rock'n'rill

Napoleon & The Troublemakers

all photos & video by Patrick Wötzel

Hi guys,

The Troublemakers have had quite a busy summer. Right now the band is in wonderful shape. Our next goal is to arrange some of the new songs I’ve written and start thinking about recording them. We’re also hoping to finish the DVD in the near future.

Last Friday’s gig was the last summer gig for The Troublemakers. Next up are some solo and duo gigs for me, the next full-band gig is, I believe, in late October.
Usually, summer is kind of a slow time cause you can only ever play festival gigs but this year we lucked out and played a whole number of nice band gigs, mostly very nice ones.
On Friday we went underground and played in the wine cellars of Würzburg’s famous Residenz building. Legend has it that Napoleon - who stayed overnight at the Residenz a few times - called the wine cellar the finest he’d seen in Europe. This is possibly the first time I played in a venue recommended by Napoleon. At any rate, it’s a pretty big underground labyrinth with enormous wine barrels everywhere. Würzburg’s Mid-Life Club rented this unusual venue for a big night of music with four bands and built two stages at opposite ends of this underground maze.

We opened the proceedings playing a little over 90 minutes, concentrating on the more uptempo stuff - with a few exceptions. As I’m prone to do, I threw in a few covers that weren’t on the set list. I really enjoyed closing the night with Dylan’s Things Have Changed. It sounds good the way we play it when we get it right :-)

It felt really wonderful to look into the audience and see quite a number of people singing along practically every word to almost all of my songs. That’s a great feeling for a songwriter. And it translated to those in the audience who didn’t know us. There was more dancing than usual. We had a real good night, thank you!

Here’s a video from early in the night, our third song, I believe.
Girl Of Many Secrets: