Live Review : Dortmund (Germany), Friday 13th June, 2008

Westfalenhalle - 12 000 ppl

Friday 13th, definitely.
The road to Dortmund was paved with little incidents : a car crash forced us to leave the highway in Essen, and many works on the roads delayed us. As we finally arrived in Dortmund and passed by the venue, heavy rain started pouring. Thankfully it stopped, but for mid-june, those were not the conditions we were hoping for.

We had numbered seated tickets for this one, as we didn't want to risk the pit in TH's home country. There was a single line to get in the venue, but when we finally made it into it, the pit was only half filled. I thought to myself that if I ever did another TH show in Germany, I'd try for the pit, but stupidly, I didn't realize I could have gone down that day too, as nobody checked our tickets once inside. I would have been twice closer from the stage, even as late as it was - my seat was pretty far back.

I knew the show wasn't sold out - I had booked late myself, on a whim, wanting to hear the band in their own country at least once. But to that point, it was... odd, for a TH show. Maybe the pit fury got so bad and it's so well known that most people opted for the balconies like us? Because the seated area looked fairly full OTOH. The crowd did yell louder and higher than in Paris or anywhere else I'd been, though.

The show was scattered with technical problems. Which is unusual for them, too. We couldn't hear Bill singing at the beginning of Ich Brech Aus, and it took them half the first verse to fix it. The guitar sounded weird a little later, bad crunch or something. And the worst was on Vergessene Kinder. The fan action planned for that song, of keeping silent, was... followed but with an unfortunate timing. As it hit right after a very bad timing of the sound people themselves.

The show wasn't really bad, but certainly the least good of the TH gigs I've been to. Which is a pity, as it was their only show in Germany for this tour. I think we all expected something special, and it was too much of the same, and too tame a crowd for such an occasion.

Bill spoke a bit more, for once he knew that people would understand what he said... (most of them anyway. There were quite a few foreigners in the crowd).
Another fan-action was to blow latex gloves on "Wo sind eure Hände", and after the song, Bill picked one to put it on and play a bit with it.

But that's pretty much the only differences I noted from the other 1000 Hotels tour shows. It felt a bit more relaxed, but not as bouncy or happy as we expected for a "back home again" show. Maybe the sound problems and the half-full pit took a toll on the band's enthusiasm.

It felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy happening in front of us, in a way. The band has been treated like a flavor-of-the-day, kid / teen sensation from day one by the record company and the medias, while they have the potential to be much more. So they've packed up shows, tours and CD releases as fast as possible to benefit from the unexpected wave of success.
Instead of aiming, or at least leaving room, for a different audience. They only targeted teenagers, so "older" fans like me have a hard time justifying their interest to outsiders who never listened to the band or are immune to its puppy dog enthusiam. And teenagers are, by nature, a fleeting audience. The band lost fans when they became too popular to be hype, and the ones drawn by the "popular" aspect would not stay long anyway.

And now... now Bill is accumulating voice problems, the band's schedule never allowed him to recover properly, it's not going to help their credibility much at a time when they would need it most to make it to the US, or to operate the switch in people's minds from "teen band" to "real band"...
And having bet too much on a perishable success... the company is getting exactly what they worked for.

Unfortunately, it's the band that pays the price of it. The band and the audience.
One can't even say that it was unpredictable. It was very, very predictable...

One can just hope this will remain an isolated incident.