Last year’s event left such an impression on me that I wanted to go to this year’s episode of the
Night of the Prog festival as well. I managed to convince my good friend
I-Warez to join me, since it makes so much more fun if you can share it.
Crow74 who joined me last year couldn’t make it because his own band
Steem was playing that weekend. Of course that’s totally irrelevant to this story, since they’re not even a prog band. Yet.
We had booked a hotel about 10 minutes from the Loreley. Had we decided earlier, we might have had found something closer, but because we
can’t make decisions think through our decision really well, everything was already booked by the millions of other tourists visiting the region. But 10 minutes is very doable if you travel by car.
After a rainy road trip of approximately 5 hours and having checked into the hotel, we headed for the festival site to witness the opening of the gates. We could, because we were early and they weren’t open yet. The weather was rather cloudy, but at least it was dry and would stay that way for the rest of the festival. While the gates continued being not open yet, we spent some time looking for hedgehogs at the brink of drowning. We didn’t find any.
After we got our wristbands and the gates finally opened, we found us a nice seat close to the stage. That may sound like quite an accomplishment, but really isn’t too hard if you’re early on a festival that has about 3,500 visitors on a terrain that can hold 18,000.
The first band to be announced by Nathalie, as we later learned her name was, was the British
Also Eden. They were a very nice first band and left quite an impression on the audience, since they got to play an extra song. They have quite a good singer, who is bald. Apparently he has quite an issue with being bald, since he wrote a song about it and shared it with the fellow bald men in the crowd. And everyone else who happened to be listening. Luckily, it was a nice song to listen to, as were all their songs.
Next band to take the stage was
Arena. Clearly a popular band, since a lot more people were drawn towards the stage. It seems musicians tend to come in default sizes. Four of the five band members are pretty much equal in height. Only the singer was towering over them. And it was that same singer who, once the band had settled on the stage, announced that he could see us and how great that was. We naturally assumed he had been blind until 2 minutes before the show, but there’s a remote possibility he was referring to the conspicuous green glasses he was wearing. They played a nice set, but how could they not, with musical masters like
Clive Noland on keyboards and
Mick Pointer on drums. They also did a tribute to the
king of pop by playing
Billy Jean, which unfortunately was a song that
contained too many high notes for the singer didn’t really emphasize the vocal characteristics of the singer. But it was a nice gesture.
After their show I thought I saw a hedgehog, so I went for the rescue. But it wasn’t drowning. So I talked to Thomas Andersen (Gazpacho’s keyboard player) instead, which happened to cross my path. And that’s one of those striking aspects of the Night of the Prog festival: musicians mix up with the crowd as if they were real people.
The Flower Kings had taken a short time off. But their guitarist
Roine Stolt apparently didn’t need time off, because his new project
Agents Of Mercy was the next band about to play for us. Another man who didn’t need time off either was the bass player Jonas Reingold, with his famous white hat, who also happens to play bass in TFK. Along with his hat, he brought his wife, because she does some vocals in the band. To make things complete with people not needing any time off, on the drums was Zoltan Csörsz. Yes, the one from TFK.
But to justify the band name, mister Stolt did enlist some non-TFK personal as well. He found a good keyboard player by the name of Lala Something (I didn’t really understand it when he introduced the band) and the lead
wizard singer, Nad Sylvan. He found the latter on myspace. Nad was wearing a
magic colorful hat, which he took off pretty much as soon as he started singing, allowing him to
unleash his irritating comments focus on his singing. But even though his last name represents a
great band, his singing couldn’t lift
The Flower Kings Agents of Mercy to memorable heights. Sure, they had their moments, just not a whole lot of them. The covers of
I Am the Walrus and a song by Genesis if my memory serves me well couldn’t change the impression made by the band either.
By now we started noticing the strange choice of music that was played in the half hour or so needed to prepare the stage for the next band. Usually it would start with some decent song that was more or less related to the progressive genre. But soon enough it would switch to silly synthesizer tunes. These were songs that had some resemblance to well known themes from great artists like
Jean-Michel Jarre and the likes, but orchestrated as a cheap derivate, using wooly sounds. Too me it was a bit of a atmosphere killer. This way each band had to warm up the audience all over again. We started developing a theory about this, involving a very heavy, angry looking, muscular man with an anomaly in his musical taste, having put himself in charge of the cd-player, but
it is a silly theory we’re still working out the details.
Luckily the wonders of last.fm kept me from pondering too long about that subject, because
Igel_in_Seenot managed to find me using the description I carefully planted in her shoutbox: ‘I’m wearing a Gazpacho streetteam shirt’. It’s moments like these that truly makes you appreciate last.fm’s community concept, because once again I made a new friend as a result of a little shoutboxing.
Next was one of my favorites:
Riverside. I’ve seen them several times already and they never really fell short. And this time even was one of their better performances. Granted, it took them a while to warm up, but after that things went very smoothly. They played over half of their latest album and the singer/bass player
Mariusz Duda was surprised by the amount of response from the audience when he announced they were going to play the track
Left Out. Since the album hasn’t been released that long ago, he commented to the cheering: “So popular already? Pirates…”
The band to close this day was another one of my favorites:
Gazpacho. This would be the 3rd time for me to see them this year. Can’t get enough of their music. They played
exactly the same as in Zoetermeer a very nice set. It felt like they played a bit stronger than previous times, but that might just be the experience settling in. Which is a good thing. The first 6 tracks of the magnificent Tick Tock album got played, followed by
When Earth Lets Go, followed by the entire Night album. Except for
Valerie’s friend, which personally I think is a track far too nice not to play, but alas. Next they completed Tick Tock by playing
Winter Is Never. The encore consisted of
Snowman and the track that seems to currently be their favorite closing track, most likely because of the violin part at the end, which is guaranteed to leave a smile on people’s faces:
Bravo. A DVD is in the making as well, because both in Zoetermeer and here at the Loreley they have been filming their show.
