Irene Wiersma and Frank Turner at Noorderzon

It’s late August and after a summer stop Noorderzon in Groningen marks the beginning of the second concert season. It’s a great festival with lots of art, theatre and of course: music. I wasn’t able to attend much this year, but I was not going to miss Irene Wiersma on Sunday August 21 and having Frank Turner on the same night was just bliss.

Irene Wiersma played at Literaturia in the Desdemona Tent. She presented ‘Iedereen heeft Gelijk’ (Everyone’s Right): a mixture of poetry, a video clip of her song Chocola and played songs from her band Flux, backed by guitarist Ronald Kamphuis and her sister Florien on vocals. It was a very nice setting. The tent had a lovely ambiance, the guitar playing along with the poetry helped to keep things going along, the showing of the clip with Irene sitting silent behind her piano was cute and the opening-part of the show started (poetry seems to have timing all of it’s own, so playing the pre-show after the main act (the poetry) isn’t at all that weird.

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Unfortunately as the previous show ended half an hour later, Irene’s show started half an hour later and that meant she started at just about the same time as Frank Turner did and I had to see him too. So after Irene and band had played a couple of songs I made my way out of the tent as silently as I could and went to the Dok-stage placed over the water where Frank and band were already racing through their set at full steam. Quite a switch from Irene’s poetic, theatrical approach as Frank plays Folk-Punk. Festive, loud up-tempo music and to a huge audience along the waterside. A great show and Frank was hugely amused by the folks swimming in the water to get rather exclusive front row ‘seats’. And just when you get in the groove… the show’s already over. But a great start for the new concert season.

(click image for slideshow)

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