The doctors were great – unfortunately the sound and organization weren’t
Concert in Cologne
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The doctors were great – unfortunately the sound and organization weren’t
Cologne At their second concert of the “Buffalo Bill in Rome” tour, Die Ärzte put their fans in ecstasy, especially with their classics. The atmosphere in the sold-out Cologne stadium was terrific – unfortunately the organization and sound weren’t.
“Himmelblau” is the name of the first song that the Berlin punk rockers “Die Ärzte” play – and the title says it all this evening: A warm summer night, a sold-out stadium, a family reunion with many very young doctors fans in tow of their parents: Everything is prepared for a big doctors’ party, which lasts two and a half hours and begins with a delay for many visitors to the interior: they are forced through a narrow eye of a needle before they see the start of the concert, there are long queues everywhere.
Drummer Bela B, clearly the showmaster that evening, sets the tone for the next two and a half hours: “It’s our pleasure to finally be at a fucking concert again,” he exclaims to the cheers of the audience, who could hardly be more colorful at the punk rock event and could be different. It’s always hearty with the doctors – lyrically and musically. If Bela B; Farin Urlaub and Rodrigo Gonzales pick up the tempo, sing against the “brown plague” and, as ever, self-ironic clown across the stage, they are in their element – and also really good this evening.
In between, however, the doctor’s engine stutters. They start songs and break them off – “Has U2 ever stopped a song and started again?”, asked Urlaub coquettishly – and animate the audience rather woodenly to La Ola waves with the text “What a nonsense”, which the full occupied grandstands and the audience in the interior one after the other. The animation doesn’t really want to ignite, and the moderation doesn’t really work either – which is not least due to the booming sound in the stadium, which leaves the dialogues and lyrics in the dark for large parts of the audience and from which the songs also suffer – especially the many new songs, for example from the current album “Dunkel”.
Especially since these songs are still largely unknown even for Ärzte fans and elicit rather polite applause – they are pieces like “Noise”, the second title of the evening, in which Die Ärzte announce “It’s time for something new”. The title song “Dunkel” only comes in the second block of encores, in which the band also presents their evergreens. “You’re actually here because of the old songs, aren’t you?” Farin Urlaub asks rhetorically. Sure, the band’s big hits were a little longer ago, but that’s no blemish considering the band’s four-century-old history, especially since “Lasse redn”, “Schrei nach Liebe”, “Junge” and “Zu Spät” have lost none of their power . Rock out, sing along – the fans experience a happy ending after all.