And by now, I'm sure you can connect the dots -- I came to Kamnik to catch Laibach's last concert of the season and, unaccountably, to see them live for the first time. Laibach's performance here was the climax of this year's
Kamfest, and as I arrived a day early I had a chance to catch some of the penultimate day's festivities. At the
kavarna next door, kids were entertaining themselves with a drawing contest, farmers with funny hats were out cranking folk tunes on the accordion and their wives, all donning traditional costumes, were dancing in circles as onlookers clapped and dipped their moustaches in beer. It looked precisely like the tiny neighborhood event it was.
I crashed for 12 hours and started the morning by slaughtering the huge breakfast laid out for me, culminating in a bacon-and-ham omelette that threatened to overflow off the plate and grease my pants instead of my arteries. In a morning of determined sightseeing, I conquered the nearby hill and its ruined castle, walked the length of Kamnik's medieval main street utna, forked out 300 tolars for the dubious privilege of checking out patchy frescoes in the Mali grad chapel, and found that I'd pretty much covered the lot by noon. Kamnik really is an improbably pretty little town, but for all its prettiness and littleness there just isn't all that much to do there once you've oohed and aahed for a morning. I celebrated with a cold
pivo, a salad of raw cabbage and vinegar, and a schnitzel that, like my earlier breakfast, contained enough salt to pay a Roman army and was large and impenetrable enough to provide shelter from an unexpected rainstorm. I surprised myself by eating the whole thing, but afterward my gut felt like a cannonball had been stuffed into it and I wheezed back to the pension for a nap.
By the time dusk rolled around, familiar strains of totalitarian oompah-oompah were wafting down from the stage on the hill and the streets were in a tizzy, with punks strolling the streets and the police, ambulance and fire trucks summoned for what was clearly Kamnik's largest event of the year. I washed down a reasonably authentic pizza with a glass of
cviček (the Slovenian rosé cunningly disguised as a red) and delivered my pineapple to the suitably bemused-looking Kamfest organizers as my token of thanks for making it all happen.
None too soon it was 9:30 PM and I joined the throng at the stage. There were an easy 500 people in attendance, a motley mix of locals from Kamnik and metalheads from elsewhere in the area, but I'm fairly sure I was the only non-Slovene around. (Not that anybody noticed; there are a surprising number of blondes in Slovenia, some even of the non-bleached variety, and I was regularly spoken to in Slovenian in tones that presupposed that I was a local too.) I had no problem at all squeezing myself into the front row, but in true rockstar style Laibach kept us waiting beyond the supposed starting time, and there was a fierce wind blowing up the hillside -- why were some of these nuts only wearing shorts!?
With a drum roll, a squirt of the fog machine and a twirl of the lights Laibach appeared on stage and launched into "In the Army Now", which entirely failed to warm up the crowd, and "Dogs of War" didn't fare much better. "Alle Gegen Alle" at least garnered some recognition, but only in the next track did Laibach choose to diverge from their usual modus operandi -- the four guys on stage were joined by the impressively stacked NSK gogo girls, in clingy black Laibach tank tops, tight leather minis, high heeled leather boots and the NSK logo delicately peeking out from their garter belts. A stomping rendition of "Tanz mit Laibach" followed, the girls beating out the rhythm on drums in perfect synchrony, but alas, only few people (myself included) actually hit the
tanzfloor to groove
mit Laibach as invited.
A half dozen tracks from Laibach's latest album
W.A.T followed, interspersed with the synthesizer assault of "Wirtschaft ist Tot" (one of the tracks from
Kapital and still more avant-garde than anything they've done since) and culminating in the eponomyous "We Are Time", after which Laibach bowed and marched off stage. The crowd wasn't all that impressed and a rather half-hearted round of applause and cheers of "Lai-bach! Lai-bach!" followed, but the band still deigned to take the hint and came back for the obligatory encore. The ballady "Mama Leone" fizzled, but reworking the Stones with "Sympathy for the Devil" fared better, "Geburt einer Nation" (yup, the Queen remix) was a crowd-pleaser and "Leben heisst Leben"
finally got the crowd enthused, fists pumping to the refrain of "Life! ... Life! is! Life!". They then launched into another version of "Tanz mit Laibach", the crowd clapping along and dancing, and then... they left the stage, and let the song play out from a CD. The gig was over just when it felt like it was about to get going.
As the audience filed out down the hill, the DJ played a cheery 1940s ditty with the refrain "Hitler lives, Hitler lives!". Whether this was condoned by Laibach or otherwise, I know not, but it certainly continued their trend of inviting misunderstanding -- the song actually was a postwar British moral message about how Hitler may have died in his bunker, but still lives on our hearts if we're unkind to each other!
All in all, I was left with mixed feelings. It was great to finally see them, and it's hard to imagine that I could have seen them anywhere else in such a small, intimate setting. On the downside, the stage show was all too much like any other band, and the less than fully enthusiastic audience was a downer. I was also surprised that
not a single song was sung in Slovenian, and disappointed that not a single Communist-era work was presented; perhaps they've just lost their relevance to today's youth. Such is the fate of yesterday's revolutionaries.