Welle: Erdball concert
I waited for a whole week for somebody on the internet to write a review of it so I would not have to bother, but nobody did, so I will have to do it myself after all XD And nobody even put any videos on youtube, too bad :(
I went to Welle:Erdball concert on November 12, and this is how it was.
I knew the venue (Markthalle) before, so I could find it without any problems. I got there at 20:00, which was about an hour before the concert. Turned out it was a good idea, because there seemed to be quite a lot of hardcore fans there and they all wanted a place close to the stage, so I could hardly manage to get in the front row myself. But I did it! Lol, and that’s the only problem about going to concerts alone - you can’t go to the bathroom or buy a drink because leaving means losing your place at the stage.
And another problem is that there is nobody to talk to - the concert started something like 30 minutes late, so basically I had waited for 90 minutes and was getting thoroughly bored. But when it started, it was totally worth it! The stage had a really interesting setup, as illustrated below.
Then there was some mystic smoke and they started with their take on the James Bond theme, the girls standing behind their respective screens and doing shadow poses with guns like in typical Bond film openings.
And then Honey (funny name for a dude, right?) got on stage and said the usual intro in German, which was pretty much like "Hello, you're listening to radio Welle Erdball!" etc.
In the first part of the concert they played some of the songs from the new album, politically charged, so the girls had dresses made of USA and USSR flags. lol, the band themselves said that part is called "Schlager" part, "Schlager" being like the German equivalent of country music. The songs in the first part included: Vor all den Jahren, Kabinet, Der Kalte Krieg, Amerika, Ein bisschen Frieden, Hab ich Dir heute schon gesagt, daß ich Dich liebe?, If you want to sing out, Eine neue Zeit, Feuerwerk (and they gave the audience sparklers to light - that's pretty handy, you don't have to think about creating the ambience, the artists take care of it themselves).
The ladies changed into glittering evening dresses for the most emotional song, and unexpectedly there was an acoustic version for a particularly "Schlager" song with and actual acoustic guitar O_O But I have to say that the rest of the time there were electronic instruments only <333 They even had a theremin! And they let the audience play it! By sticking it out over the crowd and making people wave their hands to it XD So cool! Yeah, but that came later in the concert, at that point the first part was over and things got really interesting:
at the entrance where the tickets got checked, everyone got a voting sheet where they could mark up to 3 songs they wanted the band to play. And then people had to put their votes in a special box and the band would count the votes and play whatever the audience chose! Isn't that an absolutely amazing idea?!
Well, it got the less amazing the longer we had to wait though XD It took about 30 min to calculate votes. It kind of broke the mood, it was getting late and was already nearing my bedtime, so I started feeling sleepy already. But then the band came back on stage, the girls now wearing lovely 1950s style dresses, the guys wearing the usual XD They said it took them so long because there were some 500 voters XD
And then they played all the best songs, even though the sequence of them was kind of weird, the best ones should be played at the end… And of course they used all kinds of props and odd musical instruments for each song to make things more interesting.
They played
Susi hat Angst (and Honey said they had not played the song for some 16 years, so he forgot the lyrics halfway in the song, and just hummed along with the music),
Wir wollen keine Menschen sein (one of my favourites!),
Monoton & Minimal (C=64 version, with analogue sounds, too cool!),
Schweben, fliegen, fallen (they brought out a bunch of huge white balloons and threw them into the audience, so the balloons were being bounced back and forth between the audience and the stage for all the duration of the song),
Ich bin aus Plastik (that was one of the few songs where the girls were singing, it was actually Plastique's solo song, at it was really lovely, usually I'm not a big fan of female singers, but she was great),
Starfighter F104G (and they launched paper airplanes into the audience),
Arbeit Adelt! (the usual thing with banging on an empty metal vat),
Hoch die Fahnen (as the name of the song suggests, they were waving flags),
VW Kaefer (once again, one of my favourites),
Super 8 (lol, predictably, Honey had an antique camera),
Es geht voran (I didin't know the song before, but it turned out pretty cool, I could sing along immediately),
Deine Augen,
Nur Tote Frauen sind Schoen,
Ein Mensch aus Glas (the girls were holding posters with encouraging words like "Consume", "Procreate", etc.),
Commodore C=64 (and guess what they used to play this song ;DDDD)
Tanzpalast 2000 (totally didn't expect this song, I didn't think it would eb so popular),
Der Telegraph (with Morse code sounds and everything!),
Nyntaendo-Schock (my favourite, jizzed in my pants),
Und es geht Ab, Wo kommen all die Geister her, Contergan, 23 (which was the last song of the evening).
Not sure if I managed to remember them all, but the concert was incredibly long, and very eventful. The audience could not even demand an encore after it was over, everyone was too tired XD
I spent about 30 minutes queueing for my clothes and got home at about 2 in the morning. All in all, it was a great show, but I wish they had started earlier, I would have been able to enjoy it much more if I was not sleepy. And yeah, the song order - my favourites should have been at the end so that the concert ended on the highest emotional note. But no other complaints - W:E had a great show!
