Concerts during week days can sometimes be a bit troublesome. Especially when they are Cologne. Getting there is a pain in the ass and also I’m often so exhausted from work that I don’t really feel ready for a concert at all.
Thankfully Fiddler’s Green are the type of band that will make the evening great even when I felt mostly like staying at home. The show of their The Green Machine Tour was no exception…
The Venue
It was my third time at Carlswerk Victoria and the second time I’ve seen Fiddler’s Green there. To be honest, so far I wasn’t the biggest fan of the venue for a few reasons, but the last concert made me feel a little better about the venue again.
Carlswerk Victoria is in the same industrial are as Palladium and E-Werk, just more or less on the other side. That’s basically my first struggle with this venue, because parking in Cologne is always tricky and parking there is basically a lottery. Thankfully there were no events at the other two venues, so we could easily park the car along the Schanzenstraße – but as far as I know there should also be a paid parking garage. If you go to any of these three venues, make sure to check beforehand if there’s more than one event at the same time, otherwise parking will be your personal nightmare. I think the district is accessible via public transport, but we always go to Cologne by car because getting back home after a concert is even worse with public transport than getting to Cologne by car before the show.
The next point why I’m not much of a fan of the venue is finding the entrance – each time it feels like we’re walking miles and miles in a maze. Use GPS and you won’t get lost. It’s not necessarily self-explanatory.
When you enter, you first get into some kind of small courtyard (which actually has a roof I think, and that’s problematic in so far as that people will smoke in this area although it’s not really open air and that sucks). On the one side, there’s the concert hall – on the other side there’s another building with cloakroom and toilets. Look closely and enter the door that says Garderobe if you want to find the toilets, because – another downside – I think there are no signs.
If I read correctly, using the cloak room is 2€ per person (or item), but I didn’t use it, so I’m not 100% sure. The toilets were clean and nice, but there are no paper towels, only air dryers.
The venue is quite big, according to the website of the city of Cologne it’s for about 1.6k people. In the front, right next to the stage there’s a designated wheel chair area (there might be a bit of a dead angle on stage though) with an entrance door / emergency exit right next to it. The whole venue is on floor level, there were no stairs, the ways are paved and to me as an able-bodied person they looked accessible with wheel chairs.
Drinks have average prices, a 0.5l bottle of coke was 5€ plus 1€ Pfand. There are no tokens, you can pay by cash, but I’m not sure if card payments are possible. There are at least three bars inside of the concert room and I think another one outside in the courtyard. The merch table is placed at the far back of the room and in the court yard there was a food truck / stand that sold fries (5€), hot dogs (5€) and other food.
One thing I noticed was that the sound during the support was off – and I feel like that was exactly the same when I went there for Amorphis, Sólstafir and Lost Society. The sound was still bad during the first song of the main act, but got better throughout the set, so not sure if that was a venue problem or … yeah. I don’t know.
All in all, it’s a nice venue. None of my favourites because 2 out of 3 times I got lost while desperately looking for the toilets 😂 But it isn’t bad and in Cologne, it’s probably one of the better ones I’ve been to.
The Feelgood Mclouds
I had no idea about the support act, but I had kinda high expectations when I saw the amount of Feelgood Mclouds shirts in the crowd. If there are that many people wearing the t-shirt of the support, it’s usually a good sign.
And I was right. They started at 7:45 pm and warmed us up with 45 minutes of very nice Irish folk punk. They had a great stage energy and overall I loved their songs, but the sound definitely was a major problem. It’s quite rare that the thing you hear the loudest at a concert is the bass guitar. Like … not just as „I’m feeling the bass“, but as in „I actually hear every single distinct note that is being played.“ At the same time, when you see a folk band that has bagpipes, it’s normally unlikely that you don’t hear the bagpipes. Bad news: I didn’t hear them.
The Feelgood Mclouds came with quite a few folk instruments: a banjo, a fiddle, a penny whistle, an accordeon and, as I already mentioned, bagpipes. Wanna know how many of them heard? Almost NONE. The mixing of the instruments was so bad I wanted to cry because damn, those guys were GREAT, but I couldn’t hear them! The vocals were way too silent as well, so all in all I can’t really judge their performance too well because I saw a lot, but didn’t hear much more than the bass guitar, the guitar and the drums.
