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There sure was a cold wind blowing though Dusseldorf last night, and with it came buckets of snow, and massive anticipation for the Arcade Fire concert in the Philipshalle. The initial disappointment their tour didn’t stop in Holland made way for a nice little city trip to the Christmas markets of Dusseldorf, where I stood drinking glühwein in the snow, playing Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) in my mind on repeat: “And if the snow buries my, my neighborhood..”
When the time came and the small community that is Arcade Fire took to the stage to loud cheers, they opened with the Suburbs tune that was made for the part: Ready To Start. The simple drum beat and driving guitar were the perfect match to the crowd’s excitement, the mood was set for the night. They held on to the electric vibe with a solid 4-piece opening combo, threading together Keep The Car Running, Neighborhood #2 (Laika) and No Cars Go. “Women and children, let’s go!!”.
Then some time to calm down a bit with the ever charming Regine taking central stage for Haiti and Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains). She seemed in very good spirits, doing her characteristic little rhythmic moves and even picking up some colourful ribbons for her dance routine. It’s during these songs, when I’m not bouncing around as much, that I notice how incredibly talented and multi-instrumental all the band members are.
Next up, the one song from The Suburbs I was most anxious to see: the ambitious Rococo. This song is the ideal setting for Win’s dark doomsday approach, “they build it up just to burn it back down”, perfectly accompanied by the eerie violin sounds and hushed “rococo-rococo-rococo” background vocals of the band members. What a pleasure to hear it played live! Win has really come into his own as a lead singer, carrying it off with great confidence. Here is a little youtube snippet.
Then a complete surprise, as mentioned in the opening sentence of this post: Cold Wind. This song won me over when I first heard it on the soundtrack of arguably the best tv series ever made, Six Feet Under, but I never heard it live before. Win mentioned they hadn’t played it for quite some time. Sadly I have to say it didn’t really live up to its haunting potential with a few hiccups during the song, but still a welcome surprise.
After a sizeable Suburbs middle section with Deep Blue, the uplifting romp along of The Suburbs with The Suburbs (continued) as outro and the frenetic rock out of Month Of May they carefully crafted another 4-part section to leave every single audience member begging for more.
Personal favourite and Funeral classic Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) kicked it off, moving on to We Used To Wait which had Win jumping up on the monitors belting out “Hear my voice screaming sing the chorus again!”. Next up was Neighborhood #3 (Power Out), where Win left out a complete section of the song to thank a guy who stood up way in the back seats. He must have been delighted with himself. Power Out finally merged directly into to crowd favourite Rebellion (Lies), “Everytime you close your eyes, lies lies!”, a great set closer.
I was really hoping that some of the gems of Neon Bible would feature in the encore, but only Intervention was played, followed by the ultimate Arcade Fire live anthem Wake Up. O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied? Where was Black Wave/ Bad Vibrations? Where was (Antichrist Television Blues)? Where was Black Mirror? Oh well, I guess it would take playing all three albums entirely for me to be fully satisfied.
I think it’s fair to say Arcade Fire is a band that has grown and matured over the last few years. The show might be less explosive than it used to be with band members constantly running around the stage banging drums, but that has made space for beautifully crafted songs, a confident band with mesmerising stage presence and a catalogue of songs that would each do well on stage. Their shows are an absolute treat, and if you haven’t seen them live yet I would urge you to do so!
SETLIST
01 Ready to Start
02 Keep the Car Running
03 Neighborhood #2 (Laika)
04 No Cars Go
05 Haiti
06 Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
07 Rococo
08 Cold Wind
09 Deep Blue
10 The Suburbs
11 The Suburbs (continued)
12 Month of May
13 Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
14 We Used to Wait
15 Neighborhood #3 (Power out) [extended version merging into 16]
16 Rebellion (Lies)
ENCORE
17 Intervention
18 Wake Up
[scroll down for complete setlist]
Finally the wait was over, Flight of the Conchords made it to Amsterdam!! Positively giddy with excitement myself and my motherflippin FotC partner in crime entered Melkweg only to find a room ful of chairs!! Oh no! We had wanted to be within sweat-spray distance of New Zealand’s finest gangsta folk duo, but we made do with seats on row ten in stead.
Jemaine and Bret opened the show with The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room) and the crowd gave a huge warm welcome. They make up a ludicrous story about the origins of the venue name ‘Melkweg’, claiming it pays tribute to the olden days when the people of Amsterdam used to don wigs made of old milk. “It was a bit smelly though. Yeah.. those were the days”. Milkwig laps it up.
The set continues with gems like Robots, Jenny and Think About It. After a while the boys admitted they hadn’t really played for a year and were a bit rusty, this then became the running gag of the evening. Before playing a new song about wooing ladies in the thirteenhundreds, they explicitly asked the crowd not to record and YouTube this delicate moment. They threatened to out Holland for being a filthy country due to the recent binman strike if we broke our promise, which went down with a big laugh.
Later on you could see they were struggling with the in between song banter, “this is the longest gig ever”, “we have now officially run out of things to say if you hadn’t noticed”, citing jetlag as the culprit. However, the moments when the boys address their mistakes or mux up the words and burst into laughs are actually the funniest. They play Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymnoceros at practically twice the normal speed, after Jemaine finally gets the hang of the guitar tabs, but it works out alright.
