The Souls at Honky Tonk Luzern

Friday evening in Luzern. The best and at the same time worst festial took place again: The Honky Tonk. The best because: There are so many great bands playing at the same evening. The worst because: There are so many great bands playing at the same evening. How should you decide who to listen?

Like already last December in Thun Honky Tonk took also place in Luzern. Even some of the same bands were there, just not all of them under the same name. All across town among others Chubby Buddy, Veronica Fusaro, Tobey Lucas or The Weyers were playing. But this time I only went to see one band (ok, in Thun there has also been only one more), even there were many interesting bands. This was of course The Souls.

A wonderful warm spring evening. It probably has been more difficult this way to get people inside the locations than back at Honky Tonk in Thun. This evening in 33 locations 50 different national and international bands were playing all kinds of music styles. For this only one single ticket was needed, with you could go from location to location as you pleased. You couldn’t just go to listen to your favourites, but also discover new ones. If you wanted. I stayed that evening with The Souls listening to 3 or their 5 sets.

For the audience it was a super relaxed evening, for the bands and musician also quite exhausting. As soon as The Souls had started their first set of the evening, the restaurant started getting crowded and the later the evening became, the more crowded the Mill’Feulle was. With the flavoursome smell of food in the nose (food is very nice there, a friend told) and a great view out onto the water, The Souls soon found loyal listeners. People stayed for several of their acoustic sets and kept listening to their pop/rock songs. Some came selectively, to listen to them. Others discovered them spontaneously.


They hadn’t made any setlist, front guy Jay told at the beginning. They were going to play their songs spontaneously. Well, the first two sets weren’t that spontaneously though and quite identically, but we still enjoyed the unhurried evening and were happy about listening our favourite songs more than once in this evening.

Next to songs as “Live”, “Close My Eyes” or “Lines in the sand” they also played the new still untitled song, which they keep calling “Zeppelin Siech” and I’ve heard for the first time back at Ride on Music. Also here they went into the audience, only accompanied by a guitar to put their harmonising voices to the fore. Individually they also responded to song requests. Besides keyboard player Rally and guitarist Luk started during the Ryan Adams cover “Something Good” in the third set a little jam. This was brilliant! They’ll have to keep doing this.

Though with this jam my evening in Luzern ended already, because I planned to go to Zermatt unplugged the next day. The Souls kept playing another two sets. Among them they even played a brand new song, as a friend told me. Well, couldn’t they have played it earlier? Well, the next concert will follow for sure!

Have you been at Honky Tonk too? How did you like it and who did you go to listen to?

All the tourdates of The Souls you can find on Facebook.