You see, the veteran hardrockers come from the place we come from. The provencial town and the area around it was where we grew up, and when we started to listen to the harder music, PRETTY MAIDS were part of the picture. They were local heroes, like it or not.
Starting their career in 1981, Ronnie Atkins and Ken Hammer have been in this game forever. They’ve seen ups and down throughout the years, are hugely respected in Germany and Japan and have a diehard fanbase in Denmark. Since Atkins and Hammer were joined by younger forces during 2000s, the band has been revitalised and their albums have gained a new edge, which is of course very positive.
I have to say, though, that the last time I saw Pretty Maids, I wasn’t overly impressed. It was the first evening of a Danish club tour, and it was, to be perfectly honest, below standard. Ok, it was a poor performance.
Today is a world of difference. Pretty Maids are a festival band. They come to life in a completely different way, and it’s not exactly the first time I’ve seen them shine on the big stage.
In this element, Ronnie Atkins is unstoppable. Constantly inciting the audience to sing along, the 54-year-old struts aound the stage, and even if my reviewer colleague complains about auto-tune and whatnot, I’m not too bothered; Atkins sounds good. Period.
Ken Hammer is more or less the antithesis to the rest of the band. Unlike bassist René Shades, keyboardist Chris Laney and Atkins, the heavy weight guitarist moves very little on stage. But, nevermind, he plays well, and all is good.
The set is a fine mix of old and new, “Pandemonium” and “Kingmaker” being the finest of the newer songs. As long as they stay away from the blasted cover of ‘Please Don’t Leave Me”, I’m fairly happy.
For me, even if they’ve almost reached the point of being clichees, “Red, Hot and Heavy” and “Future World” are still unbeatable. Nothing quite beats the songs of your youth. We’re having a small party in front of the Helviti stage, that’s for sure.
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All headliners for COPENHELL 2019 are now ready, with ten new bands added and SCORPIONS as Saturday’s great concert.
The COPENHELL 2019 line-up has just been expanded with ten new bands that span all the hard end heavy genres, from retro rock to modern metal. The headliners for all festival days are now on the poster, and we will continue to add more bands and events as we get closer to the festival.
In 2016, the German rock legends from SCORPIONS delivered a truly stunning concert in the craziest weather we have ever experienced at COPENHELL. Electricity was crackling both in the sky above the festival site and between an almost supernaturally proficient band and a completely euphoric audience when the incredibly enthusiastic musicians went on their tour de force. They have toured the world since then, and even though these seasoned people have surpassed their 50-year anniversary years ago, their stinger is as sharp and pointy as ever. In many ways, this band is to hard rock what Black Sabbath is to heavy metal, and they have shown a great musical span throughout their more than half a century-long career.
As Saturday’s headliner, these rock pioneers will close COPENHELL 2019 with a blast of a performance, with everything from epic ballads to electrifying rock classics.
PRETTY MAIDS are one of the first acts that will pop up in most Danes’ minds when you think ’classic Danish heavy rock’. Ever since the beginning in 1981, this prolific band has managed to maintain their style, nerve and creative spark through 15 studio albums. They have held a consistently high standard throughout the years, and the albums “Pandemonium” and “Motherland” from 2010 and 2013, respectively, are by many fans seen as their best ever. These heavy Danish rockers have been a solid force on the both the Danish and the international scene for several decades, and it a great pleasure for us to welcome them back to COPENHELL this year.
LIVING COLOUR rose up from New York’s underground scene and within a few years, they became world stars with their energetic funk metal and not least their 1992 mega hit ”Cult of Personality”. Since then and all the way up until their 2017 album ”Shade”, these phenomenally skilled musicians, fronted by Corey Glover’s formidable vocals, have delivered and developed their truly original and unique genre mash-up of metal, rock, funk, jazz and hip-hop. Count on one big party of a concert!
Deep Purple’s former bass player and singer GLENN HUGHES, also known as ”Voice of Rock”, performs together with a rock super group today. They will visit COPENHELL with their ”Glenn Hughes Performs Classic Deep Purple Live” world tour, which pays homage to one of the music history’s most influential rock bands. This concert will be an absolute hurricane of nostalgia when the band plays that magical music from the 70s that started it all.
One of Swedish death metal’s “Big Four” will visit COPENHELL 2019 when UNLEASHED release their furious and ice-cold oldschool metal. Insanely heavy, explosive riffs carried by a musical primal force can be expected here. Where many other bands have developed their concepts with progressive influences, these old warriors have stuck with their original sound – and thanks a lot for that! Every fan of classic death metal will feel sheer joy from the moment when Johnny Hedlund’s wild scream resounds across the festival site!
The Danish band SLÆGT returns to COPENHELL with their blackened heavy metal. Young meets old in a sound that is both traditional and progressive. The lyrics focus on the supernatural and the occult and have a very familiar 80s heavy metal vibe. They are mixed effortlessly with raw, grating black metal vocals, complete with battering ram-style blastbeats and painfully insisting guitar riffs into an amazing sound picture.
The American rock band CANDLEBOX showed up right in the middle of the grunge wave that rolled up everywhere in the early 90s. Rather than surfing on it, they stuck with classic blues rock and a more polished sound, which resulted in several great radio hits. Lead singer Kevin Martin’s intense voice has carried the band’s sound ever since the beginning, and his vocal chords are still in top form on both their most recent albums and their current tour.
