Placebo @ Bucharest

Posted on July 8, 2017 by Diana

I am a huge fan of music and a live event with a band that I like is enough to reshuffle my whole schedule, if needed, just to make it to the concert. So this is pretty much what happened during my short visit at home in Romania a few days ago.

The location of the concert: The Roman Arenas in Carol Park (Arenele Romane, Parcul Carol). This is my favourite park in Bucharest, it hosts the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a mausoleum for the fallen built during Communist times, the George Grigore Cantacuzino fountain build in 1870, The National Technical Museum „Prof. ing. Dimitrie Leonida”, the Romanian Academy’s Astronomic Institute, a fountain with the zodiac signs on it, several statues (“The Giants” and a statue of Dr. C. Istrati, professor, academic, minister and mayor of Bucharest), and an arena for live events that I mentioned above.

The event: Placebo, an alternative rock band from the UK. It was the third time I saw them live, but that doesn’t matter, I would go see them live again. A bit of a depressive band, they’ve been around for 20 years and they thought about celebrating that with the fans, so they organised an anniversary tour that stopped in Bucharest during the same time as me. They were a strange presence on TV years ago, especially when in one of their videos, Pure Morning, the singer, Brian Molko, an androgynous figure, jumped off a building, to everyone’s despair, and then ended up walking perpendicularly on its walls, to everyone’s surprise. Another of their videos is the futuristic Special K, a good song that takes its title from a drug but that doesn’t deal just with drugs but with love as well.

The event started with the video of Every You, Every Me, probably one of their most popular songs, if not the most popular. The concert had, according to the band, two parts: the depressive one and the energetic one. During the depressive one they went from one ballad to the other, with my personal highlight of Special Needs. The energetic part set the audience on fire. Besides the fact that Placebo is quite loved in Romania and the fans respond really well to rock concerts, the music sounded so good that everything seemed to fall into place to everyone’s delight. You could see that in the way people danced, clapped, sang along and asked for more by cheering minutes in a row and lighting up their phones, but also in the band’s reaction, their kind words and large smiles. There was a lot of passion on both sides involved in the event. I can’t think of a best moment for the concert, the melancholy of the first part made the audience listen and enjoy the beautiful music, the energy of the second made everybody jump on For What It’s Worth, sing along on Special K or The Bitter End, watch the beautiful video of Song to Say Goodbye while the band was performing it live, and the cover of Running Up that Hill (A Deal With God) was simply brilliant. To my delight, they even brought a bit of politics into their show: an image of a package of cigarettes with Trump’s face on it and the message “seriously harms you and others around you”. They didn’t play This Picture nor Bright Lights but they delighted everybody with 25 songs in over two hours of live music. It was quite a show!

 

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I grew up here!

Posted on July 6, 2017 by Diana

In between listening to rock bands on vinyl records, learning English from Cartoon Network and watching music on MTV, I used to spend a lot of time in the countryside. Yes, I went to school and other stuff too, worry not, but…

My Summer/Winter/Easter holidays and most weekends were spent in a village by the river. There was no other place to be than there. If I start speaking about how things were I think I can go on for hours. If I start talking about my countryside adventures I might not stop too soon.

When I put it all together I realise that for a long time I looked at it as if it were Heaven on Earth because I was happy there, and the last day of holiday was my worst nightmare. Things changed with time but the memories are still there. So are my childhood friends who still make fun of me for always walking barefoot.

There was a time when climbing a tree was a piece of cake, when my main activities were fishing, picking mushrooms, playing football and building fires. When the best sweet thing you could eat was the homemade jam, the best companions were the other kids visiting their grandparents and riding a horse-dragged carriage was the highlight of the day. There were also times when you didn’t want to get out of bed until the fire was burning nicely, when Christmas meant rummy and backgammon with the tree lights in the background, when Easter came with our own bunnies and fluffy yellow chicks and Autumn weekends brought grape juice, fresh apples and the smell of smoke.

But there were also the storms breaking down trees, the mice playing football under the floors late at night, the fleas the cats would bring in the house back when flea-repellent didn’t exist, the black roaches and spiders crawling in the dark, the ant bites, wasps, snow storms and floods. Yes, the floods. Probably that changed that place the most. It was fun when you were little and the waters were still mild, but the last time it happened it seems the water was poisoned with all the bitter things in the World.

