FUOCO ::

FUOCO / MINZE
sargfabrik / vienna, austria
23rd september 2005

FUOCO is the band of florian baum, a young man i met and befriended when he was working for the local emi music company. a very talented fellow: played all the instruments on his demo himself and, believe me, it sounds like a fullfledged band. something you need to know about him: he's a huge THE DOORS fan.

together with his brother and some friends he put a band together that would go with the studio version of FUOCO. it's a hard to describe mixturen between prog-rock, space-rock, a bit of classic rock and some folksy passages. sort of like early HAWKWIND, THE DOORS, a dash of ALEX HARVEY and CURVED AIR blended together and then fast-forwarded to 2005. in other words: i like it, a lot. add to that the great musicianship of the people involved and, presto, you get a great rock band.

their gig was great. they really made an effort to make a seemless experience out of it and almost succeeded... were it not for some broken strings. first the guitarist's string was gone, then the bassist lost a string and then the guitarist killed another one. talk about intense playing, eh? but that again gave them the opportunity to show how good they are as musicians. while the bassist was trying to replace the broken string as fast as humanly possible (yeah, they don't have roadies yet, what were you thinking?) the keyboarder and the drummer started a funky jam. soon flo, who plays guitar and sings, and the other guitarist joined in. flo did some ad-lib vocals singing how much love there is at the sargfabrik tonight. they jammed on for a bit until the bassist (flo's brother) was done and then managed to let the jam flow into the next track. no break. now that was nice!

anyway, FUOCO's gig was great and i'm looking forward to the 8th of october when i get to see them again. right after them was MINZE, another austrian act, akin to DIE STERNE and SPORTFREUNDE STILLER. the brother of a good friend of mine plays in that band. it all started pleasingly enough. not really my cup of coffee music-wise, but very well played with a pretty good singer. she had a very distinctive style of her own, which i think is worth millions, compared to all the german-singing copy-cat acts out there at the moment.

but the concert turned sour pretty soon. actually during the second song. there were two elder guys, i guess 40-ish, standing behind us. suddenly they started throwing leaflets or something like that at the stage. as if that wasn't annoying and disrespectful enough, they managed to hit my elbow each time they throw something. after a while i had enough and turned around and asked them what that was all about. they muttered something about if i don't like it i can go someplace else. that went a bit back and forth but when i turned back to the stage again, they weren't thowing anything anymore and didn't say anything. to me, that was that. turned out it wasn't. a friend of mine and i had to leave pretty soon, because we had some other places to be, so during the fourth or fifth song we left. we were on the stairs, almost out of the venue when i heard someone call my name from below and some shouting going on. turning around i saw the nuisances from before making a racket and calling me names. i am a peaceful person but i don't like to get barked at for no reason. so i went down the stairs again, asking them what the matter was. they got even more agitated and one of them eventually pushed me. that was it. getting angry i got right into their faces and provoked them, hoping for one of them to hit me, giving me a good excuse to rip them apart right there and then. well, that blow never came and some people from the venue stepped in. after a couple of minutes i calmed down and decided that it wasn't worth the effort anyway and we left. the rest of the evening was fortunately very pleasant.