Kaizers Orchestra’s festival summer is coming to an end pretty soon, and my last Kaizers concert for this summer took place at Open Air Gampel in Switzerland. Because of the great line-up, I decided to go there for the whole weekend – the complete report (in German) is available on www.konzertjunkie.com.
After a great, hot, sunny summer day, Kaizers Orchestra were scheduled for 6:30 pm. An excited (but rather clueless =;-)) crowd gathered in front of the stage; compared to other concerts earlier that day, it was pretty crowded, actually (and of course it filled up even more during the concert). Still, there was lots of space to dance! I gotta admit that I was quite distracted during the first couple of songs, because I had a photo pass, and well… Kaizers! In full daylight! With a good camera! =:-D Well, you’ll get to see the results once I’ve gone through all the 250 pictures, uhem… *g*
First of all, here’s the setlist: Russian Dance as intro, then KGB, Bøn fra helvete, Delikatessen, Din kjole lukter bensin mor, En for orgelet en for meg, Far til datter, Faen i båten, Tusen dråper regn, Bak et halleluja, Kontroll på kontinentet, Svarte katter & flosshatter, Maestro. There were no encores, because Kaizers had only an hour. If they had had more time on stage, I’m sure the audience would have called them back out!
At the beginning, the audience had mostly one thing to do: watch! The majority had no clue who those guys on stage were and were just experiencing their first ever Kaizers concert. And for sure not their last! Just watching Omen during Delikatessen should be sufficient to convert everyone into a Kaizerfan… when he poured water into his helmet, keeping a totally straight face (I guess – actually, he was still wearing the gas mask, so who knows?), just terrific! And of course he used that setup later on during Svarte katter, when he dipped his comb into the helmet before straightening out his hair, while everyone was staring at him (and cheering him, of course!).
Before they played Din kjole lukter bensin mor, the Jackal announced a duet – actually, he wanted to do that with a pretty Swiss girl, but “the best I could get” was Hellraizer in the end. Well, better than nothing!
At the beginning of En for orgelet, the Jackal first wanted to know if the translation that he got behind the scenes for the song title was actually correct. “Eins für das Orgel, eins für mich – is that correct?” Well, it has never been, but apparently the audience accepted it. At least they shouted the name loudly! And it seemed no one minded that there was no big concert drum this time (well, I guess nobody KNEW there could have been one *g*).
After that, it was time for a couple of new songs. The Jackal explained that they are currently releasing a trilogy to celebrate their 10th anniversary, and now they’d like to play a couple of songs from Vol. II for us. The first one was Far til datter, and for that one, they needed a banjo of course. And such a banjo is really expensive! But the one he was holding at the moment wasn’t his own, the Jackal emphasized, because otherwise he’d have one that is cheaper… “but let’s not discuss that now!”
As second new song, we got a song that was “almost an instrumental song”, in a style like that from Cloroform (which I’m sure everyone here knows, uhem…), namely Faen i båten. And right, I didn’t think of it this way before, but it really sounds a bit like Cloroform. And you can’t really count that only line of text as lyrics. In any case, the audience loved it!
The final new song was Tusen dråper regn, and that song is just ingenious, no matter if live or in the studio version. It’s just great! But the Jackal had to talk about the surroundings a bit before that – the Gampel open air takes place at a beautiful location, surrounded by mountains! Personally, I’m really confused at night when I look up and see stars – and then I realize that those are not stars, but lights high up on the mountain. =;-) Anyway, the Jackal explained to us that the mountains are okay. “We have the same mountains in Norway. But our mountains are a little bit better!” Just kidding, of course… =;-)
After all the new stuff, it was now time to play some songs that are more familiar. Of course with a huge grin, because… well, you wouldn’t expect anyone to be familiar with _any_ of the songs, right? Well, maybe the Jackal was wrong there after all. Because the following songs got a great reception, and the audience answered every “Singen Sie bitte!” with screaming along loudly. Awesome!
Then, before playing Maestro, the question: Do we want more? “Say ja! Say ja klar!” Yeah, FINALLY they did that again, haven’t heard that forever! =:-D And so we got more; and even though Omen (“the man from the Eastern Europe”) started in the wrong key accidentally, the audience loved the song, and in the end, everybody screamed along “Schwing den Hammer”.
And that was it – the Jackal said goodbye in Norwegian (“Vi ses neste år, eller året etter!”), and Hellraizer made sure that the Jackal had a towel on his sweaty shoulders before they bowed arm in arm. And while the audience sang oh-oh-oh (that’s the way Swiss people show they liked a concert *g*), Kaizers went off.
Just amazing, again! Guess the next time will be at Sonny in November, and then the Vol. II tour some time next year… =:-D