February 29 2020

Every 4 years, on the 29th of February I go for a special walk. This year I was planning to go to the city centre to see some of the carnival events in Athens. But since the carnival has been cancelled I decided to walk up the mountain that is near my house. And see how far up I could go. Hence the picture. And let me tell you the gradient was more than 10%.

The reason I wanted to do this was the fact that the road going up the mountain was going straight up. No twists and turns around like the usual mountain roads.

At some point it eventually turned to the right, but it still kept going up.

Then it started going a bit down again, so I made a took a left turn at the next crossroads and kept going up again.

At some point the paved road ended and I plateau thinking I could go no further.

However, by turning to the right and then to the left, I found out that I could go further up.

The paving soon ended and so did the houses. Then the road became a path.

And the path narrowed and went through the forest.

Finally I reached another plateau where there was something that looked like an abandoned stone well.

There, I was rewarded with some wonderful views of Athens. I was even able to spot my house from 

up there.

As the sun was setting, I started going back down. When I encountered some wild boars wandering not in the forest but around the houses, I knew that I should really be getting back home!

I still got some wonderful views of Athens though, all the way to the coast!

As I finally finished my walk, I rewarded myself with souvlaki and beer!

As for tonight's entertainment it will consist of the movie "Leap Year" (of course).

And as far as music is concerned there is nothing more suitable than Mark Lanegan's live CD from Amsterdam recorded on February 29 2012.

10 years of The PAP DX Blog

On my previous post I was talking about a decade: The 1910's. On this one I am going to talk about another decade that started a month later: The 10 years of The PAP DX Blog.

When it started, it was written in Greek, inspired by a couple of other blogs I was following at the time, one of which had a new way of looking at concerts and the people one meets there. So I decided to write about concerts myself since I go to several of them during the year, including a few abroad. In this way I could have a blog about both concerts and travel.

A couple of years into this blog's lifetime, my friends from social media who are mainly from other countries decided they wanted to be able to read my blog as well, especially when I reviewed Bruce Springsteen's album "Wrecking Ball". So from 2013 onwards I switched to English.

My second ever post was a summary of all the concerts I had been to in 2009, the year in which I have probably attended the largest number of gigs ever. Some of the photos in that post are no longer available since they were stored in ImageShack and not in Blogger. Some of the videos are no longer accessible since they were embedded in a different way. Very soon I will recreate that post, in English this time, with photos and videos reposted. In the meantime I will continue another task I have already started, which is featuring the gigs I attended 10 (or more) years ago and were not featured in the blog in English or were not featured at all.

I will leave you for the moment with the first photo ever posted on this blog. A snapshot of footwear inside the London Underground, which was inspired by "That Girl Needs Therapy", a blog by Gogonutsss which was my original inspiration (That girl eventually got married).
And by the way... Greetings Yo!Reeka and Ephee... wherever you are...

Everybody's talking about this new decade

This is actually a line from "Waiting For That Day" by George Michael. In fact, that whole verse goes like this:

Now everybody's talking about this new decade

Like you say the magic number

Then just say goodbye to

The stupid mistakes you made

That was 30 years ago. So what's the point of this post? Well, although most people, media and websites are now talking about the "best songs of the last decade", "the best films of the last decade" or, as George Michael did back in 1990, "the new decade", there are a few who complain. They say that the new decade doesn't start in 2020, but next year, in 2021. These are the same people who were complaining 20 years ago that the millennium did not start in 2000 but in 2001.

Let's focus on the decade thing for the time being, These people say that a decade starts with the number 1 and ends with the number 10. Well, that shouldn't be a problem because we are talking about the decade of 2010 or "the 10's". This means the 10 years from 2010 to 2019. To make it easier to understand let's talk about a more important decade for popular culture: The 80's! When we talk about the 80's, we mean the years from 1980 to 1989. Nobody would dream of including 1980 in the 70's! It's the number that counts, the number that's referenced in the name. That's why it is called "the 80's". And after all, what "decade" means is ten years. I could for example talk to you about the decade from 1987 to 1996 which was an important one for my personal life. So, I think that's settled.