After their performance we were too tired to stick around for a chance to talk to the band. Maybe next time. After all, I didn’t know what to say anyway besides the usual ‘You were great!’ and similar band ego improving phrases.
So we went back to the hotel for a good night’s sleep. Finding the hotel in the middle of the night can be challenging if the driver
has no clue is relying on you to lead the way and
you’re not paying attention it’s too dark to see the scarcely lit road signs. But we found it.
The next morning we woke up to sunshine. A perfect day for more music. A perfect day for wearing my
Pure Reason Revolution shirt, even though yesterday my friend overheard somebody saying they weren’t going to play. At the breakfast table in the hotel this was confirmed by a guy who noticed my shirt.
When we arrived at the parking meadow at the festival, another guy noticed my shirt and carefully asked whether we already knew they weren’t going to play because their singer/bass player Chloe Alper was ill. I then decided I would freak out the next time somebody made that comment and start crying ‘Noooo! Tell me it’s not true!’. Unfortunately, after I had that thought, nobody dared commenting on my shirt anymore. Even though I noticed several people noticing my shirt. And noticing that I noticed that they noticed my shirt.
The first band for this day was
Subsignal. We both didn’t know the band and hadn’t heard any material from them yet, so we had no idea what to expect. They played a remarkably good set, considering they were the first band playing this day and they totally matched the description given to them by their own singer: inexperienced, but cute. Had I taken the time to read up on their last.fm profile page, I surely would have had some expectations, since the band consists of members from
Sieges Even,
Dreamscape and
Sun Caged. So much for inexperience. Their first album, called Beautiful & Monstrous, is scheduled to be released in September, which explains why we haven’t been able to
download buy and listen to it yet. Naturally all the songs they played are featured on that album. Except for their final track which is a song by Sieges Even:
Sequence II: The Lonely Views of Condors. By the way, if you’re a sound guy, here’s a tip: if the singer uses an extra mic with a different set of effects, try enabling it before the singer has sung half a line into it.
The second band this day was
The Pineapple Thief. They played a bit like they were waiting for something interesting to happen. And it didn’t. But maybe it was because we just moved from the stone benches below to a spot under a tree in the back of the area. Until then, we had been sitting under a blazing sun. And up there, the sound is different and susceptible to the fickly winds.
But the longer they played, the more interesting the songs grew and it turned out to be quite all right. And they played long, because there was more time available due to the cancelation of PRR. But still, I couldn’t stop thinking the band had rather been somewhere else that day.
Next was the French and last band to be announced today
Lazuli. The only band on the festival who seems to have thought about hair and dress style. The singer very humbly explained in German, while reading from a paper, “Wir sind Lazuli”. In fact, pretty much all of his talking between the songs was in German. Well, it had a German touch to it anyway. The first couple of words were understandable, but after that, it became more and more challenging to grasp the meaning of what he was trying to convey. But it was endearing nevertheless. The music they played was fabulous. Thanks to charming German explanation I now even know what some of their French songs are about. I don’t think too many people in the audience were familiar with this band, but I’m sure they made quite some new fans here today. They’ve got a very distinctive sound, mainly due to the use of their
léode and otherwise not too common
Warr guitar and marimba. It’s a very percussive band, with a marimba player, who occasionally hits and even kicks the cymbals of the percussionist as well. Their encore is truly remarkable. Every band member plays the same instrument: a collection of bottles, each tuned to a different frequency. At least I assume it was something like that, because they were all standing around it, making it hard to see.
Pure Reason Revolution being cancelled was a bummer. It’s one of my favorites. Yes, I do have quite some favorites. But they are definitely one of them. Strangely enough nothing was said about it. In fact, announcing the bands came to a complete halt. Maybe Nathalie found more interesting things to do.
The next band
Pendragon just entered the stage 15 minutes early and started to play, assuming everybody knew them. Their singer/guitarist is very talkative between the songs. He even said that whomever didn’t know who they were, they surely would find out soon enough. He then started talking about a dream where a giant Ickle Pickle had taken over the position of the bass player Peter Gee. Because he wanted to know how Ickle Pickle sounds in German, he had the crowd yell it at the count of 3. However, with such an international crowd of course it still sounded very English. Between all the silliness they played a great show. It never ceases to amaze me how a 4 man band can create such a full, spectrum filling sound.
Steve Hackett was next. The bass player was dressed up in a women’s dress, wearing a blond two-tailed wig. It didn’t take long for the crowd to nick name him Heidi. As for the music, I’m not very familiar with it, so I couldn’t really share in the feast of recognition that a lot of people in the audience seemed to be having. There were some nice songs, but most of the stuff they played was beyond me. Partially due to already having digested quite a lot of progressive stuff this day. In fact, we were so utterly and completely saturated with music and bratwurst when they finished, that we decided to go back to the hotel and get some sleep.
The festival was closed by Mick Pointer and his friends playing Marillion’s Script for a Jester’s Show. I have no idea what it was like, because I was sleeping in the aforementioned hotel.
Once again it was a fabulous festival and unless the heavy, angry looking, muscular man decides on the line up, I’ll probably be there again next year.
Jean-Michel Jarre
