Doro- 20 Years A Warrior Soul
Mark Burnell
2007-05-23
Locomotive
No, I’d never heard of Doro either when this DVD was offered to me for review, but something prompted me to do a Google search, and I subsequently realized that not only had I heard of her, but I’d actually seen her live in concert 18 years ago at a big festival I attended when I lived in Belgium. Doro is apparently a very big rock star in her native Germany, and 2007 marks her 20th year as a blond-haired leather-clad goddess of rock. This two-disc DVD commemorates the occasion, presenting a made-for-TV documentary of the anniversary tour, a slightly different theatrical release of the same film, and, on the second disc, all two-and-a-half hours of the big show that marks the big occasion, complete with many guests, some of whom you may even know.
Five things I learned while watching this DVD set : 1. Germans love to ROCK.
While head-down, no-nonsense metal has lost its appeal this side of the Atlantic, across in mainland Europe, ROCK still rules. Heads are banged profusely and at length, and devil horns are flung around with reckless abandon and without one shred of irony. 2. Doro has a pretty good voice.
She may run around in leather pants and feathered bangs, but not only is Doro pretty foxy, she can actually sing-- not in a Janis Joplin soulful-but-ballsy way, but in an all-out-metal-screaming-in-tune fashion, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the early Runaways and Girlschool. 3. When you haven’t listened to metal in a long time……
…the straightforward, no-nonsense approach is actually pretty refreshing (at least for the first 90 minutes). There’s some kind of purity about Doro’s arrangements-- heavy on the riffing but lean on the solos, and her mostly American backing band really knows their stuff. They’re not quite Metallica, but they do know how to rock. 4. The Brits invented modern metal (but don’t know when to stop)
I always knew the Brits invented the first wave of Sabbath, Purple and the like, but judging by the reception the Brit guests get from the crowd when they take the stage, bands such as Motorhead and Saxon remain the standard by which 21st century metal bands are measured. Lemmy looks almost as weathered as Keith Richards these days, and judging by his appearance, Saxon’s Blaze Bailey should be having a quiet pint at the local pub with his whippet. There’s something a bit disconcerting about watching someone apparently old enough to be your granddad stomping around a stage and bellowing to a crowd of rabid Germans in their late teens. It’s just….weird. 5. Everyone in Germany is bilingual
Songs are sung in English and German, and everyone in the crowd sings along either way. Can you imagine a band trying the bilingual approach over here? Nope, me neither. Truth be told, no one aside from diehard Doro fans really needs to see the two documentaries because you don’t get any real insight into the woman herself. Just about every rock and roll documentary cliché is proudly on display, and they actually seem to recycle much of the same footage. On the other hand, the concert disc really is pretty good. Doro has a great stage presence, and her rapport with the frenzied audience is obvious. Oh, and she does the best version of “White Wedding” ever. If you’ve been harboring a secret need to unleash your hidden metal side, this might be the DVD you’ve been waiting for.
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