a dEUS tour diary

Brussels-Amsterdam: 2×210km

No MP3 today: the show was a session specially recorded for the TV and the radio, and anyway, my recording sounds very crappy.

Yesterday dEUS played a studio session for VPRO’s 3voor12 at the Desmet Studio’s in Amsterdam. The studio is actually like a small concert venue, with a very nice and cosy bar, and can accomodate 200 people. In order to get in, the lucky winners of the VPRO and dEUS.be competitions had to show a printout of the confirmation mail they’d received - reminded me a bit of check-in at the airport…

The band were supposed to play one hour, from 16:00 to 17:00, but in typical rock’n'roll fashion, they started 20 minutes late. They were introduced by erh… a guy from VPRO I suppose (sorry about my Dutch), who said he was very proud to have dEUS playing, as he’s been a loyal fan since WCS came out. As the venue is very small, we were standing really close to the band, nice to be able to see exactly how they play their instruments. I hadn’t yet paid attention to the fact that Alan plays the guitar at the end of Stop-Start Nature (but erh, you don’t need to be just two meters away to notice that - I got distracted by Klaas’s mad cowbell slamming I suppose.

The crowd’s response was pretty Dutch (sorry guys): interested but just a bit too quiet. I was expecting a bit more wildness from fans who entered a contest to get in… As for the concert itself: the band they played generally well, but it’s obvious that the cameras were making them a little nervous. Tom was very static compared to the second Haarlem gig, which also had to do with the fact that the part of the stage where he was standing wasn’t exactly stable: he compared it to standing on a trampoline… And they had trouble with some songs. Bad Timing still needs a little practice (Alan messed up at the start, and Tom was a bit out of tune at times), as does the new version of If You Don’t, where Mauro & Tom’s guitars sounded a bit out of sync. But apart from that, it was really great, Cold Sun is one hell of a great song played live (they do the quiet outro as well), and What We Talk About is very well received - funny detail: every time, Tom sings “we need a tambourine” and one of the (forgetful) roadies rushes behind the drumkit to play the tambourine.

My friend Alex (founder of the Nameless Webzine, a leading musiczine in Wallonia & Brussels) took a handful of great photos. You can see more on his blog.

After the show, Alan told Arthur and me that there’s a massive subwoofer under the stage, which completely fucked up the monitors’ sound. Especially his, as he plays the bass. Alan - super great guy. Very warm and open, no attitude whatsoever, and absolutely zero taste in shirts, but that can be forgiven.

Setlist:
01 Pocket Revolution
02 Cold Sun of Circumstance
03 What We Talk About
04 Instant Street
05 Fell Off The Floor, Man
06 Stop-Start Nature
07 If You Don’t Get What You Want
08 W.C.S.
09 Magdalena
10 Theme From Turnpike
11 Assault On Magnus
12 Bad Timing

Obviously they didn’t play everything on the setlist - it’s the setlist they’re going to use in London tomorrow. Spoilers!!!

Tags: Netherlands

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 22:52 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.