Sweden Rock Festival 2001 - Reports
Many
good bands...
We
came home yesterday (sunday) from Sweden Rock Festival and it will take
a couple of days to come to order again. I brought a digital camera to SRF
and will return with some photos when I fixed them, taken both on Ken Hensley
and together with him. It was a smashing weekend and Ken Hensley's gig was
fucking great. Anders (Pontara) has already written a review about that.
Ken told us that he has a new CD upcoming, but also that he doesn't know
when it will be. It can be this year, next year or even the year after that,
as he said. But I don't think we have to wait as long as until 2003.
Besides
Ken Hensley's gig, Uli John Roth was impressing. W.A.S.P. was good as usual,
but the sound varied dependent on where one stood. Unfortunately they had
placed the mixing table to close to the stage, called The Rock Stage, where
also Ken Hensley played. So many people came to see W.A.S.P. that they had
to do a show break to get the audience go backwards. The safety fence was
near breaking because of the pressure. Symphony X was okey, but according
to Anders they are better on record. Manny Charlton Band was boring and
insignificant and far from Nazareth - a disappointment. Nitzinger I missed
because their gig collided with W.A.S.P. But Nitzinger has been covered
by Anders. Flower Kings I checked for a while. They sounded good and deserves
more listening. Nocturnal Rites I never saw, but heard that they at least
had the good taste to play T.Rex' old classic Children Of The Revolution.
I
heard just a little by Moxy, and it sounded fucking great. Grave Digger
rattled on as Hell... and also gets a high score. Angel sounded okey and
Bigelf was excellent as usual. Metalium though, was nothing special, except
a funny version of Deep Purples classic Smoke On The Water, where they run
the verses as they should be done and totally ignored playing the old hackneyed
refrain and melody and just hit the gas. Southern Rock Allstars started
good with some lovely boogie rock tunes, but then they sort of faded away.
Helloween played well and Dee Snider which was headliner rocked hard all
the way. It was both new material, some covers, and old Twisted Sister songs
on their repertoar. Gary Moore mingled a few good bluessongs with a lot
of padding that needs no further comments.
Furthermore,
both Tang and Rose Tattoo was said to be good (according to sources), but
I cannot confirm this.
Summing
up: A superb weekend with much sun and beer. The price for a bottle of 45
centiliter beer was 40 SEK [approximately 4$], the food was quite expensive
for those little portions, but the wooked elk meat was a delicacy as usual
and the wild boar meat in pita bread was not bad at all. Unfortunately evenings
and nights was to cold and we needed warm sweaters and winter coats on as
it was raw and hard to sleap in tents. Many good bands and gigs though and
the score is very, very high for SRF as usual.
Georg
Ryttman (translated from Swedish by Filip Björner)