They had a little guest appearance of the singer of The O’Reillys and the Paddyhats, but you couldn’t her him either! After their set I was completely puzzled, because that’s not the kind of folk punk experience I’d expect. In between, I even took out my earplugs to see if it was because of them, but nope. It didn’t get better at all. Normally if I visit a folky concert with fiddles and stuff I’d have a tinnitus for the rest of the week after taking off the earplugs, but I didn’t have to worry at this show.
So sad!
I guess I’d go see them again and I hope that if I ever have the chance to do so, I’ll get to enjoy the sound.
(Oh and I hope that next time their piper smiles a bit more, he looked so sad that at some point I just felt like hugging him and telling him that everything’s gonna be okay…)
Fiddler’s Green
Now the main act. Their intro started at 8:45 pm, the actual stage show at 8:50 pm and it was followed by almost 2 hours (!) of folk punk. I must say there’s something … slightly weird about the recent Fiddler’s Green shows I’ve been to and that’s the way their setlist is put together.
They opened the show with Shangaied in Portsmouth, just like they did at the last two shows I’ve seen (at PLWM and at MPS Bückeburg II last year) and that was a good start. I can’t tell for sure how they continued because I didn’t get a setlist, but in the following, they included quite a lot of their songs from the latest album The Green Machine, and they especially made sure to include their drinking songs (although Albi sneakily tried to „skip“ one by announcing My Fairy Of The West one song to early when it was actually time for … I think I Don’t Like Alcohol?)
There were only a few older songs in the first part, like Perfect Gang, Bottom’s Up or A Bottle A Day, if I remember correctly. At this point I usually start thinking „Hmmm, somehow their shows used to be faster and a lot more powerful in the past.“ I think I have mentioned the same thing in my review of their show at the PLWM last year.
Now the thing is: The second half of their set escalates completely and afterwards I’m so done with my life, I need extra oxygen. And this part usually starts with Yindy. This song, by the way, is one of the main reasons why I prefer standing in the front row: I need a barrier (or the edge of the stage) to grab to be able to do the jumping through the whole song 😂 But yeah, Yindy is the beginning of a wild ride that is followed by bangers like Victor and his Demons, One Fine Day, Old Dun Cow or Folk’s Not Dead.
In between, they give you some time to rest. For example when they came down to spend Raggle Taggle Gypsy in the crowd. Also A Fleezy Cloud was a necessary break. And towards the end, there was obviously an attempt at a Wall of Folk during Rocky Road To Dublin – only that the crowd didn’t quite get the assignment and turned the whole thing into a full-song moshpit instead of repeating the Wall of Folk again and again and again.
My biggest „surprise“ was that this tour once again comes without Blarney Roses as final song – but I wasn’t too sad about it.
After all it turned out that Fiddler’s Green concerts are still a hardcore workout, you just might have to wait a bit and work properly through the warm-up. They got older – so did I – but they’re still fast as fuck and it’s always a blast to see them.
Also I just love how much fun they have on stage. I guess they’re one of the bands I’ll never get bored of, although I’ve seen them so many times within the past 17 years. I’m kind of thankful that they’re still there – and that they never were gone in between.
Let me also quickly mention their merch, which is reasonably priced and of good quality and also there’s such a big product range that although I’ve been a fan for 17 years, I still keep discovering and buying stuff. The latest addition to my collection (next to the tour shirt for 30€) was a hat with their name embroidered on it. They also have tartan ties (and I keep forgetting to wear mine for their concerts) and quite a range of jewellery. Back in the days, they even had tartan skirts and shoes (Converse chucks-type if I remember correctly). And I absolutely love that.
And as I said, one of the best things about their merch is that it’s still reasonably priced. Of course, the t-shirt prices have risen, just like with most bands, but I guess it’s hard to avoid that if you want to earn anything from your music / shows.
Now the only thing I’m asking for is: Bring a new hoodie, and don’t use a Fruit of the Loom base, please!