But, since we're on the subject, what about the millennium, or the 21st century for that matter? The problem began with the Romans who had no concept of the number 0 so they started their calendar with year 1. With the mathematical knowledge we have now we can say that this was wrong. On top of that in 1582 we skipped 11 days in the calendar since by then it had been discovered that the earth's rotation around the sun wasn't exactly 365 1/4 days and we somehow had to make up for the difference. (The Gregorian calendar). All this is explained in more detail on this link 

So, for those of you who still insist that the new decade begins on January 1 2021, I've got new for you: According to your logic, it doesn't. It would start at around January 12 2021. Case closed! And now please let the rest of us start celebrating the twenties...

New Rock - The compilation album that shaped my musical tastes of the following decade

It was - almost - a giveaway. A half price offer to be more precise. At a time when most vinyl records cost 250 drachmas, all you had to do was collect a coupon from the inside of POP AND ROCK magazine (the top selling music magazine at that time in Greece), present it to one of the paricipating record stores, pay 100 drachmas, and the record was yours. In 1979, I had already been listening to non-Greek music for just two years. I had started with Abba, progressed to Boney M, discovered The Beatles and Elvis Presley and then landed onto the soundtrack world of Saturday Night Fever and Grease. I had been reading Pop And Rock magazine for a while and I thought I should take advantage of this offer in order to get into "rock" music. I had heard "Sultans Of Swing" (the album's opening track) just a couple of times before and I knew of Blondie without having heard any of their songs. The latter had mainly caught my attention because I had seen pictures of Debbie Harry in the magazine and I knew that one day I was going to marry her. So after buying and listening to this album, I decided to buy records from the artists it featured and I started with the first, self-titled Dire Straits album on my birthday in 1979.

Now "New Rock" was supposed to be a new wave compilation (hence the name). What did Dire Straits have to do with it? Well, at the end of the seventies after a long period when progressive rock was the most popular music genre and just after the punk explosion which had come as a result of prog's dominance any new band that emerged was usually classified as "new wave". It didn't matter if they played plain old classic rock like Dire Straits did. Nor did it matter that guitar new wave gradually made way for synth based acts like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark or Soft Cell. They were all classified as "new wave". We even thought Culture Club were "new wave" when they played Rock In Athens in 1985.

After Dire Straits, I decided to try The Jam whose track "David Watts" was the third on the album. (I didn't much care for Sham 69 then who not only had the second track on the album but also had another track in it). So, I bought the "Going Underground" 7 inch single and that was it: I was hooked! They became my favourite band and I followed Paul Weller on to his Style Council and solo days. And imagine that: "David Watts", the first Jam song I ever heard was one which Paul Weller didn't even sing! Lead vocals were by Bruce Foxton, the band's bassist. And it wasn't even their own song, it was a Kinks cover!

I then moved on to Blondie, as expected, buying not only their "Eat To The Beat" album, but also their "Heart Of Glass" single (my first 12 inch - and probably the first 12 inch single to be issued in Greece) and then their "Call Me" single on 7 inch. I continued with Magazine when I bought their live album "Play" and later "Magic, Murder And Their Weather", their final LP. Like several favourite bands of mine from "New Rock" such as The Jam and Blondie, Magazine also disbanded a few years later. I would continue buying records from artists featured in New Rock for the next four decades. In 1985 Flash And The Pan came to the forefront with their hit "Midnight Man" (one of my numerous 12 inch singles of that year). I remember how overjoyed I was in the summer of 1990 when a night club in the Greek island of Skiathos played "Down Among The Dead Men", the Flash And The Pan song featured on "New Rock". And although I did not have any Generation X records at that time, I had several by Billy Idol, their lead singer. As time went by and the CD era rushed in I would buy records from all the other artists on the album like Penetration, The Motors, Skids, The Members, City Boy, culminating with last month's purchases: a Sham 69 compilation from Amazon and the 12 inch of "Dancing With Myself" by Fingerprintz, the last track on the album, from Discogs.

