! Freundeskreis were the support band, who opened up with a song (which I'm assuming was called) "Long Haired Hippies and Afro Negros", which I though would be a good start for me, them singing in English, but then it went into German, (probably due to the fact that they come from Germany!) But still, even without being able to understand very much at all (fast nichts), I did enjoy the show they put on. The band consists of 2 male rappers, 1 female singing backing vocals/harmonies and various musicians.
The Hip-Hop Freundeskreis played was generally more the kind of "chill-out and relax" variety, but there was still a lot of jumping about from the crowd, in fact they got a very good response, especially for a support band.
A band I would strongly recommend anyone seeing, since
they're the sort of band which gets their audience to participate
with the usual, "when we say this, you say that" kind of
banter. Although perhaps the roles were reversed from the rest
of the gig, since they were asking the crowd to respond to their
shouts of "Can we kick it?" with "yes you can", which obviously
I understood, but maybe "can we kick it, yes you can" doesn't
translate into German very well.!
After the usual 1/2 hour wait between support and main band, Die Fantastischen Vier came on stage with enough energy to put any other band I've seen to shame! This was a good taste of things to come, seeing three(yes 3 not 4) nutty Germans running and jumping about the stage like there lives depended on it! the only comparison I could draw would be perhaps to watching The Prodigy, i.e. one of the rappers has mental spiky hair and looks like has drunk far too much caffeine!
Live they have a very different sound to on album. I had only heard Vier Gewinnt, which was released a few years ago before I recently bought Live und Direkt. But neither of these CDs fully prepared me for the onslaught to different sounds my ears were about to receive! As well as rapping to the normal/traditional hip hop beats, the band rap over 60's funk, drum'n'bass,ambient, metal, and various other styles of music, you name it, it's in there somewhere! Live there is a lot more energy, and attitude in the songs.
Die Fantastischen Vier, also go in for the crowd participation, but they seemed more successful than Freundeskreis, by not asking their audience to shout out in a foreign language, but by the tried and tested, stop singing and get the audience to "fill in the gaps", which worked better!
In fact it's safe to say the crowd obviously loved this band, since there were people of all ages, sporting t-shirts of lots of different types of music jumping up and down, waving their arms up about, punching their fist, usual shenanigans for "hip-hop musik". In fact someone even "stage dived" from the balcony onto the crowd below!
A band I would strongly recommend anyone to go and see, and I'll just have to hope they play here in Switzerland again before I go back to England, since, sadly, I don't think they are very likely to tour over there.
Now for a couple of "Die Fantastischen Vier" links (the pages are in German, thus I'm not too sure on the exact content):
An Unofficial but thorough fan page .
Die Fantastischen Vier FAQ