Camel
Setlist
- Three Wishes
- Echoes
- White Rider
- Another Night
- Chord Change
- Watching the Bobbins
- The Hour Candle
intermission
acoustic / unplugged set:
- Refugee
- Fingertips
- Slow Yourself Down
- Eyes of Ireland
- Sending Home the Slates
- Rajaz (first part)
electric set:
- Rajaz (second part)
- Sahara
- Mother Road
- Little Rivers
- Hopeless Anger
encore
- Lady Fantasy
Band members
- guitar: Andy Latimer
- vocals, keys: Guy LeBlanc
- vocals, bass: Colin Bass
- drums: Denis Clement
The company
Karel, Nick
Story
Hi all,
Yesterday I went to the Camel concert in the 013, the ‘pop temple’ in my home town, with Karel (yeah, the one that Scott doesn’t like :) and Nick, another friend of mine (who, like Larry, is addicted to instrumentals :). It was really great.
When we entered, we all got a little flyer advertising the new Kayak album and listing some tour dates for Kayak. Inside, they were playing some live Marillion music. We had a drink, I bought the T-shirt, and we went into the room that the band was going to play in. To our big suprise, it was absolutely packed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was sold out. There weren’t many people our age though :)
I managed to sneak my photo camera in without any trouble, and the security wasn’t as active in tracking down photographers as they were at the AP concert in Utrecht last year, so I had the chance to take a lot of pictures. Lots of people used flash so after a while I thought, what the …, and started to use my flash as well. I hope they’ll turn out well.
The first half of the show was basically one big, hour-long, fantastic Latimer guitar solo. He started with a song that started kinda new-age-ey, and then the drums kicked in and it kept getting better and better. I didn’t know what the song was called though. Most of the songs in the first half were instrumental; only two or three weren’t. I didn’t realise how good Latimer is on the guitar before yesterday… Unfortunately, he had a throat infection so he had to leave a lot of the singing to Colin Bass, and he didn’t play the flute.
In the break, I asked someone who looked like a Camel fan (the Camel T-shirt was a dead giveaway :) what the song they opened with was called, and he said it was the opening track of their new album ‘Rajaz’. Makes sense. Karel also asked someone if they wanted to take a picture of the three of us, to which he kindly agreed.
The second half started with an acoustic set, they played two songs from Stationary Traveller in an acoustic version. The songs sounded really different than the studio version, but still very good. Those two songs were the only two songs in the entire show that I knew, BTW :) After a few acoustic songs, they went back to playing, um, ‘non-acoustically’ :)
After about 2 hours, the band left the stage, but they came back for one (long) encore. Larry told me that in previous shows they played an instrumental called Ice, but they didn’t this time (they sang, so it wasn’t instrumental :). Here, the keyboardist got to play an awesome solo. At some points, he played so fast that his hands were all blurry. I’m not exaggerating. He was great. The drummer was very good, too BTW.
The band alse has a good sense of humor… When Latimer introduced Rajaz, he said that if anyone wanted to sing along, it would be greatly appreciated (because of his throat). Bass mentioned that he liked Tilburg, because there are a lot of bars and shops. But despite all the bars, they still had a show to play… :)
After the show was over we stuck around for a while hoping the band might come out for a little ‘meet & greet’ with the fans, but they didn’t. Or they did after we left, but I don’t think so. We went back to the lobby; I wanted to buy Rajaz (after hearing that opening song, and some others a bit later on in the show). The guy at the counter pointed to Karel (who was wearing his TTM Tour shirt) and said, “Hey, that’s my T-shirt! The Alan Parsons Project!” Then he saw me (I was wearing the brown APLP shirt with the robot climbing the stairs), and said “And him too! I Robot!” That was kinda fun… we were the only ones with AP shirts, AFAIK. I did see a lot of Camel, Pink Floyd, Ayreon, and other related shirts…
All in all, it was a great show and we had a great time… I’m glad I took the effort to go see them.
Jan