Wave Gotik Treffen

Day 1 - Bands in order of appearance:

Das Ich
Sweet William
Henke plays Goethes Erben
Age Of Heaven
Love Like Blood
The Eternal Afflict

Agra, Leipzig
Thursday June 9 2011

The UK music media has unaccountably failed to mention this, but the Wave Gotik Treffen is now 20 years old - counting from the first official event at Leipzig's Eiskeller club in 1992. 

That wasn't quite the beginning, of course: the Treffen didn't spring fully formed out of nowhere. In the years leading up to 1992, assorted brave souls made several attempts at putting together a festival of sorts in East Germany. And they needed to be brave, too, for the Communist government of the day regarded goths as a genuinely subversive element, a manifestation of the decadent west that had no place in their rigidly controlled society.

But when reunification happened, the controls came off. All things were suddenly possible. In 1992 the WGT was born.

In the 20 years that followed, that initial gathering in a basement nightclub has grown into a many-headed monster of a festival that now takes over the entire city of Leipzig every year. The numbers are impressive - 20,000 attendees, around 200 bands, and an event schedule that takes in full-scale orchestral concerts in Leipzig's Opera House to medieval folk bands twanging and thumping beneath the trees.

It all seems downright astounding from a UK perspective. After the initial creative surge and flurry of media attention in the post-punk period of the 80s, and its 90s reinvention as a fairly conventional rock genre, goth in the UK settled down to an under-the-radar existence as a relatively minor style tribe.

But in Germany, goth was never swept under the carpet. Today it holds its own on a scale that compares with any other genre, with a regular calendar of large-scale events that easily match the size of mainstream UK festivals such as Reading and Leeds.

All of which means that the 20th WGT is by and large treated as business as usual: there are no special ceremonies, no processions, no speeches by the Mayor of Leipzig. What we do have, however, is an extra day added to the Treffen's usual four-day run, at which the bands that played the first event in 1992 are invited back to play a much-delayed encore.

And that's where we're going to start...

Das Ich are probably the only band from 1992 that has achieved any real recognition in the UK. Certainly they're the only band on today's WGT bill that could get an audience at a UK gig now. Which makes it seem a liittle odd that they're first on, warming up the tea time crowd as if they're a new band rather than established heroes of the industrial scene, while other, more obscure bands - at least from a UK perspective - loom above them.

Then again, maybe Das Ich's opening slot has something to do with the fact that the band's whacko frontman Stefan Ackermann is absent - ill in hospital, apparently. So, keyboard player Bruno Kramm, extravagantly costumed like a cross between a crazed cardinal and a surrealist Simon Price, hosts the proceedings with the help of guest vocalists: Latvian techno-metal power-balladeer Vic Anselmo (who's female, incidentally), and Myk Jung, of Deutsche cyber-goths The Fair Sex (Myk's male, by the way).

Without Stefan Ackermann's up-front antics, the show is a little visually restrained, but the Das Ich musical formula - thumping industrial-dance workouts, topped by a stern chant - can be interpreted without too much difficulty by any vocalist. It's not like there are any difficult notes to hit, after all. Vic Anselmo actually does a rather good job of turning 'Das Dunkle Land' into a rousing hands-in-the-air anthem, although she's noticeably more at home on the choruses - where she actually gets to sing - rather than the shout-to-the-beat verses.

There's a lot of goodwill in the room for Das Ich. The fans appreciate the effort the band have made to keep the show on the road even though they're a man down. The applause is warm: the band pull victory from the jaws of a sticky situation.

But here's a thing. Watching Vic Anselmo handling Das Ich's none-more-industrial vocal chores prompts me to wonder: why aren't there any female-fronted industrial bands? There's a side project there for you, Vic, if you fancy it.

Sweet William apparently once played a UK tour - in 1994. I can't remember if I saw the band at the time. But then, Sweet William really aren't very memorable.

Today in Leipzig, three scruffly blokes in black emerge and play a vaguely stoner-ish brand of mid-tempo rock while wearing expressions of blank indifference. Within a few songs I'm wearing an expression of blank indifference, too. I can find nothing to latch on to in Sweet William's music. It's an inconclusive blur of workaday rocknoise that might sound pretty darn cutting edge when you've been at the jazz fags, but I'm only one schwarzebier down so far and I have to say the band aren't doing it for me.

It's a bit of a relief, then, when Oswald Henke appears on stage to perform a set of songs originally by his old band, Goethes Eerben. Apparently it wasn't possible to book Goethes Eerben themselves - the band split up a few years back, and were evidently unwilling to reform for the WGT. So it's down to the main man, a bunch of youthful and frighteningly competent session musos, and a stage tricked out with a veritable forest of candles to recreate the old spirit.

Goethes Erben were renowned for their aspirations to high art - let's face it, calling the band 'Goethe's Heirs' sets the bar pretty high. I suppose the British equivalent would be for a band to name itself 'Shakespeare's Heirs'.

You can bet any band who dared to do that would be roundly mocked for insufferable self-aggrandisement. I mean, c'mon, it's only rock 'n' roll.

But Germany, it seems, is prepared to take the high art aspirations of their rock stars at face value, and certainly the crowd's reaction to Oswald Henke's theatrical grandstanding is enthusiastic, bordering on the awestruck.

