Venue: Stadtsaal / Burghausen / Germany
Concert date: 06.11.2008
Attendance: 1500
Ticket price: 38,00€
Uriah Heep’s comeback this year, rejoining the ranks of bands that don’t just tour but actually make new music, is a real godsend. After 10 agonizing years of waiting, we’ve finally got a great new studio album from the band, “Wake The Sleeper” (2008), and on their first tour this year, built around promoting it, Uriah Heep play the whole thing live. And they do it proud and loud! They’d probably put it themselves as “Loud N’ Proud”!
Throughout October, Uriah Heep had Thin Lizzy along for the ride on the German leg of the tour, opening the shows before Uriah Heep hit the stage. November is dedicated to the rest of Europe. Even so, the Heep boys still ended up on German soil one more time, in the little town of Burghausen in southeastern Bavaria. It’s a border town sitting roughly between Austria’s Salzburg and Germany’s Passau, with an imposing castle and a fairytale old town. The orange-and-black Uriah Heep tour bus was already parked in front of the Stadtsaal, which sits smack in the middle of the main town square. By about 5 p.m. the parking spots were completely full. We checked into the hotel across the street, which was totally empty, since it’s a time of year that can’t exactly boast a tourist invasion. So why a hotel? Heh, the next day we had an assault on Stuttgart and a Deep Purple show waiting for us.
After a hefty dinner topped off with a liter-sized Bavarian wheat beer “superb-ie”, the three of us music lovers rolled ourselves toward the entrance of the Stadtsaal. You had to climb up to the first floor to reach the hall itself. It was roomy, with high baroque ceilings and magnificent chandeliers hanging from them. There was parquet on the floor, and it could cram in some 2000 people. This time the stage, with a proper decorative proscenium arch, the kind you find in ballet or drama venues, was much smaller than at Vienna’s Gasometer in Austria, where we’d had the honor of catching the legendary band just the day before. With less room, the spotlights on the rig hung much lower, so you could easily feel waves of heat every time the lights blasted “all at once”, each with its own beam. That was rough especially on the band itself, since the guys were visibly sweating a lot more than at the Vienna show a day earlier.
The band kicked off at 9:15 p.m. From the very start the hall surprised us with excellent acoustics, delivering a warm, tight and full sound, and the sound engineers found a great balance between the instruments and the vocals. That sound graced the show from beginning to end. Some 1500 people had packed themselves in. By their own standards, Uriah Heep strolled onto the stage totally relaxed and hungry to perform. They opened with the title track of the new album, “Wake The Sleeper” (2008), which served to warm up fingers and vocal cords and to calibrate the sound in the hall.
Compared with the previous day in Vienna, the band couldn’t stretch out as much on the noticeably smaller stage, so we got less stage gymnastics from the guys. Still, Box’s little Cossack-dance interlude at the end of the classic July Morning was definitely there, and so was the guitar “pounding” in the closing part of that same song, as he rode through the song’s trademark wah-wah melody. The closing part of the song also didn’t get the intense Bolder-Box-Lanzon interplay it did in Vienna, where Bolder even hoisted his bass high in the air during his solo.
These guys are indestructible. There were no visible or audible mistakes all night, and once again it was the older songs in the repertoire that stood out above everything else. Uriah Heep have simply been playing them for so long that they’ve grown right into them. The creation of that unique Uriah Heep magic was, once again, majestic and seductive in the extreme. The chemistry this lineup creates on stage is something special. Mick Box, as ever, is visibly in his element as he steps on his wah pedal, using gestures to direct streams of energy from his guitar toward the audience in all directions, or with those same gestures signaling that he’s taking in energy from the crowd. The man is deep in a spiritual sense, as proven not just by the turquoise bracelets and rings but also by the remarkable calm and ease that’s part of his stage presence, where you can easily tell his genuine smile from the faked ones that a whole horde of people put on these days across all kinds of music genres.
Even though the band (with the exception of drummer Russell Gillbrook) had no chance for stage acrobatics because of the tiny stage, this time they allowed themselves no slip-ups in playing the material, unlike in Vienna. That goes for Bernie Shaw’s vocals too, which shone across the board, and with his softness and sensuality he was once again utterly convincing in July Morning, in the opening part of What Kind Of God, and in the classics Sunrise and Stealin’. Gypsy and July Morning remain the main attractions of Uriah Heep shows to this day, and Burghausen was no different. The guys also treated us to an impressive jam outro in the extended version of the classic rocker Look At Yourself, and Phil Lanzon pulled off an artful bridging filler with a Hammond organ solo between Light of a Thousand Stars and Gypsy.
Russell Gillbrook has fit into the band superbly, and on this tour he also contributes as an important building block of Uriah Heep’s signature multipart harmony vocals. At last year’s festivals, Gillbrook didn’t yet join in on backing vocals. In his drum kit, to his right, he has a kettle drum raised up on the drum rig as if it were an ordinary tom-tom. At the end of What Kind Of God, for example, he uses it to finish the song with bare-fisted hits on the head. The guy has brought real freshness and drive to the band. Thanks to his push, the band also decided to start playing Gypsy again with its original intro, as found on Uriah Heep’s debut “Very ‘Eavy, Very ‘Umble” (1970). His drumming is incredibly solid and tight, with clearly polished, cannon-like fills. On “Wake The Sleeper” Gillbrook sounds far more confident than in the shows we saw during his baptism-by-fire year with Uriah Heep last year. In other words, the guy is growing more and more comfortable in the shoes that the legendary bear Lee Kerslake left behind when he quit the band. Heep especially drive home the point that they’ve had a new drummer for over a year now when Russell lets rip a short drum solo on the way out of Stealin’ and the stage gets flooded with strobe fire, one more novelty that came with the band’s new tour.
The loyal German crowd sang and played along with the band the whole time, and people especially lost it for all the Uriah Heep classics. There were fewer young people in the audience this time than in Vienna the day before, but there’s no finer proof of how loyal and devoted the crowd is than seeing middle-aged guys headbanging in the front rows during Gypsy, reliving the band’s rise in the early seventies. The honest picture in Slovenia, in contrast to German refinement and keeping the rock tradition alive, would be that at an Uriah Heep show back home we’d hold a contest over who can drink the most beer.
This Uriah Heep show was once again excellent. It ran an hour and three quarters. The guys still keep an incredible freshness and stage power about them. They play the “Wake The Sleeper” material more confidently from show to show! I honestly can’t remember a band with this much live momentum since I started following them on stage. Clearly they’ll have to release the next studio album much, much sooner. The band still has a solid year and a half of nonstop promotion of “Wake The Sleeper” around planet Earth ahead of them. Festival appearances across Europe are on the cards for summer. Here’s wishing them as much success and good health as possible on their new cruises.
Setlist
1. Intro
2. Wake the Sleeper
3. Overload
4. Tears of the World
5. Stealin’
6. Sunrise
7. Heavens Rain
8. Book of Lies
9. Light of a Thousand Stars
10. Gypsy
11. Look at Yourself
12. What Kind of God
13. Ghost of the Ocean
14. War Child
15. Shadow
16. Angels Walk With You
17. July Morning
18. Easy Livin’
—encore—
19. Lady in Black
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