Uriah Heep Plant Their Flag for Four Decades in the Heart of Vienna (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Szene / Vienna / Austria
Concert date: 17.11.2009
Attendance: 600
Ticket price: 29,00€ / 32,00€

Four decades on the scene, with a few short crisis gaps in the eighties when the band’s future was anything but certain. Still, today we can say Uriah Heep are a band that “stood its ground and kept on standing”! And even though these days they’re known mostly to people who left their teens behind a good 35 to 40 years ago, Uriah Heep are one of the rare rock dinosaurs that have kept most of the enamel on teeth that are anything but creaky.

The guys, who finally coughed up a new studio album last year after we’d waited a whole decade for it, decided that a round 40 years of the band couldn’t go unmarked either. So this year they put out “Celebration (Forty Years Of Rock)” (2009) – RockLine review HERE, which gathers some of their biggest classic hits. They re-recorded them in the studio with the current Uriah Heep lineup and tacked on two brand-new songs, probably left-overs from the “Wake The Sleeper” (2008) album – RockLine review HERE – that didn’t fit on the CD.

Stranzinger are Austrian local rock ‘n’ rollers who, much like Heep, waded into the ripest years of earthly drudgery long ago. These guys belong straight at a biker rally. The quintet keeps the old-school hard rock craft alive, mixing in hefty doses of rock ‘n’ roll, and as the support act they delivered a very enviable sound in the Szene club. You could definitely tell the home crowd had them wrapped around their little finger. Which made the audience reaction downright grotesque, because looking out you saw plenty of yawning, bored faces dangerously overfed on too many gigs. The crowd had come to see Uriah Heep, after all. Stranzinger had a decent chunk of stage time. They started rumbling at eight sharp and tried to coax a bit of calisthenics out of the little hall, but got no more than polite applause. Even so, singer and guitarist Gerhard Stranzinger impressed with his command of the guitar, especially in the solos near the end of the show, when his fingers were properly warmed up. Gerhard showed above all that his licks follow feel, not speed and schoolbook correctness. Classic rock solos with a dash of blues. Stranzinger are especially convincing in how shamelessly and persuasively they build their sound on an equally important organ (a Hammond C-3 – no kidding!). The guys didn’t give in to any excessive jamming, but in a few shared solos they hinted that it’s far from foreign to them. At times Gerhard literally overshadowed the other four, needing that much room on stage as he fired off riffs, soloed and, of course, handled lead vocals, which, truth be told, are still the weakest point of the band. Throaty yet a bit muffled, and every now and then mixed way too quietly in the overall sound. Sadly with lyrics in German, so Stranzinger are of course career-sentenced to playing Austrian village fairs. For a layperson, though, a very nice surprise, proof that our northern neighbors can show now and then that what’s hanging between their legs can actually be balls.

Uriah Heep filled the hall. Actually it was wonderfully full, but not to the point of people being packed in like sardines. Just full. As far as the eye could see. The hall at the Szene club is smaller than the one at Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, mainly narrower and not so much shorter. Last year Uriah Heep played Vienna in the bigger Gasometer hall (RockLine report – HERE) on 06.11.2008, which holds about 3000 heads. Back then the place was only half full. For rational reasons, you could say picking Szene for a Uriah Heep show was spot on. But only in that respect, because Uriah Heep today are neither pretty nor smart, let alone popular like, say, the artificially manufactured MTV teenage droppings of The Killers. Uriah Heep are simply too powerful and too loud for a club space like Szene. Plain and simple. They brought along a PA that was too loud, and so we got really bad sound in the club. The guitar, and especially the drums and bass, ran right over Bernie Shaw’s vocals, to the point where the multi-part vocal harmonies were sometimes heard better than the lead vocal. For a good part of the evening you also couldn’t clearly make out the lines of Lanzon’s keyboards.

The sound saga, which a band as experienced as Uriah Heep definitely shouldn’t have to put up with, just kept going. Song after song. Bernie looked toward the sound techs several times, as well as toward the mixing desk on the club’s balcony, where tour manager Ian Bintliff himself was twiddling the knobs, and this is definitely not his first tour with Uriah Heep. Somewhere in the instrumental part of Love In Silence (“Sea Of Light”, 1995), Bolder’s bass was finally “tamed” to an ear-friendly level and we finally heard the keyboards too, but Bernie’s vocals suffered irreparable damage through the whole show and so stayed in debt. As far as sound goes, then, the night was definitely not on the band’s side.

