REVIEW BY PAUL VAN GORP

I had to leave Shed's Seven's very good show early to get a good position for the dEUS-gig. After 15 or 20 minutes dEUS got on the relatively small stage. Again a keyboard was set up; more about that later. There was a chair for Rudy again, but this time he hardly used it. He sat down for one or two songs, but he did the rest of the show standing up.

So, at 22.25h they started off with Clever White Youth, but not before Tom spoke to the audience in French. My French is not that good, but I could understand that he said he had some difficulties with speaking French. But I could understand it (at least, that's what I think), so I think it was ok.

Not wearing a dress this time, as he did last year at this great festival, he was talking a bit about last year's performance and some other festival, I think.

During the first song the audience got really heated up. Especially on this tropic day, where at 14.00h the temperature reached an overwhelming 37 degrees Celsius. Crowdsurfing got really heavy during Via. I've been to several concerts, but until now, I didn't experience such a chaotic pit. Crowdsurfers were pushed up with much force, and mostly they landed feet first on top of somebody's (sometimes my) head.

Fortunately dEUS was the headline act at this festival, and therefore performed during the evening, because otherwise many people would have fainted because of the combination of the heat and the activities in the pit.

At the start of Horror Party Jokes things eased down a little and I had achieved a position in the front middle at the fence, so I was able to see things perfectly.

After a new song, which I think I've heard before, a great and sweaty version of Worst Case Scenario followed. After this, a keyboard player joined the band during the beautiful Little Ghost. Again, the crowd was relatively quiet and really listening. Not David (DJ Crying D), but some other guy played the keyboard, which in my opinion is still not necessary. I think I saw that David-guy on stage just before the concert on stage, but I'm not sure of that. The unknown keyboard player also joined in on Suds And Soda, which still remains the audience's favorite. I'm curious if this addition of keyboard sounds is permanent; to be honest: I hope not.

It was a bit dark, so I couldn't really see in which shape Rudy was, but I think he was rather ok again during Morticiachair. As I've said before, he hardly sat down, and he didn't seem to have any problem with his leg injury anymore.

This time, Twenty Something was not introduced with the Def Leopard-stuff, but Tom announced that it was a new song. He did this by interleaving the same sentence in three languages: "this is a new song", "dit is een nieuw nummer" and "cet est un chanson nouveaux" (I may be wrong on the French). So he said something like: "this-dit-cet, is-is-est, a-een-un, new-nieuw-chanson, song-nummer-nouveaux." During Twenty Something I looked around a bit, as I did most of the time to see if I could expect some idiotic crowdsurfer in my neck. As earlier during the show, I saw almost nobody sing along, which surprised me, because I thought that dEUS was really popular in Wallonie.

Let's Get Lost followed, which turned out to be a good choice, because the dark evening had fallen over the small village of Dour. During this song, I came to the conclusion that the Werchter-show was not that great, partly because dEUS performed in day-light, and most of the songs really come out best, when performed in (semi-)darkness.

During Stef's great performance of Mr. Death Won't Get Me, the keyboard player came on stage again. Again, the audience in my neighborhood clearly thought that they were listening to a completely new song.

At the end of Jigsaw You, there was some improvisation by Tom and Stef, but apart from the added guitar noises compared to the album, there was not really anything special about this great song this time.

Hotellounge was planned to finish off the show. This time, a rather normal version was done, where they performed a very special Hotellounge the week before at the Werchter festival. In the french-speaking part of Belgium, Tom chose not to sing the French verse, but this time Stef did some lines with a sometimes low and mostly high voice. Stef put on his shoes again, which he took off at the start of the show, and the planned show had ended.

But after a short discussion, instant improvisation lead to the quick Shake Your Hip, and after a short break and lots of cheers of the audience, they closed a great performance with My Wife Jan. The show ended at 23.30h.

This was the fifth time I saw dEUS perform at a festival (Dour '94, Lowlands '94, Pinkpop '95, Werchter '95, Dour '95), and from what I remember this was the best of them. The shows from last year suffered a lot from technical problems (by the way: this time there were some problems with Stef's microphone at first) and the Werchter-gig was also not really great. Maybe it has something to do with the great distance to get there for me and the fact that we made an entire festival weekend out of it this time, but somehow this Dour-show was more appealing than Pinkpop.

Nevertheless, I prefer to see the Antwerp boys in club concerts, because everything is much smaller, and their shows ask for small places and crowds.

For me, dEUS was the number one of this relatively small festival. I prefer such a small festival to a really big festival like Werchter or Pinkpop; I think there were as few as 8000 people. Other good performances were done by Caspar Brotzmann Massaker and Natty (U) Beavers (both on Saturday, the day that Biohazard gave a funny, but not very good, show again). On sunday other highlights were Public Enemy (good show but I have my doubts about the musical aspects), Silmarils (although a lot was nicked), Suede, Shed Seven and Salad (although the combination of Salad and daglight is also not a big success).