reviewsarchiv 588

..... Smoke On The Water, and Fire in .... etc. etc. Did you actually know, that this is the most famous guitar riff of all times in modern Rockmusic? And they are still unwastable, despite many line up changes, recharging the band sceleton over the years pretty often. But we do know all these stories, don't we. And let's face it, this band mainly lives from legend status and all those musical milestones, writing Rock'n'Roll history. One thing is for sure, the polish still hasn't suffered, and the meanwhile not too bright sparkle is blending today lighter than ever before, though there has not been a new record since 'Rapture of The Deep'. On the other hand, who needs a new longplayer anyway?. The fans from back then and the new kiddies who came along, just wanna hear mainly the classic standards anyway. I mean: a Deep Purple Concert without 'Smoke On The Water' wouldn't be a Deep Purple show, would it?! So please come on and let us sing along and all over again with the band and celebrate a Hardrock dejavu of the special kind.
Munich's Olympiahalle, which fits 12.000, are filled with aprox. 7.000 and a few more. And at least it looks decently crowded from the visual aspect. The audiance is a colourful mixture of all ages, some of them who want to draw comparison to their past experiences with the band, and the other's just beeing curious about a rocklegend they have been told of, but have never seen them live on stage yet. And that I myself do belong to the first mentioned one's, I guess, I don't have to say...

Purple have recruited Marillion for this tour trip, to heat up the crowd....

But those one's seem not to be able to manage really, which is not, becaue they ain't good, but it's rather the fact, that Marillion's musical style don't really fit to the one of Purple. It's as simple as that... Apart from that, fans of this band are pretty much devided in 2 halfs.
For one half, Fish is still the one and only and true singer of the group, while other's have accepted the current shouter Steve Hogarth. Whereby Fish had only fronted the band from 1979 'till 1988, while Hogard has beend doing this from that point 'till the very day. And while with Fish only 4 studioalbums came out, it has been 13 with Hogarth. Hmmmm.... strange, that there are still so many fans around still longing for Fish.But back to the present, which shows, that the current release of the band is out now for more than 1 year. And there have been only one Live Record named 'Live In Montreal' and one DVD 'Out Of Season' inbetween. So reason enough to come along and present themselves live all over again.

I can't tell you much more about this stint of Marillion, exept that Steve Hogarth presents himself as the somehow weird professor acting as if he wanted to reactivate Narnia. The setlist is short and painless, and it even includes one of the big hits with Fish from back 1985 - 'Kayleigh'.
But the extroverted, excentric style of the opener goes only down on a limited base on the Purple audiance. End of story and there are no encores requested.

http://www.marillion.com/

.... and also this time Deep Purple start their Set with ‚Highway Star’ and roll on stage like a thunderstorm...

Congratulation, the average condition has been trained since last time and they seem much more active and reanimated, exept one guy, who has alwas been like a hurricane. Last time we all had the impression up there on stage is a Steve Morse band, included coincidentally 2 members of Deep Purple. But this time it's rather Purple themselves again, conquering the stage. It seems, Morsy Boy has been pushed back a little bit in his individual energy. And that one includes a huge talent as a guitarist and his youthful sunnyboy appearance, underlining his average aura.

The second aspect beeing straight caught in our ears is the voice of Ian Gillan, which has recovered again. He himself seems as if he has pushed back the clock of age and seems so far younger than he actually is,including a great mood. And that again spreads across the whole scenery, sparkling onto to the absolute enthusiastic audiance. There is an overwhelming party mood developing, which can't be any nicer. Don Airey once again shows, what great Keyboard wizard he is, and that he easily can compete with former Jon Lord, exept with the internal band reputation. Within his bombastic solo he includes Beethoven as well as Munich's Hofbräuhaus. - On drums as usual Ian Paice, who's neat hairstyle stands every drumming storm nowadays.

and last but not least Bassist Roger Glover, who let's his 4 strings train for the next olympic games.

This musical gourmet dinner includes some ingrediants, which are not too often to be found on the band's setlist, as for instance 'Silver Tongue' or 'Almost Human'. But never mind, as the hits are all included as my personal fave '‚Strange Kind Of Women’, dann ‚Fireball’, ‚Lazy’, ‚Perfect Stranger’ and ‚Space Truckin’. And last but not least - yes of course... Smoke... you know what I mean...

Of course we get a desert, which finishes the almost 2 hours prayer with 'Hush' and 'Black Night:
For everybody, who still don't know... no 'Hush' is not penned by Purple, and not from any other as Gotthard or so. This piece of music is composed by Joe South, who's written it originally for Billy Joe Royal in 1967. But that one had not been very luck with it. So Purple had to come along to cover it, to make it famous. This is just for your generell increase of music knowledge.