The Parlotones | 20th Anniversary Tour, Zoom Frankfurt
“Melodic Independent Rock” is the genre you are being offered when looking up information about The Parlotones and as I had never heard of the band before this was helpful to me. This show was the kind of concert where I’m only tagging along, in this case, I was joining colleagues and their families & friends, a good part of them actually are from South Africa, The Parlotones country of origin.
I also wanted to find out what the 20th anniversary was about. 20 years since the first single or album release, 20 years since the band came together for the first time, or maybe the 20 years stage anniversary? It seems to be the latter; a video on The Parlotones official Facebook page includes the message “Join us as we celebrate 20 years of performing for you, our fans”. And as part of that tour, they stopped by in Frankfurt.
The Zoom club probably has a capacity of up to about 500 people (I assume about 200 -300 attended the show) and a stage which I estimate to be around 15 m² in size. Ergo, you are very close to the band, especially if you are standing directly in front of the stage.
I think the fact that the band is happy to play at such a small venue speaks highly in their favour. In South Africa, they are a big thing, have apparently a significant fan base, and play much larger venues. Here in Germany and I suppose everywhere in Europe, they are very happy to perform on a small, in fact tiny, stage with hardly any physical distance between them and the audience, and at the end of the show they meet their fans, shake hands and give autographs. I find that impressive.
The stage design was simple, a banner with motives from the ‘China’ album formed the background and the stage lighting was provided by using the in-house system (at least that was my impression). But there was no need for a fancy stage design or lighting setup, the band compensated nicely and masterfully for everything that was not available.
All in all the evening was characterized by a good mixture of songs which reflects the band’s spectrum. There were the band-typical independent-style “Life Design” & “Overexposed” as openers (preceded by an intro), the melodic “Can You Feel It?” & “Antidote” (both with a nice electronic portion), “Beautiful” added a touch of folk music and “I’ll Be There” & “Electricity” both came with a slower touch but again lots of melody. And of course, there was “Push Me To The Floor”, and not being an expert about the band I still assume if they would not have performed this song live this would probably be like Depeche Mode not performing “Enjoy The Silence” or OMD excluding “Maid Of Orleans” from the set-list.
Unfortunately due to club time starting soon after the show, 7 songs had to be removed from the set-list including both encores. Still, 18 songs is not a bad amount.
This was the show set-list: “Life Design”, “Overexposed”, “Should We Fight Back”, “Reach Our Dreams”, “Shake It Up”, “Sleepwalker”, “Can You Feel It?”, “I’ll Be There”, “Light Up”, “Beautiful Life”, “The Stars Fall Down”, “Electricity”, “Beautiful”, “Antidote”, “We Were Just Having Fun”, “Giant Mistake”, “Push Me To The Floor”, “Downtown Love”.
In summary, I got to know a new band with an interesting sound, I took home the memories of a great show, a free concert poster and of course my ticket stub. An evening to be remembered! If you were also were just having fun at that show or tour, leave a comment and your thoughts, I will make an effort to reply.
Links:
The Parlotones – Official Website
The setlist on setlist.fm
Zoom Frankfurt
Post last updated on 13. September 2021.