After excessive Blogging throughout the Book-Week I really need to get back into a writing mood and as I do not seem to be able to finish my post for last years Wacken am I trying to change course by finishing this concert review instead.
Originally I did plan on writing this before the Wacken post anyway, as it was before it, but after the WGT.
Anyway, one of the bands I failed to mention in the Soundtrack of my Life are Die Ärzte. I probably mentioned them in one of my other posts and I have used some of their songs for the Weekend Guess, but so far I failed to express what they mean to me.
Everyone starts somewhere…
As impressionable young teenager did I listen to what my parents and peers where listening to, but somehow the things I enjoyed most had guitars and other proper instruments.
Then in 2002 or a bit later did I catch the broadcast of the „Rock’n’Roll Realschule„, an unplugged concert of some of their most famous songs and I got hooked. They became one of the first bands I ever had an actual interest in.
I tried to get my hands on their CDs and pretty much everything that sounded interesting (like their biography „Ein überdimensionales Meerschweinchen frisst die Erde auf“ – An oversized guinea pig is devouring the Earth). For my Confirmation I got a whole package of their old stuff from my cousins and listened to it over and over again. The unplugged album and 13 soon became my favourites. At that time I still haven’t had a MP3 player so I either used a portable CD player or even made my own mix-tapes for my portable cassette player. I think I still have those tapes somewhere…
Besides the main band each of the members has side projects and of course I listened to some of them as well. After managing to see Farin Urlaub twice, we – BlackWolf , a mutual friend and I – finally went off to see them in Rostock in 2008 during their Jazzfäst-Tour and it was a pretty fun concert.
It then took me five years to see them on stage again.
The Medics are in
I don’t really remember how I noticed that they would play in Rostock again, but I was thrilled when I read it and marked it as one of the possible concerts for last year. Discussing them with Black Kat and Mücke it was soon clear that Kat would accompany me for this trip.
Setting off in the middle of the week I picked her up and we made our way to the City Hall (Stadthalle) in Rostock.
The hall is constructed to have a middle (standing) area that is surrounded by tribunes on each side and as there were no cards left for the arena we had gotten some for the sitting area.
It wasn’t until we had found a proper place to sit that we noticed a couple of strange things:
- We were surrounded by mostly middle-aged to old people up there.
- The younger people in the arena partly looked like they were in a club.
- There were barely any Punks in the crowd (DÄ are after all a band with roots in Punk Rock).
- We felt like we stood out amongst the people with being dressed semi-punky and in black.
There is a lot of controversy that DÄ are too mainstream to be considered Punk any more, but they still make fun of that in their songs. Other than that does it seem that people are trying to get to a concert of them just to say that they’ve been at an Ärzte concert, before the band retires completely (The same phenomenon happens by the way with Rammstein, where you can see more and more normal people at the concerts).
Regardless of the weird people (who didn’t even move a muscle most of the time) around us and the minimal moving space we had, was it again a pretty great concert. Die Ärzte aka BelaFarinRod are just one of the most fun and ridiculous bands I know. It is not just their songs that give you a good time, but also their conversations on stage and the general atmosphere they create. I didn’t necessarily understand all of their jokes, but that doesn’t really matter as I still had a lot of fun and was pretty much grinning all the time.
What surprised me most, however, was that I still knew so many lyrics, even though I hadn’t heard most of the songs in years… Guess I simply listened often enough to the majority of the pretty well mixed (many old, some newer songs) set list back in the day. 😉
Definitely no lullaby
After a long day at work and a great concert we – or rather I – had to drive back to Neubrandenburg. The most problematic thing on those night rides is to fall asleep while driving. I might not have mentioned this before, but I can’t listen to music – especially not the band itself, though I currently don’t have anything of DÄ on my player, which I should change at some point again – right away after a concert. I need some quiet time to properly enjoy what I just heard.
Regardless of that do I need to listen to something to keep myself awake and that is when I discovered something weird.
When my shuffle brought a Feuerschwanz song to my attention, I thought, I might as well listen to the other ones as well. What I did not expect was that I became more and more awake the longer I listened. I started to actually pay attention to what they were saying, which is in most cases utterly ridiculous and pretty perverted. I do not know why it helped me to become less sleepy, but it did… Kat later said, that she doesn’t really like the singers’ voice as it sounds too faked and she has a point with that. To me it doesn’t sound bad, but I can hear some kind of fakeness in the way he is singing, as if he changes the sound of his voice on purpose. Maybe that’s what kept me awake. 😀
As I am now completely off topic let me give you a short version of what you just read:
It was a great concert with a strange crowd and I’d go right away if I have the chance to attend another of their concerts.
PoiSonPaiNter
