--> Gig report - Spirit Disease at Vuoritalo, Helsinki 11 December 2004

Setlist

01. Sadistic Belated Abortion
02. Annihilation
03. Covered In Warm Blood
04. Torment And Pain
05. Everyone Must Die
06. Delusions Of Grandeur
07. Scared To Live - Afraid To Die
08. Jokainen Ihminen On Luodin Arvoinen
09. Redemption Denied
10. The Extinction Of Subhuman Kind
11. Evil Dead
12. Blinded By Fear


Gig number two for Spirit Disease. Now that we knew that the line-up really works live, it was much easier to just go to the venue and do our stuff. And what a venue it was! Vuoritalo looked like a bomb had exploded within it. The "backstage area" was fucking cold and filled with punk people and DOGS (really!). I liked it a fucking lot, though - it reminded me of my early days playing live in all sorts of assholes when I was still playing guitar instead of bass. It actually felt great to be playing in a place like Vuoritalo with bands like Rytmihäiriö and National Napalm Syndicate. Total underground mayhem with no unnecessary bullshit. Of course some nostalgic feelings too - both of the bands were around already in the late Eighties when I was still only part of the audience and hadn't lost my stage virginity, ha ha. The other two bands on stage that night were Unkind and the very promising new band Nerlich.

OK, we arrived to Vuoritalo and did our soundcheck and all the waiting and beer drinking and shit. The schedule & showtimes had been changed because of some personal shit by some members of the other bands. This meant that we had to open the show instead of playing third as we were originally supposed to do. But hey, that's life, we were happy just to play live. No rock star bullshit attitude from Spirit Disease - EVER.

We got on stage and I introduced myself as a fat hippie bastard that plays in this unknown band called Spirit Disease. And then it was 1,2,3,4,GO! Song by song the audience got more and more into the thing and by the final two songs they seemed to really be into us. That was probably due to the fact that most of them had not heard our CD before. Sure, there were lots of our fans over there too, cheering to their fave tracks off Redemption Denied. I stopped the show about half way through the set to have a little speech about Dimebag Darrell, who had just been murdered two days before. We and the audience had a drink to his memory and then we played the rest of our set. Everything ended with our usual wall of noise ending and that was it. "End of the show - let's get our gear off the stage and start boozing." And that's exactly what we did. Rest of the night was spent chatting with the fans and watching the other bands play really good sets and all that usual shit. We also managed to sell quite a lot of merchandise (T-shirts & CD's), so that was great too - we must have made an impression on some of the audience. A great gig, a great evening.

Written by Sallanen 16 December 2004. Photos by "Hagert". Click the photos for larger versions of them.