I can't quite join in the general joy, though, because the pomp-rock bombast and highfalutin' neo-classical interludes that make up the Goethes Erben songbook just seem a bit overblown and silly to me - while Oswald Henke himself, flouncing around in a frilly shirt while singing in a curiously strained, nasal cackle, comes across like a pantomime villain who really needs to be told to ease up on the overacting.

It's a German thing, I suppose. I don't believe Goethes Erben ever played in the UK, and frankly that was probably for the best. The band would have come slap up against the British sense of humour at its pretension-pricking best, and it might've got a bit messy.

Perhaps I haven't been paying attention for the last twenty years, but I've never heard of Age Of Heaven before. I've never heard of them, but in a way I've heard them a million times.

For Age Of Heaven are an entirely straightforward neo-Sisters Of Mercy goth band, all clattery drum machine beats, sepulchral vocals, every song a melodramatic anthem.

Yes, we've been here many times before: in the UK, the 90s goth scene was dominated by this sort of stuff to a frankly unhealthy degree, and in the end became one of the reasons why goth went distinctly off the boil at that time. It was hard to remain interested in a genre in which so many of the bands wore their influences - and, for too many, the same influences - so blatantly on their sleves.

Still, Age Of Heaven do their post-Sisters thing with a certain shameless panache. It's crashingly obvious where they're coming from - they have one song, 'The Providence', to which I swear it's possible to sing the words to The Sisters' 'Alice' - but they do it well. Mind you, by the end of their set I'm reminded why I'm glad it's not the 90s any more.

I suppose the preponderance of Sisters-alike goth bands in the 90s might have been part of the reason why large chunks of the goth scene turned to the electronic zone as the decade wore on. Somehow, the slammin' beats of EBM sounded, if not exactly like the future, at least not quite so much like the past.

And here comes a band to represent that strand. If Age Of Heaven have mustered the precise ingredients of a Sisters-esque goth band, The Eternal Afflict have pulled off the same trick with the standard ingredients of the EBM zone.

Clipboards at the ready, then. Let's check off the inventory. Impassive bloke stationed behind a keyboard? Check. Shouty bloke running round the otherwise empty stage, alternating between angry hollering and cheesey gee-up gestures to the audience? Yep. Four-on-the-floor beats? Certainly. Strong suspicion that everything except the vocal is on the backing track? Oh, yes. We've definitely got that.

In spite of - or perhaps because of - their standard-issue EBMisms, The Eternal Afflict do seem to be a genuinely successful band, although, as with others we've seen tonight, their success seems to be exclusively a German thing.

Still, you can't argue with high placings in the Deutsche Alternative Charts, or indeed with the roars of approval the band's hammering beat 'n' shout workouts provoke from the crowd here in the Agra.

Yes, the band are clearly well-liked, although I don't know if I'd go quite as far as the blurb on their website, which confidently informs us that The Eternal Afflict are "...the most discussed about electro band of all time."

Personally, this is the first time I have ever discussed about The Eternal Afflict. Given that it's unlikely our paths will cross again unless I randomly catch the band at another festival sometime, it may well be the last. I don't think The Eternal Afflict will worry about that, mind. They're doing well enough not to worry, as EBM outfits can in Deutschland. It's a German thing.

Although they named themselves after Killing Joke's biggest hit (and, not coincdentally, most conventional song), Love Like Blood are yet another band which enjoyed much success in Germany without troubling the rest of the world to any great extent. I use the past tense here, because Love Like Blood split up in 2000. Tonight's performance is a brief reunion, a limited edition comeback that the band are adamant won't be extended beyond a swift round of festival appearances this year. Well, we'll see what happens. The Love Like Blood Wikipedia page tells me that the band are on 'indefinite hiatus', a phrase which leaves quite a bit of wriggle room. No band splits up for ever these days, do they?

Tonight, you'd never guess the band have been on any kind of hiatus. Love Like Blood exude an easy confidence, as if they never stopped gigging.

They're well-drilled and obviously rehearsed to the hilt. Frontman Yorck Eysel, suited and booted like the boss of a rock 'n' roll boardroom, is poised and assured, keeping his moves low-key and yet somehow commanding the stage. Just goes to show, folks. You don't have to rush about like a mad thing, wearing a frilly shirt.

I'm not quite so enamoured wiith the Love Like Blood sound, mind. In a nutshell, Love Like Blood are to Fields Of The Nephilim what Age Of Heaven are to the Sisters Of Mercy - a skilful, competent, homage. Neatly done but entirely derivative.

I suppose this recreation of the WGT's 1992 bill serves as a reminder that the goth scene wasn't exactly basking in the white heat of creativity during the 90s. It was a time when, artistically, goth retreated from the sharp end and hedged itself about with rules and regulations - rule one being Thou Shalt Sound Like The Sisters Of Mercy. Rule two: Or Fields Of The Nephilim. It's ironic, in a way, that the WGT began at such a time.

However, in its 20 year lifespan so far, the festival has broadened its outlook, cast its net wide, and has never been afraid to explore the possibilities implicit in the Wave part of its name. We'll find out how much of that has been served up this year, when the full-scale WGT kicks off tomorrow.

On to Day 2 of the WGT here.

Love Like Blood: Website | MySpace | Facebook

The Eternal Afflict: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Age Of Heaven: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Oswald Henke: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Sweet William: Website | MySpace

Das Ich: Website | MySpace | Facebook

Wave Gotik Treffen: Website | MySpace | Facebook

For more photos from the WGT, find the bands by name here.