They play a few more songs than planned because “we’re staying until we get one right!” and end the main set with hilarious version of Mutha’uckas with Bret on a mini drumkit swallowing all the supposed swear words until there are hardly any lyrics left.
The encore, with Bret & Jemaine coming back on stage wearing flashing robo-boxes on their heads, is ironically plagued too when a piece of their equipment won’t work: “This is awkward. It was supposed to be our grand finale”. But it is soon fixed and Too Many Dicks (On The Dancefloor) is a worthy gig closer.
A wonderful evening with the New Zealand (“much funkier and more modern than your old Zeeland”) twosome. But where were the season 2 classics like Hurt Feelings and Sugalumps? Just as wel I’m going to see them again in London in two weeks!
SETLIST
01 The Most Beautiful Girl (In The Room)
02 Robots
03 Jenny
04 Think About It
05 [New song about wooing a lady]
06 Bus Driver’s Song
07 Foux du Fafa
08 Boom
09 I’m Not Crying
10 Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymnoceros
11 Bowie’s in space
12 I Told You I Was Freaky
13 Business Time
14 Ladies Of The World
15 Song For Epileptic Dogs
16 Mutha’uckas
[encore]
17 Too Many Dicks (On The Dance Floor)
[See below for setlist]
I was a wee brokenbranches when I first encountered the raw Vedder vibe live, bareley seventeen years of age. Although I was at the concert with my high school sweetheart, I remember only having eyes for one man and he was a blur of testosterone, flanel and hair up on stage. The whole experience had me feeling very woozy I recall.
Tonight, 13 more years of maturity under my belt, not much had changed. There he was, same curly long hair, same contorted face while he sings, hanging out of the mic stand. And there’s that amazing band. I love the fact Pearl Jam always play a decent dose of the old stuff to get the crowd going, none of this “we’re only playing our latest” crap.
Picture thanks to Frank Meeuwsen
And the crowd lapped it up, every last note. There were one or two songs from their upcoming album Backspacer as well as oldies, such as the seldom played Brother from the Ten era, and everything in between. Twenty eight (!) songs worth. They had me right from the start by opening with Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town, a personal favourite I’d never heard live before. Great choice for opener as well: as Eddie sang “I just wanna scream helloooo” the house lights came on to greet everyone.
Eddie was quite chatty, telling a funny story about how there were people waiting outside their hotel. The band was bummed they didn’t have time to talk to them or sign anything so they just greeted them in passing. Turns out it was just a bunch of people standing in line for the bus, “we were very embarrassed, but they were so friendly, asking ‘hey how are you?'”.
Picture thanks to Frank Meeuwsen
Black was introduced with the words “This is what happens when you fall in love with a Dutch girl”, and Wish List had some extra lyrics at the end: “I wish I wasn’t a travelling man, I’d settle in Rotterdam”. Towards te end of the show he also said “It might be another three years before we see eachother, or it might be a year and a half”, followed by a pause and then “..or maybe ten days..” which immediately lead into the first encore Life Wasted.
This last remark has already surfaced on Twitter as a possible reference to Lowlands! Here’s hoping, cause I certainly wouldn’t say no to another helping of Pearl Jam. During both (lengthy) encores they had the entire stadium up on their feet screaming for more, a really great night in Ahoy.
See you in ten days!?
SETLIST
01 Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town
02 Last Exit
03 Animal
04 The Fixer (single from upcoming album)
05 Given To Fly
06 Severed Hand
07 Why Go
08 Dissident
09 Brother
10 Gone
11 Even Flow
12 Wishlist
13 Nothing Man
14 1/2 Full
15 Black
16 Got Some (from upcoming album)
17 Go
[encore 1]
18 Life Wasted
19 Better Man
20 Daughter
21 Lukin
22 Comatose
23 Alive
[encore 2]
24 You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away (Lennon & McCartney cover)
25 Love Reign O’er Me
26 Evolution
27 The Real Me (The Who cover)
28 Yellow Leadbetter
Finally the wait was over: last night I saw Radiohead perform at the Westerpark in Amsterdam. Conditions were perfect: an open air gig in a park with sunshine, 27 degrees and 18.000 Radioheads with high expectations. And the band delivered! What a night, what a concert and what a privilege to see a band perform so well and with such gusto. We were treated to a varied setlist, with songs spanning much of their career, and 6 from their latest release In Rainbows.
As the band came on stage I turned to my friend MB saying “I hope they open with Bodysnatchers!”, as I knew they have played it consistently this tour but never to start the show. Well my wish was heard and may I say Thom & co, what an excellent choice it was! It’s just a cracking song to kick off with, great guitar, great energy. It was worth squeezing into the front and waiting like “sardines in a crushd tin box” before the show, because it soon became apparent we were surrounded by Radiohead connaisseurs who immediately started singing and dancing like mad. Perfect!
