New Blog from Mike

ponie

pie
Nov 28, 2008
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Trainwreck!
Yes, what that headline means is basically "code" for fucking up during a show, which is what happened to us yesterday at the Summerbreeze festival.

I guess we'll be able to laugh about this in a few years. Or maybe not. Horrible, and embarrassing it was I tell you.

Everything was perfect, set for a fantastic show. We're headlining the whole event and right before we went on stage we're pumped. Really! Crowd was screaming, going crazy, and as the intro started running....yes, magic in the air!

Walking on stage, I was blown away by the amount of people there. It looked as if the every people at the fest was there to see us. Amazing! Very powerful sight indeed.

Then as we go into "Heir apparent" I notice the following:
1: My stage sound is horrible, 2: Why can't I hear Fredrik and 3: What the fuck!?
I start nodding to our monitor guy to get Fredriks guitar up. Then I kinda glance over to Fred to see what's up. Now, I see our guitar tech running around like a monkey around Fred's amp. It's fucked up. His guitar is not even there. It's dead silent! Fuck! Normally I start fast-forwarding the song in my head to see if he has any breaks on his own...stuff I might have to play instead, while also trying to play good and remember the lyrics. Fuck...Yes, there's a part he plays on his own! Gahhhh! For some reason his guitar kicks in for that part (which is clean guitar) and then cuts out again as the distortion comes back on. Fuck!

The whole song is done with only my guitar and by now we've lost the plot. I virtually wanna walk off stage. But we hang in there. Unfortinately....

Sometime before "Ghost" we play a impromtu version of "Soldier of fortune" only that there's no guitars (since we have the open tuning guitars on us), there's no bass (Mendez forgot the song) and overall it's...not...good! There's also some strange funk jam between Mendez and Axe going on which is absolutely horrible since they can't hear eachother at all. Sounds like they're playing a "groove" on their own. But...it doesn't groove.

I believe there was a desperate drum stick dropping drum solo somewhere as well.

Next song "Ghost of perdition" is done with some fucking shit sound the managed to get through Fred's amp and the song sounds horrrible and loose from start to finish. Shit. Fuck, Cunt. Fuck!

After this abomination of a version Fred leans over and says, "talk some shit, I'll be up and running properly soon". So I talk some shit, then goes into a half-assed version of "Harvest" asking the crowd to sing. Now, all of a sudden we're faced with the following: No-one's singing. Couldn't they hear me? They don't know the words? They wanna see me sweat? So it's basically a (horrible) instrumental version of the song which kinda falls apart after a verse and a chorus, to little or no applause I might add. Gulp! I'm not sure whether the 30.000 people out there hates us by now or what. I just wanna get done and go home! Haha!

To be honest, round about now we start gluing things back together and the remaining part of the set goes back to "normal" more or less, only that I guess our faces look disillusioned and "sad" haha! Anyways, the crowd slowly gets back into it and by the end it's....nice, I guess.

We had people coming up to us and say it was great, fantastic. I've no idea but it's the single most embarrassing show we've done with this line-up so far. We always "deliver" but this time technical problems had us looking like wankers. So basically we just wanna say sorry to the fans who saw us there expecting ( and rightfully so) a professional show. It wasn't, but as I said, maybe we'll laugh about it in....200 years.

The town/village where we had our hotel was absolutely stunning by the way. Dinkelsbuhl was the name of that town and I suggest you visit. Beautiful!

Anyways, we just got back home. The cabdriver who drove us was drunk and probably had the swinflu. Anyways, we'll crawl back under the rocks to lick our wounds, so hopefully we'll be back on form for the next show which is on Thursday...in Belgium I believe. Mussels and Duvel here we come!

Take care my friends and wipe that smirk of yer faces will ya? I know you think the above was funny....

Mike
 
[KOTNO]Narrot;8483426 said:
people that were at the show didn't actually think it was horrible ...

They probably mistook it for the band being weird and proggy :lol:
 
I think it was more unique than horrible. Don´t think I´ll see opeth like that again...:lol: Anyway I liked the soldier of fortune version, Per did a good job saving the song.
But on the other hand I actually met people after the concert who hadn´t yet heard opeth live and were dissappointed (However most of those people were so drunk they dind´t even notice the guys had technical problems)
 
^ Haha :lol: Here's a summary with all the available videos. Unfortunately, there's nothing about Heir Apparent or Ghost of Perdition, nor Harvest.



"There's also some strange funk jam between Mendez and Axe going on which is absolutely horrible since they can't hear eachother at all. Sounds like they're playing a "groove" on their own. But...it doesn't groove."



"Sometime before "Ghost" we play a impromtu version of "Soldier of fortune" only that there's no guitars (since we have the open tuning guitars on us), there's no bass (Mendez forgot the song) and overall it's...not...good!"



"Then as we go into "Heir apparent" I notice the following:
1: My stage sound is horrible, 2: Why can't I hear Fredrik and 3: What the fuck!?
"



"To be honest, round about now we start gluing things back together and the remaining part of the set goes back to "normal" more or less, only that I guess our faces look disillusioned and "sad" haha! Anyways, the crowd slowly gets back into it and by the end it's....nice, I guess."
 
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Mikael's voice is some of the best I've heard from him in that Soldier of Fortune version. much better than the "well known" version. :O