Live In Athens, April 2016

Imiskoumbria were one of the first Greek hip-hop groups. On the 9th of April they celebrated their 20th anniversary at Fuzz Club in Athens. Support was provided by QB Mix and Sexpyr

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

The Randen live @ Tiki Bar

I had heard of The Randen from a friend of mine but I had never listened to them. The first time I did that was when they released their first digital single "Songs Of Freedom". And I immediately wanted to see them live because they sounded nothing like what I expected. More of a British "alternative" / "new wave" sound than an American classic rock one that I'm used to from several local bands. Plus, another thing that makes them different, in the words of my friend who introduced me to them, is their songwriting. They have written not just a lot of songs but a lot of good songs. If you search around the internet for The Randen you'll probably only come across the two songs that comprise the "Songs Of Freedom" single, but they have written a lot more. In fact, at the time of this gig they had already finished their as yet unreleased first album and have completed several tracks that are going to be featured in their second one. That's why they can do full-length gigs based on their own material. And they have done several gigs so far, most of them free, or with a very low admission price, it just was never convenient for me to go. 

But I finally did go last week at the Tiki Bar in Athens. And although it was yet another occasion where I would have to leave early to catch the last bus home, the gig started early so I was able to enjoy most of it!

 

 And yes, admission was only 3 Euros and apparently I was the 25th guest!

Time for a pizza and a 69

After having heard several of its songs at The Big Nose Attack gigs, (starting, if I am not mistaken from late 2014), I finally sat down for a complete listen of the band's 3rd album "69". It's released on orange vinyl which represents the band's continuing love affair with pizza. (It's also available on ordinary black vinyl and CD so don't worry).
On their last gig that I attended, back in January (the "69 Release Party"), a friend of mine told me: "You will enjoy this album. It's their best ever and not at all experimental". Nothing bad with a band being experimental of course, but a statement like this builds up your hopes for what you are about to listen to. And indeed the average track length is 3 minutes. Some people have attributed the 3 minute length to the so-called "perfect pop song", but believe me, it also works with the band's blues-rock style. It has to be said though that the closing track "Don't Look Back" is 5 minutes long. The overall album length is around 32 minutes which is another thing that works to its advantage: It sounds great on vinyl!

The opening track is appropriately enough called "Special Sauce Called Love" (After all who wouldn't want some love to go with their pizza? It's the most special sauce there is, right?)
"Under Your Spell" is another one of my favourites as are "Fifty Shades Of Shame" and and "Let The Love Shine" with all of which I was familiar having listened to them live at the band's gigs. However, before we move to my "most favourite of all" on this album, let's have a small flashback on their last one: "Paint It Blue" featured one song that was so popular and received radio play that can rightly be called a hit: "Yeah! (That Girl)". And deservedly so, because it was very catch indeed. But "69" also features a song which, in my own humble opinion, has a very catch riff and chorus and deserves to be their next "hit". This song is "Not The One". For me, this is the best song on the album, but remember, this is only my opinion. When you listen to the album, maybe your favourite song will be a different one.

For the end of this post I left the album's biggest surprise for me: "Dirty Emma" a song which I had never heard before on their gigs. Not only it's a great song, but if I heard it correctly it features the lyric "You complete me like KFC"? If so, then Emma is lovely indeed and I wish I had her phone number.
So, go on, give "69" a listen! (Preferably accompanied with some pizza and beer). You can do that here. And remember, this is not a review, it's just my personal "reaction" to it as Facebook would say. Hopefully, one day, I will also have it on CD (I had the CD for about 5 seconds yesterday, but then I misplaced it...)

February 29 2016

"Probably the most useless post on this blog", I said exactly 4 years ago on my February 2012 post (in Greek). Since this day is special, in the sense that it only comes once every 4 years I decided to go out and take some photos and turning the date indicator on my camera on. Well, once you go out and do all these things you realize that it's a normal day just like any other, but because of its "rareness" I decided to document it by posting the photos I took on this blog. And that's what I decided to do today as well. I even turned my camera's date stamp on (again).