But it wasn't just the artists featured on this album that I got interested in. This album turned me into the (mostly Brirish) New Wave genre so I bought records by other artists that I would read about in Pop And Rock magazine, usually without even having heard a single note of them. Back then, there was only one radio show in Greece playing pop and rock music called "Pop Club" hosted by Yiannis Petridis, who was also the chief editor of Pop And Rock magazine as well as the person who compiled the songs on "New Rock". And there was no YouTube either. So it was difficult for me to listen to all these bands mentioned in Pop And Rock magazine. As a result I would often buy a record because of something I had read in the magazine. (I bought my first two Depeche Mode records without having heard them actually). For example the next record I bought after "Eat To The Beat" by Blondie was "The Fine Art Of Surfacing" by The Boomtown Rats. And Polygram, the record company that issued the compilation used to display the covers of some of their other records on their inner sleeves, so I got to know (though not to hear) about bands as diverse as The Who, Status Quo, Jethro Tull, Thin Lizzy and even... La Bionda. Being very young though then, a pre-teen, I couldn't understand the artistic concept behind the record (it featured posters and photos of horror movies) on the front and on the back cover over the song titles and I remember writing a letter to the magazine about that. They answered (featuring my name printed on the magazine, wow!) that the pictures had nothing to do with the bands.

Pop And Rock gave away a couple more records a few years later, but these featured mostly b-sides. (These b-sides however were unavailable in Greece like "A Man Inside My Mouth" by The Cure). The songs featured on "New Rock" are mostly the bands' best. It comes as no surprise that the Magazine anthology was called "Touch And Go", the Penetration and The Members best of compilations were called "Don't Dictate" and "The Sounds Of The Suburbs" respectively plus the most famous song (and biggest hit) by The Motors is, of course, "Airport". In fact, Morrissey even played the Penetration's "Don't Dictate" video before coming on stage for his 2014 Athens concert. As for me, I listened to "New Rock" again, only a few hours before writing this post.

In 1998, when magazines very often gave away cover mounted CD's, Pop And Rock featured a CD compilation including some of the songs and several others by artists featured in "New Rock". It was called "Flash Back To '78"...

TRACKLIST:
Side 1:
1. SULTANS OF SWING - Dire Straits
2. ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES - Sham 69
3. DAVID WATTS - The Jam
4. AIRPORT - The Motors
5. TOUCH AND GO - Magazine
6. SWEET SUBURBIA - Skids
7. 5-7-0-5 - City Boy
Side 2:
1. DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN - Flash And The Pan
2. THE SOUND OF THE SUBURBS - The Members
3. HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE - Blondie
4. KING ROCKER - Generation X
5. HURRY UP HARRY - Sham 69
6. DON'T DICTATE - Penetration
7. DANCING WITH MYSELF - Fingerprintz

Rod Stewart live in Brighton

As I have already mentioned back in July, Rod Stewart's “Absolutely Live” was my favourite live album until “Live 1975-85” by Bruce Springsteen And The E Street Band came along. That was the main reason I had always wanted to see him live. I never did until this summer, though. At first, it was because, like several other artists who are getting older (Bryan Ferry comes to mind), he had discovered “the great American songbook” and I thought I would be disappointed. I didn't want to listen to that, I wanted to hear the old classics that were included on “Absolutely Live” (and several others that came before and after that album). Later I thought that he would probably not be fit enough to perform (he's older than Bruce you know). Well, I needn't worry. A couple of years ago, if I remember well, he toured Europe and played in Italy and everyone was stunned! Friends who had attended told me that at the end of his concerts he was shooting footballs from the stage to the crowd, even at indoor arenas! So, I decided that I had to go and see him. 

