We were treated to an amazing concert from the Palestinian/Galician singer-songwriter Najla Shami (with guitarist Sérgio Tannus) this week, organised by the university's Galician Studies Centre as part of this year's Forum for Iberian Studies.
I do love a bit of Arabic influences mixed into my music (see also: Shakira), and I may have lost count but I think I heard Najla singing in seven different languages that evening, so this hit all the right spots. Oh, and she's an amazing singer as well.
So, anyhow, here are some videos with the some of the songs she played here:
I don't know why, but the new Noisettes tour had its premiere at Oxford last night. It was a great show, ranging from full-on inferno to soft and sensitive. Like the last time, Shingai kicked off her shoes after the first song and performed the rest of the show barefoot, directing the band with her toes (or so it appeared sometimes).
I still don't know enough about their work to make any meaningful comment about old and new songs they played. Clearly haven't done my homework since I saw them the last time round.
So, have a couple of pictures instead (if I'm allowed to make a small suggestion, they could have done with a spotlight on Shingai - most of the time she appeared as a silhouette):
I gather they play the Koko at London today, then Manchester and Glasgow.
I saw Katzenjammer live last night for the first time (though I didn't admit I was a Katzenjammer virgin when they asked, wasn't sure what the rite of passage might be!). I could go on raving for hours now, as they're just so crazy and refreshingly different from everything else that happened in the history of the universe until now, but then again, I'm not nearly qualified to unpick the zillions of influences and cultural references in their work (I just about managed to identify the Genesis cover and I know that the big triangular thing is a contrabass balalaika), so I'll just post two of my not so very good photos and a video of one of my favourite K songs below.
I should point out that this video is very much at the tame end of the spectrum of Katzenjammer craziness ...
Catch them if you can - here at Oxford they played in a ridiculously small venue at a very affordable price, but that might change if word spreads ...
PS The writer in Oxford's Nightshift magazine correctly translated the name as a fit of self-pity, but I think they took it from one of the first comic series in the US, The Katzenjammer Kids, which began at the end of the 19th century and was heavily influenced by Wilhelm Busch.
it's Shakira's birthday today, so in celebration, here's the video of her lovely bilingual rendition of "Je l'aime a mourir" by Francis Cabrel, from the recent DVD Live from Paris:
The Live from Paris DVD+CD arrived yesterday - ordered from Germany as Sony UK is being hopeless again. In the UK you can only get the DVD this week, the double pack is due to be released next week. And as track 2 says: "Why wait?" Here are my first thoughts on the new release:
This is Shakira’s fourth live DVD, so you may wonder whether she can add something new to the series, but as someone who knows the first three by heart I can reassure you that the new offering is a combination of the reassuringly familiar with the new and inventive.
Very familiar and mostly unchanged are the songs at the hard core of her repertoire from the 90s albums Pies descalzos and Donde estan los ladrones. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t changed a note in her own favourite, Inevitable, since the MTV unplugged concert, and Si te vas, and Ciega sordomuda are similarly steadfast reminders of the good old days.
A lovely new feature is the medley made of A'tini al-Nay (an Arabic song she used to sing as a child), the Metallica cover Nothing else matters, and her own Despedida from the Love in the times of cholera soundtrack. Travel around the world in just a few minutes. Within the same “acoustic” setting is a much-improved version of Gipsy.
Since I saw the show at Paris in December 2010, she added a lovely French song (Je l’aime a mourir by Francis Cabrel) and switched a few more of her announcements to French, which is a nice touch. My only moan about the programme is that none of the collaborators showed up (while Alejandro Sanz and Wyclef Jean did, the last time round).
The DVD with 99 minutes of concert footage and 20 mins “behind the scenes” extras is perfect as always. The CD contains as much of the concert as fits on a single audio CD (big improvement on the 5-track CD from last time!), which means all announcements and a couple of songs (Si te vas, Gordita) were dropped, and the A'tini al-Nay snippet was cut too. The sound editing on the CD is different from the DVD version; there were a couple of places where I think I heard things that weren’t so prominent in the DVD soundtrack.
Her last words on the concert recordings are “a la prochaine” (until the next time), so I’m very much looking forward to the next tour and the 5th DVD. After New York, Rotterdam, Miami, and Paris, maybe we'll hear her "live from Beirut" in four years time, complete with a full-length version of A'tini al-Nay?
(Cover of the DVD+CD pack, which comes in a CD case) amazon.co.uk
As I've seen Shakira's Sale el Sol tour only twice, I can't wait to get the DVD, which is out on December 6th, as has just been officially announced. Full details are here. As the title suggests, the show was filmed at the Bercy, Paris, but not during the December 2010 gig that I saw. There were an additional two shows at the Bercy in the summer of 2011 which were used for the DVD.
As the UK distribution is hopeless again (amazon.co.uk offers the DVD for an astronomical price of £ 26.75 and doesn't give a date when it might be available!), I've ordered my copy from amazon.de.
Oh, and there is a new live video out to promote the DVD, it's Antes de las seis from the Sale el Sol album. One of my favourite songs.
As I take every conceivable excuse to travel to Paris, and as I can’t do the London gig of the current tour because it falls in the school hols and I have kids to look after, I went down to the Bercy to see the Sale El Sol Tour for the second time (first time was Lyon, see here).
