Ritchie on stage, Circus, Stockholm, 2. October 1995

Newsgroups: alt.music.deep-purple
Subject: Rainbow, Stockholm, Oct 2, 1995
From: Svante Pettersson 
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 19:23:38 GMT

Here's my report of the Rainbow gig in Stockholm Oct.2. I will give you the setlist with my comments.

Pomp And Circumstance

- Complete with audience singing along like I've seen on those silly english tv-programs :^)

Over The Rainbow

Spotlight Kid

- Serious note: If you have epilieptic problems, don't go to a Rainbow concert... The lighting engineer went crazy here with VariLights flashing all through the song making it hard to see what was going on on the stage. As the show went by we learnt that this was the lighting engineer's favourite trick. I hope he gets fired.

Too Late For Tears

- Some one (I don't remember who) screwed up this song towards the end. Disappoinment.

After TLFT Doogie annonunced that this concert were being recorded. I talked to the sound engineer after the show and he told me it was for Swedish Radio. I also saw the Swedish Radio truck outside the venue after the show.

Long Live Rock'n'Roll

incl. German folk song (?)
Black Night

- After these songs Doogie said something pathetic like "Nice to see that you still like the good old Rock'n'Roll. No Grunge, no punk in Stockholm!"

Hunting Humans

Wolf To The Moon

Difficult To Cure

incl. Keyboard Solo
- The keyboard solo was soooo boring with a bit of drum machine trown in, don't know why but it didn't make sense to me. Maybe he missed the old drummer (whatever his name was...). :^)

Still I'm Sad

incl. Drum Solo

Man On The Silver Mountain

Temple Of The King

- My favourite part of the show. The audience sang and got applause from TMIB.

Black Masquerade

- Doogie: Nice to see you Mr. Blackmore!
(TMIB leans over to Doogie and looks confused)
Doogie: Nice to see you Mr. Blackmore!
(TMIB looks at Doogie and looks like he wanted to say: Yeah, whatever...)

Ariel

- Doogie thanked the audience "for putting us in the charts at #8".

Blues

Since you've been gone

Perfect Strangers

- I noticed that the sound engineer used a 15-year old tape echo for vocal effects on this song. (Sound-engineer-nerd-comment :^)

Hall Of The Mountain King

---

ENCORES

Burn

- TMIB screwed up the ending of the guitar solo (The "classical" part) and got the band so confused that they screwed up the last verse. Doogie forgot to start singing and Chuck Burgi missed the fills.

Smoke on the water

- DP mk III version with the bass player singing the second verse like Glenn hughes used to do. Towards the end the band stopped playing and went off the stage leaving the audience singing you-know-what. They returned to play the riff about a thousand times and when the real end of the song came TMIB stopped a bit before the others and it looked to me as TMIB went out behind the amps and cried... :^) It was probably just my mind playing tricks on me because TMIB returned and did his greetings to the audience (you know, on his knees slapping hands with the crowd) and he even shouted something inaudible in th microphone. Note: He was smiling when he did this... :^)

Over The Rainbow

- Outro. They played the whole song and kept the house lights off while the Rainbow logo was projected on the backdrop.

I kept thinking of what TMIB has said about IG lately. If that still is his opinion then we are going to see Doogie, the bass player, Chuck Burgi and RB himself get kicked out of the group very soon. I am not one of those guys who complain if someone is playing one note wrong. I like those kind of things, they are all part of the live experience. But there was some major screw-ups in this show. They sounded like they hadn't had the time to rehearse the songs. How long has Chuck Burgi been in the band? Maybe he was rushed in at the last minute? It seems that those young guys RB has in the band isn't quite up for the job. I don't think this incarnation of Rainbow will last for long.

The support act Milky did well. They had lost most of their Led Zep things since I last saw them but they rocked on in a funky, 70's vein. Rainbow allowed them to bring their own sound engineer so there was no risk of them being destroyed by a sleepy sound engineer, as so often is the case with support acts. I think they had their own lighting guy too. The lights were quite good during Milky's performance and just stupid during Rainbow's.

I saw one thing in the light dept. I haven't seen anywhere else: Rainbow lights. Yes, one beam of light in all of the rainbow's colors.

All in all it wasn't worth spending six and a half hours on a train to Stockholm and six and a half hours home...

BTW, TMIB played excellent apart from Burn... Whatever you have to say about his attitude, he is one of the greatest guitar players alive.

Sorry for the long post but I just got off the train and felt I had to share all this with someone... :^)

Later...

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Svante Pettersson                       |   "The world isn't flat.
HTML-Dork, Kajplats 305                 |    It's actually +6 dBa at 5.7 kHz  
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swepett@kajen.malmo.se                  |                       -FSCFRA 1994
swepett@conet.se         http://www.kajen.malmo.se/~swepett/     
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