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Review: G3 – Joe Satriani, John Petrucci & Uli Jon Roth, Colston Hall
There will be an awful lot of notes played tonight, promises Uli Jon Roth. He rather hopes it won’t be too many. We’ll be the judge of that, pal. The superfans down the front have paid £200+ (no misprint) each for their meet’n’greet tickets. For that sort of outlay, you’d expect serious quantities of notes as well as a proper close-up look at Uli’s fabulous Sky guitars. This year’s G3 doesn’t disappoint on either front, serving up three-and-a-half hours of jaw-dropping guitar playing in a variety of styles.
The elder statesman here, 63-year-old Uli gets to go first. Best known for his five-year tenure in the Scorpions from 1973-78, before they adopted a more mainstream approach and achieved global success, he’s the missing link between Hendrix and modern symphonic/neoclassical metal. After a long hiatus during which his style was out of fashion, he re-emerged to find himself justly lauded by a new generation of shredders. Headband and moustache heroically unaltered since the mid-seventies, Uli remains an exceptional guitarist and adequate singer. Fortunately, we get a great deal of the former and not too much of the latter, as Niklas Turmann, one of two additional guitarists in his six-piece band, handles most of the vocals.
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The soaring Sky Overture serves as a magnificent showpiece for those stylish guitars as well as Roth’s distinctive playing, for which that old cliché ‘fluid’ seems the only appropriate description. Of course, he knows that we really want to hear those old, pre-metal Scorpions songs that his former band, who are currently on a never-ending ‘farewell’ tour, rarely touch these days. We’ll Burn the Sky is dedicated to his younger brother Zeno, who died recently, with Turmann wisely not attempting to ape Klaus Meine’s nasal tones.
Uli also takes the opportunity to give it some proper old-skool whammy bar abuse, shooting us a toothy grin with each dive-bombing run and concluding with his signature riff-laden virtuoso showcase, Sails of Charon.
Time for what John Petrucci himself describes as the “metal portion of the show”. And who’s that he’s got sitting behind an unusually tiny drum kit? Why, it’s Mike Mangini, who ditched academia for a life of prog-metal. That means we’ve got two-fifths of Dream Theater on stage before our naked steaming eyeballs. Flying Colors bassist (and former Joe Satriani sidekick) Dave LaRue completes the instrumental trio, who eschew Dream Theater stuff in favour of tracks drawn primarily from Petrucci’s Suspended Animation solo album.
From giant riffs to super-fast yet unfailingly precise and melodic picking, Petrucci really has got the lot and he’s one of the principal reasons why Dream Theater attained arena headlining status. He unveils two new pieces tonight. The aptly titled The Happy Song bounces along joyfully, a perfect marriage of super-complex musicianship and melody. Hell, you could even hum along with this one. No wonder Mangini is grinning like a fool throughout.
Glassy-Eyed Zombies (“Don’t be scared!” Petrucci counsels) sees him back in more familiar prog-metal territory, working his way through a blistering variety of techniques, and the trio conclude with an epic romp through Glasgow Kiss. Frankly, this reviewer could watch Petrucci play all night, and it seems I’m not alone given the standing ovation he receives.
But G3 is Joe Satriani’s party and it’s not for nothing that he’s been headlining these hugely successful tours for 22 years now. The format gives him less time than his previous headlining sets at the Colston and he opts to keep it fresh by concentrating on material from his sixteenth album, What Happens Next, which strips away much of the prog of its predecessor, Shockwave Supernova, to pursue a back-to-basics approach.
Satch’s band is much the same as last time, with ace bassist Bryan Beller and Frank Zappa’s former ‘stunt guitarist’ Mike Keneally, who keeps the bandleader on his toes by being one of the handful of musicians able to play guitar and keyboards simultaneously. The ‘new guy’ is drummer Joe Travers, Keneally’s regular sidekick who shares a Zappa connection by being ‘vaultmeister’ of Zappa Family Trust.
There remains something intentionally other-worldly about shiny-headed Satch, as he adopts his familiar mouth-agape, shades-pointed-skywards posture, making his versatility all seem so effortless. Accompanied by a suitably evocative animation, Cherry Blossoms is a welcome addition to his repertoire of beautifully expressive slower pieces. But the centrepiece here is an extended Super Funky Badass, which not only delivers on the promise of the title but also features some magnificent twin lead guitar and climaxes in a frantic duel with Keneally. Old favourites Always With Me, Always With You and Summer Song conclude his set and bring the audience to their feet.
But they’re not done yet. The G3 format requires all three guitarists to come together as the world’s most over-qualified covers band for a lengthy encore, with the accent on having fun with some familiar songs. Niklas Turmann also returns on vocals for a romp through Deep Purple’s Highway Star, during which they each take turns to be Ritchie Blackmore. Uli Jon Roth then assumes centre stage for his party piece, All Along the Watchtower, which, like the ensuing Immigrant Song, is stretched beyond its elastic limit to accommodate all the soloing. Excessive? Perhaps. But we came for guitars and guitars are most certainly what we got.
All photos by Mike Evans
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