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A post on this blog that is not a "Happy New Year" post? Yes, that's right! :o) After a few years of the corona pandemic, we are now more or less back to normal life, and for the first time since the beginning of the corona pandemic, our birthdays are celebrated at concerts again.
As already mentioned in the previous blog post, one week before Christmas, on 16th December 2023, we attended Deathstars' home game in Sweden's capital Stockholm, with Liv Sin as opening act and Priest as main support. Or as I would say, especially in retrospect: Some nights are just magical. While working on the corresponding live review and photo gallery, I mainly listened to the songs from Priest's performance ("Neuromancer", "Obey", "The Pit"...). And when Priest started dropping hints a few days later via their facebook profile ("//STOCKHOLM// Tack för en fantastisk lördag på Slaktkyrkan - vi ses snart igen!" and "News coming soon.."), I wondered: "Could it be that...?" Could it be that Priest will play another show in Stockholm soon, maybe even on our birthday weekend? And on 11th January 2024, it turned out: Yes, that is exactly what Priest were going to do... What are the chances?!? So, I was pretty over the moon, and the birthday plans were fixed.
Right before the concert, I could have even met Then Comes Silence, who had a DJ session in honour of their single release of "Ride Or Die" in Gamla Stan already from 5 PM. Unfortunately, I only found out about this event afterwards, despite thorough research on my part about what could have been done during that weekend. Oh well!
The concert itself was great, and you can read everything about it in the corresponding live review and also check out the photo gallery.
Here is also an audiovisual impression of Priest's show at "Slaktkyrkan"...
As can be read in the live review, by 10.30 PM, everyone was swept out of the club, due to a subsequent event that was never mentioned on the official website of the venue. That was definitely not cool. We thought that we would be at "Slaktkyrkan" until midnight, like last time. And the days when there was a wide range of rock and metal clubs in Stockholm are long gone. There is this one venue that was repeatedly suggested to us, where mostly cover bands play, including that night, but especially after seeing something original like Priest, I didn't feel like seeing a cover band. And so we had our own little party...
The next concert we will attend is already in the pipeline, and it will be another show in Stockholm. One might think that all these events in Stockholm have something to do with my love for the capital of Sweden, but that's only partly true these days. Cancellations of concerts, tours and festival appearances, sometimes at the very last minute, have become common practice for musicians long before the corona pandemic, and there are currently also other risk factors such as strikes, which is why I continue to refrain from longer "gig trips". Within Sweden, the network of public transportation is not that well developed, and it has recently also become quite notorious for its unreliability. That's also why Stockholm is more or less the only option at the moment. Well, there are certainly worse things than being limited to Stockholm for a while... ;o)