I went to Welle:Erdball concert on November 12, and this is how it was.
I knew the venue (Markthalle) before, so I could find it without any problems. I got there at 20:00, which was about an hour before the concert. Turned out it was a good idea, because there seemed to be quite a lot of hardcore fans there and they all wanted a place close to the stage, so I could hardly manage to get in the front row myself. But I did it! Lol, and that’s the only problem about going to concerts alone - you can’t go to the bathroom or buy a drink because leaving means losing your place at the stage.
And another problem is that there is nobody to talk to - the concert started something like 30 minutes late, so basically I had waited for 90 minutes and was getting thoroughly bored. But when it started, it was totally worth it! The stage had a really interesting setup, as illustrated below.
Then there was some mystic smoke and they started with their take on the James Bond theme, the girls standing behind their respective screens and doing shadow poses with guns like in typical Bond film openings.
And then Honey (funny name for a dude, right?) got on stage and said the usual intro in German, which was pretty much like "Hello, you're listening to radio Welle Erdball!" etc.
In the first part of the concert they played some of the songs from the new album, politically charged, so the girls had dresses made of USA and USSR flags. lol, the band themselves said that part is called "Schlager" part, "Schlager" being like the German equivalent of country music. The songs in the first part included: Vor all den Jahren, Kabinet, Der Kalte Krieg, Amerika, Ein bisschen Frieden, Hab ich Dir heute schon gesagt, daß ich Dich liebe?, If you want to sing out, Eine neue Zeit, Feuerwerk (and they gave the audience sparklers to light - that's pretty handy, you don't have to think about creating the ambience, the artists take care of it themselves).
The ladies changed into glittering evening dresses for the most emotional song, and unexpectedly there was an acoustic version for a particularly "Schlager" song with and actual acoustic guitar O_O But I have to say that the rest of the time there were electronic instruments only <333 They even had a theremin! And they let the audience play it! By sticking it out over the crowd and making people wave their hands to it XD So cool! Yeah, but that came later in the concert, at that point the first part was over and things got really interesting:
at the entrance where the tickets got checked, everyone got a voting sheet where they could mark up to 3 songs they wanted the band to play. And then people had to put their votes in a special box and the band would count the votes and play whatever the audience chose! Isn't that an absolutely amazing idea?!
Well, it got the less amazing the longer we had to wait though XD It took about 30 min to calculate votes. It kind of broke the mood, it was getting late and was already nearing my bedtime, so I started feeling sleepy already. But then the band came back on stage, the girls now wearing lovely 1950s style dresses, the guys wearing the usual XD They said it took them so long because there were some 500 voters XD
And then they played all the best songs, even though the sequence of them was kind of weird, the best ones should be played at the end… And of course they used all kinds of props and odd musical instruments for each song to make things more interesting.
They played
Susi hat Angst (and Honey said they had not played the song for some 16 years, so he forgot the lyrics halfway in the song, and just hummed along with the music),
Wir wollen keine Menschen sein (one of my favourites!),
Monoton & Minimal (C=64 version, with analogue sounds, too cool!),
Schweben, fliegen, fallen (they brought out a bunch of huge white balloons and threw them into the audience, so the balloons were being bounced back and forth between the audience and the stage for all the duration of the song),
Ich bin aus Plastik (that was one of the few songs where the girls were singing, it was actually Plastique's solo song, at it was really lovely, usually I'm not a big fan of female singers, but she was great),
Starfighter F104G (and they launched paper airplanes into the audience),
Arbeit Adelt! (the usual thing with banging on an empty metal vat),
Hoch die Fahnen (as the name of the song suggests, they were waving flags),
VW Kaefer (once again, one of my favourites),
Super 8 (lol, predictably, Honey had an antique camera),
Es geht voran (I didin't know the song before, but it turned out pretty cool, I could sing along immediately),
Deine Augen,
Nur Tote Frauen sind Schoen,
Ein Mensch aus Glas (the girls were holding posters with encouraging words like "Consume", "Procreate", etc.),
Commodore C=64 (and guess what they used to play this song ;DDDD)
Tanzpalast 2000 (totally didn't expect this song, I didn't think it would eb so popular),
Der Telegraph (with Morse code sounds and everything!),
Nyntaendo-Schock (my favourite, jizzed in my pants),
Und es geht Ab, Wo kommen all die Geister her, Contergan, 23 (which was the last song of the evening).
Not sure if I managed to remember them all, but the concert was incredibly long, and very eventful. The audience could not even demand an encore after it was over, everyone was too tired XD
I spent about 30 minutes queueing for my clothes and got home at about 2 in the morning. All in all, it was a great show, but I wish they had started earlier, I would have been able to enjoy it much more if I was not sleepy. And yeah, the song order - my favourites should have been at the end so that the concert ended on the highest emotional note. But no other complaints - W:E had a great show!