Thursday 14 April 2016

The Simple Minds live in Athens 10 years ago!

On April 15, 2006 I saw The Simple Minds live for the first time. They played at Athinon Arena, an indoor venue in Athens. I would get to see them again in Athens 8 years later on an outdoor gig this time, but I chose to revisit that first gig (a sort of "Throwback Thursday" post) for a very specific reason. It was the first time I carried with me any sort of digital equipment to capture part of the gig as I do now with this blog. And what sort of digital equipment would that be I can (almost) hear you ask? Well it was just a humble SonyEricsson T310 mobile phone where you had to attach the camera to the phone in order to take a picture. No video recording ability, sound recording was possible though, albeit with a memory capacity of about 640Kb, it would be a very short audio clip and practically unlistenable. You can see the photo I took at the top of this post, as for the sound, I captured a few seconds of "Speed Your Love To Me" and uploaded that on SoundCloud.
As for the gig itself, the setlist was much better than the 2014 one which seemed to focus on later and not so familiar songs. Thankfully I was able to retrieve it from setlist.fm.
Now having finally seen Simple Minds live, I realized I had not yet seen U2. In my mind these two bands were somehow interconnected, since back in the mid-to-late eighties they shared the same status of enormous success. We all know where U2 are now, they're still there at the top, but the Simple Minds popularity gradually dwindled in the 90's (probably due to the "epic", lengthy songs they seemed to be producing after 1989). Well, I finally got to see U2 not once, but twice in 2009 in Cardiff and in 2010 in Athens, and as I've already mentioned the Simple Minds again in 2014.
Finally this wasn't actually the first gig where I took photo(s). I had taken my conventional camera with me at a Bob Geldof gig in 1990 at Lycabettus Theare where I was in the first row. Now all i need to do is find the photos, scan them and write another "throwback" blog post some time in the future...

SETLIST:
01. Stay Visible
02. Home
03. Love Song
04. Book Of Brilliant Things
05. See The Lights
06. Big Sleep
07. All The Things She Said
08. Waterfront
09. Hypnotised
10. She's A River
11. Underneath The Ice
12. Someone Somewhere In Summertime
13. Speed Your Love to Me
14. Don't You (Forget About Me)
15. Belfast Child
16. Different World
17. Seeing Out the Angel
18. New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
19. Theme for Great Cities
20. Stranger
21. Alive and Kicking





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