Brussels, March 26, 2006. Backstage at the Ancienne Belgique concert venue, ten beginning bands are trying to keep calm. One of them will win this edition of Humo’s Rock Rally, the country’s biggest and most respected music contest. Among the competitors are five youngsters from Kortrijk, known to foreigners mostly as “not that far from Bruges”. Under the name Balthazar, they play a sexy mix of jazz, folk and rock, with the occasional electronic touch to spice things up. The jury that night isn’t convinced and crowns The Hickey Underworld instead, with The Black Box Revelation coming second. Both bands go on to produce some excellent albums full of raw rock’n’roll and tour the world, and are still very much alive today. Balthazar, however, only gets the audience choice award, and are left somewhat disappointed.
Fast forward almost exactly 8 years, and it’s obvious they never let it truly get to them. Two EPs and two albums later, Balthazar have played nearly every big festival in Europe and quite a few beyond. After experimenting with some more up-tempo electronic songs, they finally arrived at their current, unique sound. It’s that sound that brought them to Istanbul last Saturday for their first encounter with a Turkish audience.
After a long wait in the cold – did we really hear them still sound checking the bass drum at the announced starting time? – and a rather drastic search by some less than friendly security people, we were finally let into the beautiful venue. With little or no prior knowledge of the songs, and three different nationalities among them, my company provided quite a representative test case for the band’s global appeal. Furthermore, we had barely taken our coats off before three girls confided that they had come all the way from Ankara just for this concert.
Reasonable as Roxy’s drink prices are, especially for Istanbul concert venue standards, it didn’t take much alcohol for this miniature UN assembly to get into a trance from the very first ominous chants of “Lion’s Mouth”. Definite highlights of the night were “Listen Up”, the chamber orchestra of its album version replaced by a bigger sound tailored for stadiums, and “The Boatman”, with its chorus sung along word by word by the three Turkish girls, in key and in an accent all of us English teachers can only dream of. The band also treated Istanbul to two new songs, “No More” and “Will My Lover”, both of which suggested the next album might be even better than 2012’s Rats. It was only after the last a capella repetition of “Blood Like Wine”’s chorus that the crowd stopped dancing and regained their faculty of speech. The first words from my multinational band of brothers: “that was amazing.”
Photo Credit: Sveta Nekrasova
That fucking was amazing!