I could go on talking about the fact that there was no indoor plumbing, the water came from the spring, the gas came from a gas tank, and when you couldn’t find one to buy all the food would be cooked on a wood-burning stove. And it tasted amazing! And so did the (unwashed) fruits and berries from the garden: raspberries, strawberries, cherries, blackcurrants, sour cherries, plums, pears, apples, grapes.

It was a pleasure to go there again, especially around the Summer Solstice, Midsummer for many, Sânziene for us, the magic night when the sky opens and one can see into Heaven, when magic fairies dance in the forests and drive young men crazy, when girls dream of their sweethearts and the abundance of the crop can be foretold. It was a shock and a delight to see the old dusty street all lit up, when I remembered it covered in darkness that you had to learn it by heart in order to get home safe at night. It was sad to see the fields all covered in weeds from all the seeds the wild waters brought years ago, but among all the thorns and the thistles the wild flowers were still there in bloom, beautiful and colourful as they have always been and always will be! And the silence of the nights with the songs of the Blackbirds and the crickets, the misty mornings spirited by cuckoos, roosters and the neighbour’s really loud geese. I grew up here!

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Radiohead @ Globen

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Diana

It was for the first time in my life that I went to a concert with a certain feeling of fear, besides the excitement I usually feel when live music is about to happen. For everybody who knows me it is clear that a live concert is the place to be for me, that or a live tennis match… or by the sea. Anyway, a concert site is no longer a safe place, we all know that and we found that out in the most disturbing and sad way possible. When you see that security measures are really tough when you go in and you have to walk through security doors almost like in the airports, you start to feel a bit better. It would be best if these things weren’t necessary.

Going back to the music, this time it was Radiohead I ended up seeing. Not a band I usually listen to, they’ve been there for quite a while because of family, yes, older siblings and their music and younger sister sticking her nose into that, and because of MTV and especially VH1 which aired their videos quite a lot when I was growing up in front of the TV screen. They were some of the weird guys I could see on TV. It takes a bit of brain power and will to understand their music which I consider not very easy to digest. It can be horribly depressive while it is amazingly beautiful. Of course everybody knows “Creep” or has felt like that every now and then. Then there’s also “Karma Police”. My personal favourite from them is “Jigsaw Falling into Place”.

The concert was amazing. It had a lovely light show, a very edgy and cold energy attached to it, plenty of good sounds, little chatter, lots of clapping and excitement all wrapped around some really beautiful music that the lovely people of Stockholm and its surroundings, to quote Thom Yorke, the singer, enjoyed from the first to the last chord.

Now leaving aside their music it is important to mention that Thom Yorke is an activist and has made his voice heard several times in relation to many topics from environmentalism to anti-war causes and not only. So I was really curious to see if, just like many other artists these days, he is going to say anything during Radiohead’s concert. Lucky me, the concert happened two days after the general elections in the UK, and of course the singer had something to comment about that. The short message of it all is that hope, which begins to come back to the British people, can make a difference in the face of those who think they own Great Britain and who try to scare its citizens. This short political speech came before a song called “The Daily Mail”, which naturally makes me think about the British tabloid with the same name, but listening to it also makes me think about a certain power-play.

The concert seemed too short for everybody in the audience, even if it lasted a bit over two hours and had 24 songs in the setlist. The band chose to end it with “Karma Police” and I must say that the audience singalong to it gave me the goosebumps, it was really pretty. At the end of it all it just felt that I’ve attended a concert of some legends of the World music scene, and maybe I did cause the gig was, after all, sold out.

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The Cardigans @ Gröna Lund

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Diana

There were other movies before “Titanic” that made ladies sigh after Leonardo DiCaprio, and “Romeo + Juliet” was one of them. Released somewhere in 1996, I don’t remember seeing the movie till a few years later and when I did, well, I wasn’t impressed. However, by the time I saw the movie I had to face “Lovefool” by The Cardigans on repeat on all possible music channels in all 3 versions of the video. And I didn’t like it, I didn’t understand much of the song or its videos but it has a catchy tune and could easily turn into an earworm that gets stuck in your brain to the level of annoyance. So after this experience with the band, imagine how I felt when they put out “My Favourite Game” in 1998. By then I was already going back to listening to rock music and breaking away from MTV pop. Its catchy energetic beat was totally different from the previous song I knew from them, and the video in which Nina was chaotically driving a car in the wrong lane ending in a car crash and being hit by a stone in the head at the end were the reasons I paid attention to this particular track. This song was the reason why I was at today’s concert till the very end: it was the last one in the setlist and I really wanted to listen to it live.