One way or another, the Austrian audience always looks terribly cold and reserved at first glance. In the first part Uriah Heep still kept the newer songs in the set. Neither the older Return To Fantasy, which came off completely botched thanks to the dreadful sound, nor Bird Of Prey (older still) soon after it managed to fire up the crowd. The two brand-new songs from “Celebration”, Only Human and Corridors Of Madness, of course didn’t catch on with the crowd, and probably never will, but Uriah Heep judged the songs worthy enough to deserve a stage outing. You’d rather see Heep slot in two older songs instead of them. Not least because the band kept as many as five songs from the “Wake The Sleeper” (2008) album in the set. Surprising, but understandable on the other hand. The band craves a refresh. Four decades of defiance do show, after all. Anyway, the crowd only really came alive at Free Me, somewhere around the middle of the show.

But let’s rewind a bit. The setlist itself isn’t revolutionary in the slightest for those of you who’ve followed Uriah Heep in recent years. With the exception of three songs. Return To Fantasy (Heep last played it in winter 2004), which passed by as if it didn’t exist thanks to the terrible sound, then the phenomenal Rain, where only Bernie Shaw and Phil Lanzon stayed on stage. You could even catch some “humming along” from the lone “yodelers” in the hall. Also very welcome was the inclusion of Love In Silence from the excellent album “Sea Of Light” (1995), which had been an increasingly overlooked album in the band’s repertoire in recent years. Uriah Heep built part of the show around an acoustic set. That was marked especially by the run of Rain, Wizard and of course the “everybody’s song” Free Me, where the Austrians finally sang as one with the band and all the women in the hall jumped in the air especially intensely. The crowd, by the way, was split perfectly fair and square between the sexes this time. Luckily Bernie could actually be heard, at least in the acoustic classics. Bernie’s holding up. He showed it beyond doubt, along with excellent delivery of the material, with the dizzyingly high scream at the end of Love In Silence and by pushing his vocals to the limit of his range in the obligatory classic July Morning. Mick Box introduced the Lawton-era classic Free N’ Easy by saying this was the song that critics, back when it was written, defined as the first heavy metal song of Uriah Heep’s career. In this song especially you could feel how, thanks to the botched sound settings, Bernie Shaw was left completely helpless on stage. At that point Mick’s sawing riff swallowed the hall whole.

Mick Box isn’t using hair dye on this tour, so it was easy to feel the presence of two spare “Gandalfs” on stage this time, Lanzon and Box. Box didn’t leave the crowd wanting. During July Morning, after the solo, he once again theatrically blew out an “imaginary” flame on the guitar neck, and at the end of the song he stomped into a “kazachok”. In Look At Yourself he went wild on the wah-wah, so that song belonged entirely to the legendary guitarist. New drummer Russell Gilbrook is turning into a real animal. With jerky, precisely measured, cannon-sized swings he held the Uriah Heep framework together with total confidence, and during the show he pulled all sorts of “half-bestial” grimaces that drew laughs from those in the front rows. In short, the band is keeping its vitality!

This time the concert didn’t manage to conjure up feelings as intense as at a few previous encounters with this band. The reasons lie in the extremely reserved crowd, which, especially in the first part of the show, acted as if it had come to the wrong place for entertainment. Another thing is undoubtedly the sound, which for the name Uriah Heep was disastrous and unacceptable in the first half of the show. Third, definitely, is the smaller stage they had to squeeze onto this time.

Luckily the expressive power of the classics played in the second part of the set, such as Gypsy, Look At Yourself, July Morning and the timeless Easy Livin’, meant the energy flow between band and crowd finally ran in the right direction, so we got at least a smidgen of that magic typical of Uriah Heep concerts. Along with Bird Of Pray and Sunrise, these are the songs Uriah Heep definitely play most intensely at their shows. They touch the listener the most and crawl under the skin the hardest. Even after 40 years.

The trip to Vienna proved very useful as a scouting mission of sorts, giving a rough first take on the band’s form, the repertoire and the concert setup itself. RockLine is heading back to the tour dedicated to the band’s 40th anniversary, this time in Munich on 26.11.2009, where in the Tonhalle, which holds more than twice as many people as Vienna’s Szene, we can expect a resit exam in properly calibrating the sound on stage, as well as greater intensity in the stage performance and delivery of the material. On top of that, the legendary Manfred Mann’s Earth Band will be breathing down Uriah Heep’s necks. They’re a band with an even longer track record than Uriah Heep, so another seriously interesting get-together with rock legends is coming up soon.

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Setlist

1. Intro 2. Wake The Sleeper 3. Return To Fantasy 4. Only Human 5. Book Of Lies 6. Overload 7. Bird Of Prey 8. Corridors Of Madness 9. Love In Silence 10. What Kind Of God 11. Rain 12. Wizard 13. Free Me 14. Free N’ Easy 15. Gypsy 16. Angels Walk With You 17. Look At Yourself 18. July Morning 19. Easy Livin’ —encore— 20. Sunrise 21. Lady In Black

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