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Crossing Border festival
The Den Haag fire department seriously dampened the spirits at last night's 16hp show at the "crossing border" festival. Or to be more precise, those over-zealous "Ordnung muß sein" power-mad persons who said that they were only enforcing the fire department's rules and regulations ("Befehl ist Befehl") by not allowing anybody to stand near the stage and who threatened to have you kicked out of the auditorium, if you didn't obey them, did. The auditorium was the Prins Willem-Alexander hall. A part of the Den Haag congress & convention center. The PWA hall is a cheerless place with 2.000 seats (approx.) in desperate need of some atmosphere. And as 99.9% of the crowd seemed to be glued to their seats and obeyed the "theatregoer code of conduct" (meaning, to sit/be reverently quiet during the songs and applaude politely afterwards) the whole event was rather frustrating and disappointing. During the regular set the band never managed to bridge the grand canyon sized gap between them and the audience. However had they rocked (or perhaps that's why). And I'm afraid they are going to RAWK harder even in the future. They played two new songs (at least neither Ing nor yours truly could recognise them as either anything they ever released or as a cover) that were very loud, very bland, very amorphous and just very plain bad, I'm afraid. They encored with the Gun Club's "Fire Spirit". During that last song everyone stood up and created the atmosphere that could have been there from the beginning. By Martin
Pictures by Ben    
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