A hissing and cracking. The channel search of a radio wave receiver. Lights run across the ten Orange guitar amps modified to double as flashing lighting machines and their front grilles as projection screens. Channel scan and lights lock into place on Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation”. On the screen in the background a flood of video snippets of Avril Lavigne’s faces. And then – bam – she’s in the spotlight, which looks a bit like the James Bond opening credits. Only she has a big bouquet of black balloons with her, which looks more casual than an old man with a gun.
With “Bite Me” from the current album, Avril Lavigne jumps right into the present. Just don’t hit me, otherwise it’ll rattle, that’s a short summary of the message for the lover or someone who thinks he is. “What The Hell” takes you to the middle phase of your career. The sound is typical for the Zenith, this industrial cathedral, reverberating bass bangers that eat away at every subtlety, but vocally Avril is blessed with a timbre of a slightly metallic quality that cuts through.
You’re already on “Here’s To Never Growing Up”, the anthemic chorus sweeps the audience away, and “Complicated”, which started it all for the skater girl, who signed her record deal at 16. Video snippets Avril, the little blond stage person in the black fluttering hoodie, songs from yesterday this morning, lined up breathlessly – nice what is being said here: everything always happens now. Love and hate, infatuation and separation, marriage and divorce. Time can be stopped, and Avril Lavigne is still in his early twenties today. Maximum. The equally young audience, who would have wanted to celebrate with her in 2021 and 2022 if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, lets the big balloons bounce for an hour and a half. It’s magic.
Dan Ellis and David Immerman’s electric guitars don’t sound like steel strings and hot tubes, but something that processors have a few times lacked. And even though Avril straps on an acoustic guitar for “Wish You Were Here”, it’s compressed into pop-rock sound format. As a girl, she was always the boss of a boys’ gang of wild noisemakers. The picture is painted so perfectly with opaque colors that the edges are hardly ever smeared. Except for the title track of their new album “Love Sux”.
Avril sits down at the drums. The fact that what she is doing has nothing to do with this hi-hat-bass-drum thing and hand-foot coordination, but is more a rhythmic tapping – this is also likeable as a small contrast to the all-encompassing professionalism. Just like the cover version of the Blink-182-Songs “All The Small Things”, to which they once again joined their support acts, the jittery pop-rocking Phem and the band’s singer girlfriends asks. The latter had delivered a strangely ripped-off show with all the animation antics to backing tracks, only to then actually pleasantly disappear from the stage without leaving any residue.
With Avril, the feedback works between the show’s songs and the audience. You have shared life moments with this girl. Happy faces. So Avril jumps from memory to memory, which is much more entertaining than listening to her albums in one go, where you always have to go through a bunch of total redundancy in addition to the catchy numbers. “Sk8ter Boi” as the last song before the encores is another big party with confetti cannons. Then things get contemplative with “Head Above Water” and “Avalanche”, because not everything in life can always be cheeky and funny, before she promises her audience eternal love: “I’m With You”. Time is a circle and Avril is a young girl on the big screen, wide-eyed at her success.