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

One (festival) for the road

On June 21st I was flying to Rome to see The Rolling Stones. En Lefko Festival was announced in Athens for that very same weekend, the 20th and the 21st featuring among others The Simple Minds, who I would like to see (again). I was lucky because they were chosen as headliners on Friday which meant that I could go see them and catch my flight the next day. I was even luckier because the other band that I wanted to see, Hooverphonic were billed to play just before them.

So, I arrived at Technopolis, just as Hooverphonic were beginning their set, and after some problems with my ticket (which looked more like a receipt) I got in.

(Apparently, the scanner could not read the barcode, but that's to be expected when they print the tickets on cash till paper where the ink gradually fades away - duh!)

Hooverphonic first came to my attention around 2002-2003 with "Sometimes" and continued later on with the "More Sweet Music / No More Sweet Music" package. For most Greeks they are famous for "Mad About You" though.

They played songs from the whole of their career, and they did play "Sometimes". The last song in an acoustic version.

Now, it was June, the beginning of summer and my last gig was surprisingly at an indoor venue. This one was outdoors, but, after the Hooverphonic set was over, it started raining.

We took shelter away from the stage and started worrying if this was going to affect the Simple Minds set which we were all waiting for, but thankfully it stopped just before they came onstage. (And yes, the first thing Jim Kerr said to us when he appeared was "show me your hands". Typical.)

I had seen them before, again in Athens back in 2006. This time there was more of their early stuff ("Love Song", "I Travel"), stuff that they had disowned when they became famous ("Don't listen to our early albums" Jim Kerr apparently said to Chrissie Hynde, his wife at the time). Suprisingly enough it was these "early" albums that they were promoting a few years ago on their 5x5 tour.

But the problem was that there was also quite a few of their later stuff when just as they became famous they decided to go "epic" ("See The Lights", "She's A River").

But of course there was also stuff from when they were famous AND making great pop songs ("Don't You Forget About Me", "Alive & Kicking", "Sanctify Yourself").

And they saved the best for last: my favourite, "New Gold Dream", a song that should have been a single but it wasn't and was my favourite song in late 1982 / early 1983.

So that was the last song of the second and last encore. We were now ready to go home (and in my case to the airport). But then it started raining again. Hard.

We took cover for quite a while, even visited the dance stage which was indoors.

Finally it stopped. Thankfully, because the next day was going to be a long one...

Simple Minds setlist:

        01. Waterfront
        02. Broken Glass Park
        03. Love Song
        04. Hypnotised
        05. Imagination
        06. I Travel
        07. Blindfolded
        08. Dancing Barefoot
              (Patti Smith Group cover)
        09. Dolphins
        10. She's a River
        11. Someone Somewhere in Summertime
        12. See the Lights
        13. Don't You (Forget About Me)
        Encore:
        14. Big Music
        15. Alive and Kicking
        Encore 2:
        16. Sanctify Yourself
        17. New Gold Dream (81,82,83,84)