Last time, I just went around a couple of places, but this year, I decided to take it a step further and become a tourist in my own city. So, I started from the same places but then continued downtown to the Acropolis, and then popped around next door into the Acropolis Museum and finished by going all the way around the "sacred rock" of the Acropolis, as it's called ending up in a second hand record shop.

So what's so special about leap years? Well, first of all, February has 20 days instead of 28 (duh!), which means that the year has 366 days instead of 365. (A friend of mine suggested that the 29th of February should be a holiday "a day dedicated to astronomy or something like that"). Leap years are also the years on which the Summer Olympics and the US Elections take place. So there you have it...

By the way, do you also want a video from this day? Well, here it is:

On a more serious note here are 2 others featuring musicians. The first one playing Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" in the Athens Metro, and the second one playing classical music outside the Acropolis Museum. Enjoy!

 

A Broken Frame - Then And Now (The Extras)

The release by Marsheaux of "A Broken Frame", a track-by-track cover of Depeche Mode's original 1982 album was one of the major events in contemporary synth-pop last year. Back in August, I published on this blog a side-by-side review of both albums based on their vinyl versions, my original DM one which I had bought back in the day and the Marsheaux one which I had received earlier in the year. Since then Marsheux have released the CD version which came with lots of extras. It's a double CD, and CD1 also features covers of the B-Sides from the Depeche Mode singles from that album: "Now This Is Fun" featuring James New on vocals (b-side of "See You") and "Oberkorn (It's A Small Town)" (b-side of "The Meaning Of Love"). CD2 has extended versions of all album tracks. The "extended mix" was quite an important feature for some of us who grew up listening to music in the 80's and could be found on the 12 inch versions of the singles released. It was not a remix that sometimes is completely unrecognizable compared to the original song, often without vocals as was the case from the 90's onwards, it was a longer version, using elements of the original track. We got a taste of these on the bonus CD that came with the first, white vinyl edition featuring extended versions of "Leave In Silence", "My Secret Garden" and "The Sun And The Rainfall", but on CD2 of this edition we get everything. And some songs really come out on their own in these versions, most notably "Nothing To Fear" and "The Sun And The Rainfall".

Now that I had a CD edition of the Marsheaux version of the album a question started bugging me: "Shouldn't I get a copy of the original DM on CD?" It seemed that I should, but which edition? By browsing through Discogs I decided that the best choice was a 2006 edition featuring a CD and DVD. The CD featured the album and the DVD featured on its video portion a documentary about the making of the album and on its audio portion the complete album on a 5.1 mix, the b-sides (which Marsheaux included on their own CD1) plus a live concert from that era.

As you can see,I did photograph them side-by-side as I did with the vinyls on last year's post, although in this case the two designs do not exactly match as they did on the vinyl versions.

There was one more extra Marsheaux had in store for us from "A Broken Frame": A single! Their choice was "Monument", it came out on CD single and its design was similar to the "Leave In Silence" single from Depeche Mode. DM's "Leave In Silence" featured "Leave In Silence (Longer)", "Further Excerpts From : My Secret Garden" and "Leave In Silence (Quieter)" (on the 12'') whereas Marsheaux's "Monument" features "Monument (Shorter)", "Monument (Bigger)", "My Secret Garden (Better)" and "The Sun And The Rainfall (Lighter)". And in my own opinion this version of "My Secret Garden" is indeed a better one. They also filmed a video of "Monument" to accompany the single.

Finally, I decided to gather together all the other items related to "A Broken Frame" from my collection in one photo: The 7'' and 12'' versions of "See You" and "The Meaning Of Love" from Depeche Mode, the bonus CD given with the first white vinyl edition of Marsheaux's album plus an extra CD slipcase of "Monument" I received with my order of the single with different colours (a misprint perhaps?). And it's also worth noting that there is an instrumental version of "A Broken Frame" out there that is included as a CD-R in souvenir boxes sold at Marsheux gigs.