Author: Urban Bolta
Location: Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Velden am Wörthersee / Austria
Concert date: November 23, 2010
Attendance: 40
Ticket price: €30 (presale), €33 (day of show)
The Quireboys are one of those bands that, with a smidge more luck, could be criss-crossing far bigger venues today than Velden’s Bluesiana. Hard to say what went wrong. Maybe the band didn’t push hard enough themselves, maybe they broke through a year or so too late.. but whatever, it doesn’t really matter. Had the band hit it big commercially in the nineties, you’d have a hard time catching the Quireboys in a setting as intimate as the one we got this time in Bluesiana. When I got to the club, it was basically deserted, and by nine in the evening a few dozen heads had finally trickled in. Just a few dozen. Way too few.
The Quireboys have had an intense summer, spent touring all over Europe. It’s been 20 years since the release of their debut “A Bit of What You Fancy”. To mark the anniversary the guys reissued it, rolled up their sleeves, spat in their hands and hit the road. Rockline already caught them during festival season at Sweden Rock (report here) and at Bang Your Head!!! in Germany (report here), but this time we met the Quireboys for the first time on the much, much smaller club circuit, face to face. In that respect, the Bluesiana show was incomparably better than all my previous encounters with the Londoners. But let’s take it from the top.
A little after nine, a very good-humored bunch of five musicians made their way from backstage to the stage and “summoned” the few dozen of us, who had been chatting in the corners in great spirits, up to the front. The Quireboys opened the night with Don’t Bite the Hand from their second record, “Bitter Sweet & Twisted” (1993), and right from the first ball had us swaying and shaking our hips in the embrace of bouncy blues-rock. Through the evening the Londoners entertained us with the standards of their career, taking us on a stroll through it all, from the central album, the debut mentioned above, right up to “Halfpenny Dancer”, released last year, from which they predictably served up Mona Lisa Smiled.
Once again the central figure was the ever-smiling vocalist Spike, with his trademark red bandana pulled down over his forehead, who, along with guitarist Guy Griffin, is the only constant member of the lineup since the eighties. Spike is a frontman from head to toe, keeping one eye on the show at all times and steering it safely forward with energetic moves inherited from none other than David Coverdale (Whitesnake), while his English humor and accent between songs win the crowd over without a doubt. Vocally, Spike handled the gig with confidence, though it has to be said he wasn’t giving a hundred percent. He wisely steered clear of overly demanding vocal lines, and in the choruses the others often came to his rescue, but he still dished out the whole palette of those recognizable throaty, raspy, gritty lines. Lead guitarist Guy Griffin and rhythm guitarist Paul Guerin followed Spike’s relaxed mood and cruised easily through the show, and Guerin wasn’t even rattled by a snapped string during Dirty Toys. But watch out, the rhythm section had changed since the summer lineup. The Quireboys imported a pair of brothers from America who now take care of the rhythm, and I couldn’t find an answer on the World Wide Web as to why the swap happened. On the far left of the stage, Keith Weir, hidden under his cap, coaxed bouncy rock’n’roll sounds out of the keyboards with his fingers.
The Quireboys’ performance is a real masterclass in reviving the bouncy blues-rock of the seventies and the sound of bands like T. Rex, Mott The Hoople or The Faces, to which the Quireboys added a pinch of glam rock mischief in the late eighties. There She Goes Again, This is Rock and Roll and 7 O’ Clock were the peak of Tuesday’s get-together in a half-empty club. After a short break the musicians returned to the stage with the ballad I Don’t Love You Anymore, and for the very end they saved one more in the series of tickling, cheeky blues marches, Sex Party. The night lived up to high expectations, helped for sure by the warm embrace of Bluesiana. Even though the guys, because of the poor turnout, didn’t leave every atom of their strength on stage and clearly have some reserve left in the tank, this colorful stroll with the Quireboys was without a shadow of a doubt worth our time and money, and long into the night we heard Spike’s words, repeated countless times, ringing in our ears, words we won’t easily forget: “We are the Quireboys, and this is rock’n’roll”!
Setlist
1. Don’t Bite The Hand
2. Mind
3. Finer Stuff
4. Tramps and Thieves
5. There She Goes Again
6. Roses and Rings
7. Dirty Toys
8. This is Rock and Roll
9. Whipping Boy
10. Mona Lisa Smiled
11. Man on the Loose
12. Hey You
13. Sweet Mary Ann
14. 7 o’Clock
—encore—
15. I Don’t Love You Anymore
16. Sex Party
Photo Gallery