After that the beautiful All I Need calmed everyone down a bit, only to be swept up again by The National Anthem, the dark and gloomy Kid A track that is always a winner live, not in the least because of Thom freaking out towards the end. Skipping through the setlist I would say my personal highlights were Lucky, There There, Videotape, and the amazing encores with gems like Climbing Up The Walls, Wolf At The Door (only it’s 3rd appearance so far), Jigsaw Falling Into Pieces and closer Planet Telex! And of course, the Amsterdam crowd was lucky enough to be treated to the new song Super Collider, which was previously only played during the Dublin and Paris shows.
Real crowd pleasers were Street Spirit (a massive hit here in Holland), Idioteque (nothing like a bit of techno in a Radiohead gig) and Just for it’s good old fashioned Bends-distorted-guitar-feel. Mind you, from where I was standing every single song got a very warm reception. Thom had the crowd laughing when he put on safety goggles before sitting behind his drum kit for Bangers & Mash and putting on a geeky voice saying “Safety first, safety first, that’s what I always say!”. And just before Jigsaw Falling Into Pieces, Jonny was fidgetting with his guitar and Thom joked “Hurry up Jon Jon! If you’re not in tune you’ll have to tune it. Well, it’s never stopped you before has it!”.
According to this amazing yet slightly disturbing website keeping track of the gig statistics of Radiohead’s 2008 tour (be sure not to miss the pie chart showing the occurence of animals that get lyrics devoted to them by Thom!!), the Westerpark gig gets an honourable 6th position in the Setlist Rareness Ranking out of 24 gigs so far. Not bad!
Check out some gig goodies below: a clip of Super Collider, some pictures I took and the complete setlist.
Super Collider live at Westerpark, July 1st 2008
The complete setlist
01 Bodysnatchers
02 All I need
03 National Anthem
04 15 Steps
05 Lucky
06 Nude
07 Street Spirit
08 There There
09 The Gloaming
10 Arpeggi/ Weird Fishes
11 Idioteque
12 Faust Arp
13 Videotape
14 Just
15 Bangers & Mash
16 Everything In It’s Right Place
17 Reckoner
First encore:
18 House Of Cards
19 Climbing Up The Walls
20 Wolf At The Door
21 Jigsaw Falling Into Pieces
22 Karma Police
Second encore:
23 Super Collider
24 How To Disappear Completely
25 Planet Telex
Admittedly there were a lot of glittery brooches, there were black stockings, high heels and lipstick, there were the lederhosen and there was even a recorder-solo, yet Rufus Wainwright easily gets away with these frills without it becoming a camp charade. How does he do it?
First and foremost: by singing his knee-high socks off. I was stunned at the consistant power and pitch-perfection of his voice throughout the 23 song setlist. And it’s not as if there’s a lack of drama and high notes in a Wainwright show, but he nailed it every time. Quite frankly, swept up in the brilliant performance of a song like Do I Disappoint You, you don’t even notice there’s a man in lederhosen singing it to you.
Then of course there’s the band, 7 skilled and brooched multi-instrumentalists that make “An evening with Rufus Wainwright and band” run like a well oiled machine. If there’s anything to find fault with, it would be that perhaps it’s all a bit too well oiled. Compared to Arcade Fire last week (which is not a very fair comparison, but for the sake of argument), there were certainly no band members running across the stage posessed by the sheer energy of the music. Each song was like a neatly packaged parcel, with a bow on top.
Las but not least, it’s Rufus himself. His charming between-song-chatter easily wins you over. Wether he’s encouraging the audience to get a few drinks down them in the break, referencing the people with portable beertanks that walked through the crowd when he opened for Keane (Rufus opening for Keane, it sure is an upside down world we live in), or when he’s telling a random story and gets a bit self conscious and boyishly says something like “well, whatever, I had fun”.
The one thing that bugged me about this whole “An evening with…” concept was the sitting down!! I know this is in part a personal thing, I just find it impossible to sit still when I’m enjoying music. Last night I was constantly very aware of the huge black mass of people around me just sitting in their chairs whilst the band is churning out one great song after another, how extremely unnatural! “Why don’t we all leap up and sing and yell and dance??” I kept thinking to myself, but then again, I didn’t do it either. I joined the herd like a good little sheep and in stead sat twitching and writhing around within my personal chair space.
Next time you come Rufus, please leave the chairs at home. I’ll definitely be there!
Below is one of my (far far away & blurry) photos, the setlist and a snippet of Between My Legs with the Dutch competition winner Michelle.
01. Release The Stars
02. Going To A Town
03. Sanssouci
04. Rules And Regulations
05. Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk
06. The Art Teacher
07. Tiergaren
08. Leaving For Paris
09. Between My Legs
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
10. Matinee Idol
11. Do I Disappoint You
12. A Foggy Day (Judy Garland cover)
13. If Love Were All (Judy Garland cover)
14. Beautiful Child
15. Not Ready To Love
16. Slideshow
17. 14th Street
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
18. I Don’t Know What It Is
19. Poses
20. Complainte De La Butte
21. Millbrook – dedicated to best friend Fred
22. Get Happy (Judy Garland cover)
23. Gay Messiah
brokenbranches 
