finds a suitable monitor and uses it as a seat. Bernie has always liked singing July Morning by sitting down on one of the available stage monitors for the opening verse. Mick accompanied this classic with an intro explaining that it was born from three different lead motifs that Uriah Heep later “glued” together into one composition. Truly the most complex creation on the entire “Uriah Heep menu,” it remains part of the iron repertoire and one of the highlights of every Uriah Heep concert. The band also stretched out considerably instrumentally in the second half of the excellent new Rocks On The Road (“Living the Dream”, 2018) and of course the special version of Look At Yourself, which runs close to 15 minutes with an extended outro jam from all four musicians. On this tour Uriah Heep play the classic Gypsy without the Hammond organ intro that’s on the original of the debut album “Very ‘Eavy… Very ‘Umble”. A story in itself on this tour is the magical Rainbow Demon once again (“Demons And Wizards”, 1972). As expected, the band ends the show with the incredible Lady In Black, where a good part of the crowd joins in the singing. An incredible composition, a masterpiece built on just two chords (A minor, G major), and what’s truly incredible is the “yield” and reach it achieves. In the encore everyone was demanding Easy Livin’, but before that we got the only song from “The Magician’s Birthday” (1972), the excellent Sunrise.
The band seemed a lot fresher and more regenerated in Prague than the day before in Vienna. Uriah Heep delivered yet another excellent gig, just as you’d expect from them. The tour is packed tight schedule-wise. The same goes for U.D.O. The next day both bands moved from Prague to the Moravian part of the Czech Republic. U.D.O. played in Jablunkov near Ostrava, and Uriah Heep in Hluk, which lies somewhere between Zlin and Brno. So RockLine traveled to Hluk the next day to bow once more to Uriah Heep on this tour. The story doesn’t end there. On February 17, 2019, U.D.O. also played in Zlin, 40 km from Hluk. But all of that follows in RockLine’s other notes from this concert odyssey, forever honed to epic proportions.
After the Prague concert experience, it’s impossible to ramble on about whether one of the bands stole the other’s show. They’re simply completely different. U.D.O. perhaps left the bigger mark because they hadn’t played under that name for a few years, and because of the giant stage backdrop that delivered that atmospheric dot on the “i”, while Uriah Heep, in their usual style, simply played with classic stage lighting and a few smoke curtains. Suma sumarum. Two exceptional bands. Two completely different musical stories that, in a spectacular union on one stage, delivered an abundance of unforgettable and unique concert delights.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
