Time for festivals! OK, actually Skambankt have been playing festival concerts all summer already, but I didn’t make it to any of them until now. Too many other festivals in Germany, and in addition, I’m not that fond of traveling for hours and hours just to see a 40-minute concert in front of only a few people, most of whom have never seen Skambankt before. =;-)

But finally there was a festival that was rather easy to get to and with a nice line-up – so I got on my way to Kartfestivalen! The whole report about Kartfestivalen will be up on konzertjunkie.de soon, so I’ll only report about the Skambankt concert here.

It filled up nicely in front of the stage before Skambankt’s show – it seemed that most people arrived just in time for Skambankt, yeah! The beginning was all different from the last club tour. This time, Skambankt started with Dynasti; the beginning of the song was played from tape before the band entered the stage, then they came on and took over. A great start!

The next song was Skambankt, and that already set the scope for the whole concert: Terje wanted to know whether we were “with them or against them”, and OF COURSE the audience was with them! “Det kommer til å bli bra!” Oh yes, it was clear right from the beginning that this would be a great concert. The audience went along right away, shouting “Skambankt!”, and that remained just like this throughout the whole concert. Actually, the Skambankt chants started over and over again, in almost all songs. That showed how much the audience enjoyed the concert – even though many of them didn’t really seem to know the band, or only the last album. Actually it was quite obvious that there were not that few people who sang along on all “Hardt Regn” songs but didn’t know any of the others.

The next songs were Løgnprofitør and Malin, before they played their new single Mantra. That one worked great live! And it seems that everybody knew it. The band seemed pretty impressed by the audience and the festival as well – Terje announced that once he is rich enough, he’s gonna buy the house on the other side of the river and live there, and then they’d play at Kartfestivalen every year from then on. But only if he’s got the money… =;-)

The next songs were Vår Bør, which works just as nicely in the middle of the set as it does as opening song, and Alarm. At the beginning of Alarm, the band improvised a bit of audience interaction by having the audience cheer them, then playing a bit (or rather making some noise), having the audience cheer again and so on. Worked like a charm!

Of course someone had to come up on stage to count in after the drum solo – this time it was Anette from Ålesund who saw her 10th Skambankt concert. And she managed to count in correctly on first try! =;-)

Next, Skambankt played Trygge Rammer, and after that Stormkast #1. They changed the middle part a bit and had an even longer break/guitar solo part in it. The next song was Tanker Som Mareritt – which made me fear that the concert was over already, but no, fortunately Skambankt weren’t quite done yet!

Slukk Meg For Eg Brenner was amazing again – I just love that song, and it got the audience boiling as well. Or maybe only the first row? Who knows, who cares? =;-)

The last song was O Dessverre then – even though I was a bit confused in the beginning, because they started it with the intro they used to do before Alarm. But they had played Alarm already, so that couldn’t be. =;-)

Just as Mantra, everybody seemed to know O Dessverre, so the audience went crazy, and everybody screamed for encores for quite a while, but Skambankt didn’t come out again.

So the setlist was: Dynasti, Skambankt, Løgnprofitør, Malin, Mantra, Vår Bør, Alarm, Trygge Rammer, Stormkast #1, Tanker Som Mareritt, Slukk Meg For Eg Brenner, O Dessverre.

A great festival concert, even though they probably surprised some of the people in the audience. But these people have turned into Skambankt fans now, I guess. =;-)