"Sold Out! Ausverkauft! Rien ne va plus!” were the welcoming words on the note glued on the door of the Sleeping Beauty (Doornroosje). Yet all 500 of us were wide-awake filling in the lottery tickets (handed out upon entering) to win a 16HP T-shirt or CD. But that didn’t stop people from storming the merchandise corner. Plenty of T-shirts, with various prints and various sizes (thank you for considering the fact that not all people have XL-sized beer bellies ;-), as well as the Hoarse CD, Clogger CDs and the Ditch Digger A&M promo CDs. Buy! Buy! Buy! The obvious question I had to ask the guy behind the counter (Marty?) was if he anticipated this Dutch greedy behaviour. ;-) "We brought enough... and tomorrow we’ll get another load." (So, no need for the other Europeans to be afraid we bought off the whole stock, as was mentioned on the list ;-)

As we entered the venue, a Belgian lady by the name of An Pierlé took her position on a skippy ball in front of the keyboards/piano. A mixture between Tori Amos and Toyah. Not a bad choice for an opening act.

Finally around 22:00 silence. Everybody was eagerly awaiting the band. They opened with Silver Saddle, with Steve playing the keyboards and a very very young girl plucking the violin. How old is she? 18? And how much chewing-gum has she got in her mouth? Does she have to chew with her mouth open? ;-) And why can’t she pretend as if she was interested? ;-) Okay, we would look bored too if we had to play with 16 HP. ;-) Not! Oh, and what a terrible mistake to screw-up the intro of Cinder Alley.  <grin> Poor thing, she must have been as nervous as hell. And she did make up for it later, when she vigorously played on that xylophone.

Listening to Secret South, I found it difficult to accept "Silver Saddle". One way or the other, it doesn’t fit in with the other songs on the CD. (too much synthesizer-ed). But it did fit perfectly as an opener. The warm bass playing of Pascal on South Pennsylvania Waltz made the atmosphere grow "brick by brick", and caused it to explode after the perfect drumming by Jean-Yves. Further in the set an amazing version of Flowers in my Heart was played, with a lot of Black Lung Yeehaw influences, followed by Burning Bush and ‘Cept You. A quiet moment, too quiet maybe. But after those songs, from Splinters onward, the energy was back until Haw.

A funny detail was to see Steve sometimes fall back into his previous role of roadie.  During the songs, when he was playing guitar himself, he gave the new roadie (a latent guitarplayer as well? ;->) some instructions whenever he heard a weak sound from David’s slide guitar.

Yep, and David is a dandy, feeds the girls candy. The feet with the new shoes (see Clogger video) were thrown in the air constantly. At one point, the feet were up so high that I had full vision of the soles. I had to restrain a burst of laughter, remembering a scene from Toy Story2, when Woody the Cowboy shows his soles to verify he's owned by somebody else. Yee-haw!

By Ing!

Setlist dived for by Martin.
Pictures by Ben.