Vomito Negro @ Blue Shell, Köln, DE

Posted: Sun, Jan 5, 2025

This weekend in October was a busy one. I originally had plans to try and battle it down to London to see Linea Aspera perform at Monster Queen in London. I had bought a ticket months in advance - I’d seen Zanias in Glasgow not that far back and I’d love to see Alison perform again. However, train strikes had thrown a spanner in the works, to say the least. I had absolutely no way of getting down that didn’t involve huge detours and grim coaches (which had sky-rocketed in price due to said strikes). That’s that weekend out the window, I suppose…

Some time later, I’m listening to music on me commute as I tend to do, and a Vomito Negro song pops up on shuffle. What are these guys up to right now? A group I’ve loved for years, but had seemingly never been to the UK, or at least not in the last 15 years from what some online digging brought up. They did have a couple of upcoming German shows though, one in Köln and one in Asendorf.

Wait… the Köln gig was on the same weekend I was meant to be trekking to London… I did some digging and realised I could actually get a train to Manchester, fly direct from Manchester to Köln, stay 2 nights in a decent hostel, and get back all for less than one night in London battling various trains and coaches!

Fuck it, let’s do it. How rough could it be? It’s not that different to travelling over the UK, just add some flights and a language barrier. Easy enough, right?

I’ll save my Köln exploration for a blog post and skip right to the gig. After a day of walking about seeking cathedrals, churches, and some decent scran, I head back to the hostel, slap a mug on, and head out to the metro (KVB? S-Bahn?) to go to Blue Shell.

The venue is so pretty on the approach. Big fan of the lighting. It’s fairly quiet around doors, so I pop in to see the merch offerings to find it’s all cash only - fair enough! I swung by the cash machine just down the street and came back to buy a couple Vomito CDs I didn’t want to shell out for on Discogs (they were so much cheaper here too!) as well as a sticker pack and tape from Skren.

I wanted to grab Gin Devo’s solo album The Garden of Evil but unfortunately had no space to bring it back - I was travelling light (read: free personal item, no cabin or checked bags light) so had nowhere to shove an LP.

Skren are up first and they were fucking electric. I couldn’t stop dancing their whole set. They played tracks from many of their releases. I was joined by the lead singer’s sister at the front who was so incredibly sweet. I would highly recommend checking out their most recent EP, TIEF, but honestly I’d pick up everything from their catalog!

I grabbed a couple of videos of Skren but wasn’t able to get any decent photos - my phone is shite, but I try my best. A highly-edited framegrab from one the videos I took will have to do. A really beautiful surprise post-gig - both members of Skren came to find me after the show! I had posted a wee comment about popping over from England on one of their Facebook posts and how excited I was, and they came to hang out and gave me a free band shirt! Absolutely lovely people. I really hope I can see them perform again.

Vomito Negro are on stage next. Their stage setup was minimal. Initially, there was a projector with an image of multiple surgical instruments, which would cut out every few minutes to read ‘Gino’s MacBook Air’ (this was hilarious to me for some reason). The laptop was turned off the second time it happened, leaving Sven’s drum machine and Gin’s synth as the only items on that stage.

You know what? It’s all they needed. Gin has a powerful stage presence and every single song was brilliant. I was a little disheartened that they didn’t play two of my favourite tracks, Stain and White Lights, but they played bangers from all over their discography. Over 40 years in the game and still killing it.

At the end of their set, I managed to grab one of Sven’s light-up drumsticks, as well as a photo of the setlist. I’m hoping to make a copy of this setlist and get both it and the drumstick framed some time.

I spent most of the set dancing, again, but managed to grab a couple of clips as memories.

And here’s the setlist and merch I picked up!

After the gig, I hovered around outside and managed to catch Sven for a couple of minutes (who was lovely)! I did feel horrifically awkward as I speak next-to-no German, and of course everyone is nattering in German around me. I thought it would be best to have a wander back to the hostel, as I felt a bit too shy to try and see if Gin Devo was around. Plus, I needed to be up at around half 4 in the morning to have enough time to get to the airport, so some form of rest was needed.