Vredefeesten, Sint-Niklaas, Belgium – August 5 2015

Hey!
Alright, so saturday night we played our last gig of this year’s festival season. It’s been a long summer, but it sure ended on a very positive note!

Vredefeesten is a free festival held in the centre of the town of Sint-Niklaas close to Antwerp in northwestern Belgium. The city square was the main festival site, and as well as being full of stages, foodstands and porta-potties and all the other stuff you usually find on festival sites, it also hosted some kinda hot-air balloon extravaganza. Now, that’s what I call a nice combination!

The stage we played was somewhat off to the side and next to the city church at Sint-nicolaasplein. I dunno what the capacity might’ve been, but the square seemed pretty packed the few times I looked up, so there must’ve been at least a few hundred people there I guess. And they all looked pretty happy to be there too!

Tos, our regular guitar-tech and backline-/stage manager lives in Amsterdam and brough some of his equipment to this gig. Now this is equipment we’ve worked with many times before, and that we are totally comfortable with. I guess our familiarity with it helped, cuz last night Motorpsycho a was quite happening little combo! Having rehearsed all of Suite: Little Lucid Moments earlier this week, we played it in its entirety for the first time in something like five years at this show. What a blast! It is a much nicer piece of music than I remembered, a hoot to play, and it doesn’t seem as impenetrable now as it did when it was new, something I think later behemoth works like DDU and Folk Flest can help explain: compared to those, LLM is a pretty concise and focused piece of music, and one that really fits ‘trio-psycho’ pretty well!

Sometimes you just hit the groove, you know – the music plays you and everything is somehow self evident -and I must say that on saturday we locked in right out of the gate. We kept up the pressure untill the end too, and despite a few issues with Kenneth’s in-ear monitor system, it was a fine show with Snah in particular ‘delivering the goods’ (© Rob Halford, 1979) and leading from the front.

We flew in late and left early, and so didn’t get to see too many of the other acts on the bill, but we caught a few songs by New York psych rock trio White Hills that rocked pretty damn hard. Hypnotic and psychedelic music, and really nice people too!

Now, I don’t understand why every town in the universe doesn’t throw a party like this for its’ citizens at least once a year, cause this seems like a great way of getting a town populace to work together for the benefit of all. Lord knows we need more of that these days…
I doubt most would have the balls to run with this kind of a booking policy though, but all hail to the promotors for daring to, and thanks a million for inviting us – we had a great time!

SETLIST

  • Serpentine
  • Sail On
  • Starhammer
  • > Vanishing Point
  • On a Plate
  • Hell I-III
  • > Through The Veil
  • Suite: LLM
  • Vortex Surfer

 

photo by @dddddennis


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