A night train is the perfect way to travel if a) you are not afraid of heights, b) you are used to sleeping on hard surfaces and c) you are not afraid of being robbed. Otherwise, you might end up being really tired the next morning, because once you actually make it up on the pallet, you never dare to go down again (a), even though your back hurts after two hours (b), and apart from that, you wake up every two minutes to check if your bag is still there where you put it (c)…
Anyway, I made it to Prague, and after a short breakfast at a friend’s we got on our way to discover Prague. I’ve been there before, but it’s been a while ago, and we just had to take advantage of the terrific weather and walk around the city.
When we got to the venue in the evening, Geoff Berner was on stage already – at a quarter to eigt?!? I thought that at least the Czechs would start their concerts at a reasonable time, but no… =;-) The place was pretty small, and in the beginning, there were very few people there.
But that changed as soon as Geoff went off stage. At once, it got really crowded! The gallery remained completely empty (except for some couple dancing waltz *g*), but the floor was pretty crammed.
Kaizers played a typical “first concert setlist”: Ompa til du dør, Bøn fra helvete, 9mm, Sigøynerblod, Container, Blitzregn baby, Volvo i Mexiko, Kontroll på kontinentet, Enden av november, Delikatessen, Apokalyps meg, Maestro, encore KGB, Katastrofen and Resistansen.
In the beginning, the atmosphere was rather restrained – during Sigøynerblod, the Jackal actually had to ask which part of “put your hands up” we did not understand. =;-) The audience was very diverse – you could hear a lot of Norwegian, but there were pretty many Czechs there as well. And when the Jackal asked who had seen Kaizers before it was obvious that there were quite a few first-timers in the crowd. And of course they needed some time to warm up – but in the end, they seemed really excited. Where I was standing, for example, there were some Czech first-timers who were dancing wildly under Maestro. Mission accomplished! =:-)
Of course the Jackal wanted to announce the “faster”-part in Sigøynerblod in Czech – but he got lots of different answers to his question about how to say faster in Czech. Well, it’s a complicated language! =;-) No clue if what he said in the end sounded right, but he did try to speak some Czech in any ase. *g*
Hellraizer raizes hell every day except Sundays, and sometimes he takes Mondays off as well, and when he got a bad day, he writes rock’n’roll songs. The last bad day he had was nine years ago, and he wrote Container that day, and of course back then he knew already that he would play that song 9 years later in Prague. =;-)
Next time, we should all bring some friends – they can stand up on the gallery then. Hellraizer: “You have friends, right?” But the Jackal had the answer to that: “You have six new friends right here now. And we have 300 new friends! It’s a win-win-win-win-etc. situation.” After a while, the gallery actually started to fill up though, with more and more people from the floor getting up there.
Kontroll på kontinentet was the soundtrack for ten thousands of Norwegian teenagers in 2001, and of course the atmosphere was great under that song. And when the encores started, everybody in the audience was hot and up for more!
And we got more – first KGB and then, because the Jackal has it in his contract that he has to play the guitar once every night – the first ever Kaizer song, Katastrofen. The song is actually ten years old already – “where’s the champagne?” During Resistansen, the audience sang along loudly (ok, and completely wrong *g*) in the chorus.
So, all in all, a great and absolutely successful first concert in Prague! I’m pretty sure it was not the last one there – and maybe at the next concert there will be even more Czechs in the audience. =;-)