Alligatoah Concert in Erfurt

Recently, we attended our second Alligatoah concert after the one in Leipzig. This time, the concert took place in Erfurt, which is practically just around the corner. Initially, it was supposed to be held in the Thüringenhalle, but it was closed this year due to the risk of collapse. Therefore, the concert took place in the Messehalle. We got there quite quickly by train and tram. I was wearing my tour shirt from Leipzig, and Nathalie had her white fan shirt. When we arrived, about 15 minutes before admission and over 2 hours before the concert started, some queues had already formed, but shortly after 6 pm, we were already inside. There was only a small merchandise stand, and the cloakroom was relocated to Hall 2. The entire Hall 1 was reserved for the concert. There were only standing places, and it wasn’t particularly difficult to get ones in the first block as close to the stage as possible – you could tell that Erfurt is simply not Leipzig. But this allowed us to stand relatively close to the front.

At around 7 pm, the supporting band started playing. This band, “ok.danke.tschüss,” was the support for the entire Re-Retour (the second part of the Retour, including additional cities like Erfurt and Dortmund). They describe themselves as Einhornrock (unicorn rock), and they’ve chosen their logo accordingly. Admittedly, we didn’t know this relatively young band, but the songs they played were really good. They also played their newly released single “Joel” on that day, which, in hindsight, became my favorite among the songs they performed. Nathalie, on the other hand, found “Muschigeburt” the funniest and also liked “Zu laut in der Disko.”

And then, at 8 pm, the actual concert started. The program was very similar to the one in Leipzig before. Conveyors on the stage moved from right to left and vice versa, transporting band members, cardboard boxes, or other things back and forth. It was funny at the beginning when Alligatoah misspoke and said Rostock instead of Erfurt (the previous venue). He playfully picked up on this on social media, stating that Erfurt was unique because it was the first time he had misspoken like that. In the concert itself, something new was that in the song “Fick ihn doch,” the garden gnomes in the background actually spewed flames, as mentioned in the lyrics.

Furthermore, I made a recording of “Nicht adoptiert” and “Mit dir schlafen” together because I liked what Alligatoah had said before and in between. Additionally, in the second song, the ending was slightly modified again, replacing the part with Esther Graf with “Teenage Dirtbag.”

Around 10:30 PM, the fantastic concert was already over. We had two missions left: firstly, we wanted to get Alligatoah drinking cups, and secondly, Nathalie wanted her own tour shirt. The lines at the beverage stands were very long… so we decided to ask people who were returning their cups for the deposit if we could simply buy the cups from them. That’s how we acquired a cup with “Alligatoah trinkt Wasser” (like the name of the TikTok account and now Nathalie’s favorite cup for drinking water) and “Ein Virtuose am Getränk” (A virtuoso with drinks). After that, we went straight to the merchandise stand. There were also a few items from ok.danke.tschüss, but since we didn’t know which CD was the best (there were two, and we wanted the songs from the concert) and we already have enough sweaters and other stuff, we only looked for Alligatoah things (although Nathalie liked the unicorn sweater). So, we got the tour shirt for Nathalie (where the album CD was “free” again), but also the tour poster, which is hand-signed. I initially wondered if the signature was only printed on it, but Nathalie said it’s genuinely hand-signed because he shared it on Instagram.

Then it was time to head home, but we still had to retrieve our jackets from the cloakroom in Hall 2… and unfortunately, it was crowded, much like in Leipzig, with long queues extending out of the hall. This was particularly unpleasant because while waiting, we discovered that a tram back to the train station only departed approximately every 30 minutes AND we had to take the rail replacement service from Erfurt station back to Weimar. When we finally got our jackets back, there were only a few minutes left until the tram arrived, so we sprinted to the stop. We were extremely lucky because the tram was already packed and about to leave, but we managed to squeeze in just in time. However, at the station, the bus left in front of us, even though it was actually too early, as it was already full. Fortunately, the next bus arrived only 10 minutes later, even though the bus driver himself seemed a bit confused about which one was supposed to go back to Weimar. By around 01:00 AM, we were finally back home.

Something really strange happened in the days that followed, which might be funny to mention. In the song “Trauerfeier Lied” (2013), you see in the video how Alligatoah is buried, and the gravestone shows the year of death as 2023, which was 10 years in the future back then. On his concert tour in 2023, he mentioned this multiple times. And when the “Re-Retour” came to an end… he suddenly deleted all posts on social media (or made them invisible) and linked a new orchestral version of the song. What’s peculiar is that all biographies were reformulated to “Alligatoah was…” and even his TikTok account was renamed to “alligatoahtrankwasser” (Alligatoah drank water). So, it remains intriguing what the future will bring…