Through almost 30 years, the highly respected and influential band KATATONIA has been on a true voyage of discovery through the hard and heavy music’s subgenres. They have moved from death and doom, across more traditional heavy metal to a more progressive rock sound, with everything being assembled masterfully into a modern and complex sound. The band will visit COPENHELL 2019 on their 10-year anniversary tour for their seminal album ”Night Is The New Day”, which they will perform during this concert (Note: KATATONIA will perform on Wednesday, June 19).
The pedal will be taken to the metal when the Danish band MANTICORA fires up their music at COPENHELL 2019! These heavy boys deliver their thrashy, progressive power metal at an absolutely ferocious pace, which will make all speed metal fans very happy. The band released their eighth studio album last year, and lots of experience and technical skill are evident in their music. The efficient mix of styles and the fascinating horror lyrics are a true treat for all power metal fans.
The Copenhagen quintet DEMON HEAD plays diabolical retro rock inspired by 60s acid rock and 70s proto metal. This includes double guitar solos – one of their defining characteristics – occult themes and heavy, slow songs vibrating with the sinister feeling of impending destruction. A must for all doom fans!
COPENHELL 2019 has had the fastest-selling tickets in the festival’s history, and both 4-day tickets and Thursday tickets are sold out.
Purchase tickets, read much more about the festival and all of the bands at Copenhell.dk or in our official COPENHELL app – and follow us at Facebook, Spotify and Instagram.
]]>Anyhoo, before the Maids are let loose upon the small provincial town of Silkeborg, local outfit Black Swamp Water have the honour opening for the veteran rockers. The six-piece play a kind of southern hard rock music, but notably with a lot of double bass drum. The reason for this might be that the drummer, Kim, has a background as the sticksman of death metal combo Dawn Of Demise and has filled in for Illdisposed on a number of occasions.
Black Swamp Water’s music is not really my style, although there is sudden burst of thrash metal here and there and really, really heavy parts every now and then. The gig suffers immensely from a singer who isn’t exactly the cream of the crop and to go with that has a stage presence that is close to non-existent. Classic quote from the stage this evening: “We never played this one live before.” This is great to say if you’re Metallica or Slayer, but the news value is hardly monolithic if you’re Black Swamp Water from Silkeborg.
Now, I have to tell you about the audience here at Kedelhuset tonight. Seriously, I can’t remember when I’ve been to a hard rock or metal concert where I was among the youngest in the crowd. The amount of middle-aged guys in shirts and jeans (not t-shirts…shirts!) is frighteningly high, and the number of women who are well beyond their best years ditto.
It should also be mentioned that with 200 tickets sold on this Friday evening, the place is not exactly packed. It tells you more about Silkeborg than the band, mind you. Silkeborg is more about country and jazz music than metal, that’s for sure.
So, it is finally time for Pretty Maids. First of all, I have to say to the credit of this band, that it doesn’t matter much if you see them in front of a Wacken audience or 200 people in a little shit hole in provincial Denmark; they deliver a show, with singalong and all that. I respect that a lot.
When that is said, this is clearly the first evening of the Christmas tour, and the grand old men, Ronnie and Kenneth, and the three younger musicians along with them, aren’t as sharp as one could wish for. The same can be said of the sound, which for the entirety of the gig remains slightly undefined and muddy. Which is a shame.
‘Mother of All Lies’ opens the ball. One of the best songs from 2015’s Motherland album. The sound doesn’t do it justice, but Ronnie and the boys seem to be in good shape. The title track from the latest album, Kingmaker, and ‘Heavens Little Devil’ from the same album are next, and I have to admit that this is the second time I hear these two songs, so there’s isn’t much for me to recognise. After ‘Heavens…’, a middle-aged woman in the front shouts to Ronnie that she ‘can’t fuckin’ hear what you sing’. Ronnie channels the complaint to the sound guys who turn him up a wee bit, but it doesn’t help much.
Time for some nostalgia with ‘We Came to Rock’, before the song ‘Clay’ from the (to me) lesser known turn of the millennium album, Carpe Diem. ‘Yellow Rain’, on the other hand, I do know, and this one works quite well. ‘Rodeo’ continues the streak of well-known pearls, although still marred by bad sound.
The Pandemonium album, Ronnie exclaims, was the album that put this old band back on track some seven or eight years ago. The title track from the album is delivered with power and conviction, the most impressive song so far tonight. Less impressive, however entertaining, is the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another brick in the Wall’, which follows. Then ‘Bull’s Eye’ from Kingmaker, a song that doesn’t leave much of an impression.
The ballad ‘Little Drops of Heaven’ drowns in keyboard and muddled sound. Fortunately, this leads directly into ‘Carmina Burana’, which of course means that ‘Back to Back’ is on the menu, closely followed by ‘Red Hot and Heavy’, and these two mega-classics end the set proper.
This is where the audience in the front don’t even bother shouting ‘we want more’. They simply shout ‘Future World’, ‘Future World’, ‘Future World’. And they get it. First encore is said über-classic, and no matter what, it is cool.
More cheese that cool is offered with ‘Please Don’t Leave Me’, the song that the middle-aged women in the front row have come to hear. I mean…I completely get that something has to put bread on the table, but…oh, well. I’ll shut up.
My review buddy from the newspaper tells me that he had happily forgotten that the song ‘Love Games’ even existed. I have to admit that I always liked it. I still do. Just a shame that Ronnie’s voice at this point has gotten tired. There doesn’t seem to be much air left in the geezer, sadly.
Thus ends an enjoyable evening with a band who have great songs, lots of humour, routine and experience – but the sound guys they brought with them leave a lot to be wished for, and I’m hoping that the next dates on the tour will get the band warmed up.