Listening to The Cardigans 21 years after getting to know them brings me back to my habit to seeing barely now bands that I used to listen to years ago. The Cardigans were super popular during my gymnasium (junior high) and high school years so I couldn’t have missed tonight’s show.

Another hit from them was “Erase/Rewind” that came with a completely different concept for the video, Star Wars inspired, the song caught my attention not as much for being endlessly broadcast on TV or radio, but because I discovered it on the OST of “The Thirteenth Floor” and it came as such a natural ending to that movie that I actually ended up watching because of HIM’s “Join Me (In Death)” video.

About 4 years later the band came back with a dark-haired Nina, a new album and new videos among which the video for “For what It’s Worth” which I really liked for the bunny costumes, the train and the carrot-celery cocktail. Not to mention that I think it is a good song and the atmosphere of the video is depressively beautiful.

After that I switched my interest to different sounds and lost track of the band and their music. Also music channels turned into these strange reality-shows broadcasters and left the music behind so I stopped watching them.

However, today’s concert was a must see and must listen. But first of all: I froze! With extra sweaters and well prepared for a cold evening I still had a hard time holding it together till the last beat. Other than that, it was super nice to see them, for what they represented 20 years ago, for their music and for the fact that Nina’s voice sounds exactly the same live as it does on the recordings and that it seems that she sings so easily. I must say that I liked the most the first and last track of the evening: “Erase/Rewind” and “My Favourite Game”, performed in such ways that really brought back memories of feelings one had when listening to them a long time ago.

And with these being said, I can now say that the Summer season of concerts in Gröna Lund has officially started.

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Tennis Fever

Posted on March 19, 2017 by Diana

Going to Kings of Tennis and not writing about it until now might be seen as somehow strange for somebody who is so hyped about the sport and so into talking about it all of the time. Well, I have a good reason for that: it wasn’t the same.

It lacks the excitement and the thrill of a real competition. Of course, seeing all those tennis legends is an absolute bliss, especially since the final was between Joan Carlos Ferrero, former World no 1 and Roland Garros winner, and Jonas Björkman, former World no 4 in singles and no 1 in doubles. I’ve never seen Ferrero play live before, I watched him several times on TV, and I will have to be honest and say that he was the reason why I went to the event in the first place. And I wasn’t disappointed, actually, I am pretty sure no one was, he plays amazing tennis even 5 years after his retirement from the professional tour. Seeing him made me realise how unlucky I was not to get to watch him play before.  Jonas Björkman I’ve seen before, when he paired Robert Lindstedt (who’s birthday is today, so happy birthday to him) for Stockholm Open. If I were to compare my sensation when watching these games I can say this: whenever I see the players competing on court, my level of adrenaline and excitement rise and I enjoy every moment of the match. Watching Kings of Tennis was like meeting the players off-court: people you respect and love for what they’re doing but there’s something missing everytime.  It’s one thing asking for an autograph when they finish practice or walk out of the court as winners, and another asking for a picture when they’re having a cup of coffee, if I may use this comparison to underline even more how it felt.

All in all, it was a tennis event. Kings of Tennis takes place at Stockholm Waterfront and is a part of the ATP Champions Tour, where tennis legends take the stage once more. It’s a show that brings together former World leaders, Grand Slam champions or Davis Cup champions. And just as other tennis events, it’s under-appreciated: there weren’t a lot of people in the audience and most of the ones there were busy having wine and socialising rather than watching. I guess this is also because the event itself is positioned as quite posh and spectacular, rather than competitive and rigorous, as tennis is often seen.

Due to the fact that the Bucharest ATP tournament got canceled, I won’t be seeing any live tennis anytime soon. Also, this also translates into a severe interruption in my almost 15-years-in-a-row visits to the tennis park in Bucharest, visits that I didn’t let go of even after moving to Sweden. I guess I will just have to focus this Spring on fighting an annoying hay fever that hit me so hard that I could barely keep my head up for a few days. And I am writing this now only because I have a well prepared stack of allergy medication by my side. Other than that, warm weather goes well with coffee and walks.

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