At 20:00 Nikki Puppet and her friends got started and they made their own rock’n’roll-party with a sound not many supporting bands get. Nikki has a real rock’n’Roll voice, a bluesy and powerful female rock voice, although at the end of their show she doesn’t have that power anymore. She gets a few hands of the people of 013 on each other though.

On "Militant Lover" (great song) guitar player Christos Mamalitsidis showed how to play a great solo, later on in the show there was even a drum solo (please don’t do this next time)!

After half an hour they left the stage for MSG. At that time the audience fortunately had increased till a couple of hundred fans. At 21:45 Michael Schenker entered the stage and played the first riffs of "Assault Attack" on his black and white flying V.

Bass player Rev Jones is a real stage-animal, he has his own way of head banging, it’s more a like a helicopter. He plays quite fast, it’s a pleasure to see this guy playing his bass guitar.

After "Ready to Rock" and "Let it Roll" MSG played a few songs of the album "Tales of Rock’n’Roll" to return to the most successful period of Michael Schenker, being UFO and MSG 1 and 2.

The sound of the guitar solos could have been some harder, it would have made the sound more impressive. The audience reacted enthusiastic when the first notes of "Into the Arena" came out of the speakers; unfortunatly this song had an intermission of a drum solo, a Beatles-medley and some jazzy music while Rev was playing his electronic double bass.
The intermission enfeebled the song, that`s a real pity. After this song the band went off-stage to take a little break.

The first encore was "Life Vacation" (Tales of Rock’n’Roll) with a solo by Wayne Findley, he showed he can play solos very well also.

Then Michael took his Schenker-Brother guitar, this was the beginning of the best part of the show. A better sound and 2 great songs ("Doctor Doctor" and "Rock Bottom").
Last song took over 15 minutes and showed Schenker at his best, superb solos played with a lot of feelings straight from the heart.

After 1,5 hours the show was over; this anniversary show was a really nostalgic show with a lot of old songs (what happened to the songs between 1985 and 2004?) and a few new ones with a great ending. I personally would have appreciated it when Michael would have played "Lost Horizons", which he didn`t but maybe next time i`ll be lucky.

(Review: Ralph Vermeere
Pics: Geert Oldenmenger)