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Ripening 2 reviews

Ripening 1

Berlin special

photos

Festival, Nandrin, Belgium
August 10, 2003

Highway Star
Knocking At Your Back Door
Pictures Of Home
Lazy
Well Dressed Guitar
Haunted
Don Airey Solo
Perfect Strangers
I Got Your Number
Speed King
Steve Morse solo
Smoke On The Water
Space Truckin'

Hush
Black Night

My first DP concert ever, but I was really amazed by the quality of the show. It was a wonderful evening. They started at 10pm, and played for more than 1 h 45min. I was really amazed by Gillan's voice, so close to what it sounded in the past. This guy is amazing.
Steve Morse was wonderful. We really liked his main solo, consisting of a succession of references to well-known tunes (Led Zep, the Beatles,...) and ending with the intro to Smoke on The Water. All in all, a very good concert. Don't hesitate to go and see them. They are as close as they can be to what you expect from them!.
Denis Javaux

“This is a tune, a very lyrical tune, about nudity…The Well Dressed Guitar”. Formidastic, astonishing, breathtaking, genius, impressive…it made my neck hairs stand up. The crowd really went loopy for it. What a cracker it was! Don really played the orchestra impressive, everybody was clapping along. The whole place exploded after this song.
Michel De Pourcq - read Michel's full review

According to the tour dates on this site, this was still the summer tour and the Bananas world tour starts in a month. According to the official t-shirts and programs at the concert, this was the first date of the Bananas world tour... Does it make a difference? Yes, because they played the exact same songs as during the first part of the summer tour .Haunted, I Got Your Number and The Well Dressed Guitar were the only songs from the Morse era, plus the usual classics; SOTW, SK, Lazy, PS, KAYBD, ST, Hush... I was hoping they'd do more new stuff, but the concert was great anyway -even if Ian Paice didn't do any drum solo.
The highlights were Perfect Strangers, Smoke (especially brilliant tonight), Space Truckin' and Haunted which I believe will really become a DP classic ballad.
As a bonus the album version of Haunted was played over the PA afterwards.
I never get tired of seeing them.
God bless DP!
Philippe Joseph

This is my lucky Deep Purple year: Nandrin was the 3rd time I got the chance to see them this year, the 2nd time in my home country. The good thing is this was the best of the gigs I saw this year. I was happy to see that there finally was a backdrop and a decent light show. It really has been a long long time since Deep Purple has surprised me with their stage show and setting.
The disappointing thing was that this was the third show in a few months with nearly exactly the same set list. No Mary Long and I'm Alone this time, these were replaced by Knocking At Your Back Door - in a great version! But the rest was a slightly improved copy of the previous shows I have seen. Other bands I have seen twice this year, which I like far less than Deep Purple, have gained my respect by delivering two totally different shows. I wonder how Steve Morse feels when the two albums he co-wrote are completely ignored, and I am 100% certain that Don Airey is capable of quickly mastering any other Deep Purple song…. But would Gillan not prefer lying on a sunny beach rather than to have a look again at some long forgotten lyrics, which some fans might know better than he does? I wonder, and I hope to hear some other stuff later on this year, when I give them another chance to really astonish me with some tunes I haven’t heard live before (or in a long time).
Ludo Verhaege, Gent, Belgium

It had been quite a while since I saw Purple on stage (Belgium on the Abandon tour in 1998), and the sound here was a lot better, even though it was an open air venue. The boys played a wonderful show, with a real good mix from older stuff and the two numbers from Bananas, which were really appreciated by the audience in general (though the album-title extracted some comments: "It's not normal to call an album Bananas", to which I've replied by asking since when Purple had started to be "normal"). My friends and me were particularly pleased at having a big dose of "Perfect strangers", but we did kinda missed "Purpendicular".
It was very clear that the guys were thoroughly enjoying themselves as well as we were. It did look a bit strange to not be seeing Jon Lord at the Hammond, but it sure didn't sound strange, Don playing like a real madman, always being enticed by Steve's manic guitar play to push things even further.
If this is the sound of future Purple, the future looks so bright we'd better start wearing our sunglasses (or rather, keep wearing them, as the day was very sunny, and it was still 27°C when we left a bit after midnight).
I really look forward to the Bananas tour, and I really hope that they can be at the Graspop Metal Meeting next summer, where they can easily outperform many a younger band with the show we saw in Nandrin!
Bart Kestelyn

I've see Deep Purple nine times since the reformation. Saturday night was the ZZ Top night. I like them, another legend of rock, but I can assure you that Sunday night, with Deep Purple was incredibly hotter! They play the standards as usual (five songs from Machine Head), but not one song from Purpendicular of Abandon. Why? There are some very good songs on these albums.
They performed new songs; Haunted and I've Got Your Number. The former is a ballad, easy to play. I'm a little disappointed. This song brings absolutely nothing to the legend of Deep Purple. I'm sure this one should be the weakest song of the new album.
I've Got Your Number is really great! A mid tempo song. Compareable with Almost Human, Any Fule Kno That and Ted. If this is real, then Bananas should be a damn good album!
Philippe Emond

Every day I take a look at The Highway Star, to read the tour reviews, about what they play, etc. This was the best show in years, so much power and so much fun .
I won't talk about the setlist, because enough has been written, but I must say that when they played I've Got Your Number there was more inspiration when they played it at Roeselare earlier in the year. I hope that at the next show they will play Doing It Tonight, for me it is a groove that hits every cell in my body.
What I like the most is that after Rithie left, they are laughing again on stage.
Great love,
Jean-Pierre Rondags

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