When the tour was announced at the beginning of the year, I looked through the dates and settled on an indoor concert in Paris. I bought the ticket, but much later, parliamentary elections were announced in Greece for that weekend. This pushed the price of plane tickets way up, since many Greek expats living in France would be coming back for the weekend in order to vote. I could not afford them, especially if I was to be able to make my other concert trip, the following week in England for the Happy Mondays. So, I tried something that has worked well in the past for me before. I looked to see whether there were any dates on that tour in the south of England on that next weekend. And I found that there was one in Hove the day before the Happy Mondays gig in Margate. Hove? “Where's that?”, I wondered until I realized that it was practically next to Brighton. In fact, it is one town, Brighton & Hove. I was delighted that I would have the chance to see Brighton again, 18 years after my last visit, while I was still at university! So I bought the ticket and started preparing for my English summer seaside holiday.

I arrived in Brighton one day before the concert so I had the chance to take a swim at the beach. Very refreshing, it gave me energy for the whole of the following year!

The following day, after doing more sightseeing, all I had to do was walk to the cricket ground. 

Because it is in a residential area the concert had to finish by 9pm, so it started really early. Of course the residents of the nearby flats took advantage of this fact and were watching the concert from their balconies, together with their guests!

First on stage were Johnnie Mac And The Faithful, handpicked by Rod himself as a support band. The music they play fitted perfectly with Rod's and they even treated us to a cover of “The Handbags And The Gladrags”.

Next up, in a fanfare with fireworks in broad daylight was Rod. Now, I think I had missed whatever had been billed as a “Greatest Hits” tour in the past, so I imagined that he was mainly going to promote his latest album “Blood Red Roses” and with luck I would get to hear some of the old favourites. Imagine my surprise then, when for just his second song of the night he launched into “Young Turks”, the song that had made me a Rod Stewart fan when I was 14!

He did exactly what I wanted him to do; he played almost all of “Absolutely Live”! And then some! “Tonight I'm Yours”, “Sailing”, “I Don't Want To Talk About It”, “Maggie May”, “Rhythm Of My Heart”, “You're In My Heart” and more; all the favourites were thrown in the mix! And “Grace”, from the new album was also brilliant and has now become a new favourite of mine. He did seem to have a bit of trouble hitting the high notes on “Baby Jane” but his backing singers more than compensated for it.

In fact he gave his backing band their own time to shine when they played Mark Knopfler's “Going Home (Theme From Local Hero)” and Fleetwood Mac's “Go Your Own Way” by themselves.

And he did seem to enjoy the whole thing, talking to the ladies in the audience (“Alright Mrs Jones?”) and even acknowledging the guys in the nearby houses who were enjoying the show for free.

No football kicks this time, but fittingly enough, he closed the show with “Stay With Me”. Just like “Absolutely Live”! The customary firework display at the end of the show was performed in broad daylight!

As, once again on foot, I was making my way back to Brighton, I was thinking that this had been something that I would like to experience again. Yes, I would go to see Rod Stewart live again, even if he was to deliver the exact same show!

SETLIST:
01. Having A Party
02. Young Turks
03. Some Guys Have All The Luck
04. Tonight's The Night (Gonna Be Alright)
05. Forever Young
06. Twistin' The Night Away
07. Rhythm Of My Heart
08. The Killing Of Georgie (Part I and II)
09. It Takes Two
10. Tonight I'm Yours (Don't Hurt Me)
11. I'd Rather Go Blind
12. Rollin' And Tumblin'
13. Going Home (Theme From Local Hero) (band only)
14. Grace
15. I Don't Want To Talk About It
16. Dirty Old Town
17. Have I Told You Lately
18. Go Your Own Way (band only)
19. Baby Jane
20. Sailing
21. Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?
22. Maggie May
23. Stay With Me