The queuing was slightly less mad than in Lyon (which was the first concert in Europe and has therefore surely attracted a few hundred hardcore front row people from across the continent), but still quite crazy. I joined the end of a very long and winding queue at 6pm, when the doors opened, and it was 7 before I got in.
This time I heeded my own advice which I gave out after the last concert, and went for a place close to the “end of the pier”, with just four or five rows between me and the synapse of the stage axon (I like this neurological terminology for the stage layout, will stick with it!). It’s not just that much of the show is actually happening there, it’s also that you don’t have to crane your neck back and forth when the action moves from the main stage to the synapse and back. And the view of the main stage is still good from this distance, plus one gets an impression of the whole light show as it is intended to be seen. So, best standing place in the house, really.
Just after “Bonsoir Paris” I noticed she actually addressed the criticism I expressed after the Lyon concert, switching her “tonight I’m all yours” introduction into French. Later on she also spoke more French during the bellydance course with four girls from the audience. Sweet. My other criticism after Lyon was that the DJ was a bit rubbish and blatantly only there to artificially pump up the adrenaline, and wouldn’t it be better to give a new act the chance to play to a big audience. As the announcement in Lyon said the DJ was booked for the entire European tour (and he was still there in Paris), I am now officially spooked to hear that at the Manchester Gig (14.12.) he has been replaced with a girl group called Parade. Damn I should have gone to Manchester as well.
So, next on my wishlist is a full-length recording of the Arabic song A'tini al-Nay. Oh, and another MTV unplugged concert.
Where were we? Oh yes, Paris. So, from my vantage point at the end of the axon the whole show made a lot more sense, and I really loved the little unplugged session at the synapse.
Some random observations that I hadn’t noticed or recorded last time: The Sale El Sol announcement already confused me at Lyon. She started with something along the lines of “over the last few months I’ve been feeling a bit different” which seemed to lead very clearly towards something involving eggs and sperms, except that it didn’t. Identical text in Paris, but still no baby at the end of it.
I really loved the violin intro for Ojos Asi. I think the violinist who also plays a range of other instruments is a great addition to the band. Still have to find out her name. I think she was introduced as British in Lyon but as Irish in Paris. Never mind.
I’m not a huge fan of Gipsy but loved the dance intro and the acoustic version of that, and the throwaway line at the end: “soy gitana de ciudad”.
Two days after Paris I was due to see the show again at Frankfurt, but come 9pm (and after the DJ had already played 30 mins too long and in a suspiciously calm mood) it was announced that due to the inclement weather conditions her plane couldn’t land at Frankfurt, so the show had to be postponed. Oh well. Next time take the train – I really enjoyed my train rides through the snow from Paris to Frankfurt and back. Now I hope that the replacement show in Frankfurt will be Monday –Wednesday during term time, hope that can be arranged … Oh, and don’t forget A'tini al-Nay.
On the Oral Fixation tour, Shakira started the show singing a couple of lines in Arabic. This snippet is only listed as "intro" in the DVD, and to my eternal shame I must admit I never investigated what these lines were.
On the new tour, the same lines emerged in the middle of the show and a setlist I found on the web names the song as A'tini al-Nay.
And in this interview, Shakira explains how A´tini al-Nay was one of the first songs she performed as a young child, and that people called her the "little Fairuz," and she sings the first two lines again but then says she can't remember the rest of the lyrics.
I'd love to see her doing a complete cover version of the song, actually. Can we have that on the next album, please?
Update 13.11.2021: still waiting, but I replaced the embedded video above which had stopped working, and found two new ones to add:
Oh, hang on, maybe I like this version even better. Can't make up my mind:
And I've just found a free score too. Don't have a ney (yet) but have enjoyed playing the bits I remembered on the flute and recorders over the last few years.
After two months of touring the US, Shakira’s third global tour hit European soil at Lyon. Having spent the night before the concert in Lyon already, I arrived at the Halle Tony Garnier at 4pm and was shocked to find there were more than 500 people queuing already. I haven’t seen such fierce competition for the front row places before, and have in fact on some occasions arrived much later and still secured a better place than this time.
But anyhow, we all got in eventually and had ample time to admire the venue. As someone told me over breakfast at the Youth Hostel the next morning (all hotels being fully booked because of some aquarium trade fair or something similarly important), the place is a former exhibition hall built in 1914 using metal scaffolding in the style pioneered by Gustave Eiffel. The width is comparable to other arenas (like Wembley Arena) but the length of the thing is a staggering 210 metres, so I hope the people in the tiered seating at the back brought their telescopes along.
Like on some of the last European gigs I saw, the “special guest” was a DJ with the only and acknowledged ambition to work up the crowd, which I feel is cheating in a way, if you compare it to the traditional approach of giving a less known band or act the chance to promote their work to a wider audience. The advantage of the DJ approach, of course, is that they only need minimal equipment, such that 15 minutes after the DJ finished, the stage was ready for the main act, and Shakira actually appeared before the announced time (that must be a first, not just for her but for any woman of her nationality).
When the lights went down and everybody strained their eyes to work out where in the darkness she might materialise (no curtain and no giant cobra in sight this time), she worked her way through the crowd from the back of the audience to the “pier” running half way along the middle of the venue to the stage. Once it was clear from the video projection that she was in the crowd, it was in fact easy to locate her from the halo of excitedly glowing smartphones and cameras surrounding her.
While walking towards the stage she sang “Pienso en ti” an ancient piece from her breakthrough album Pies Descalzos, which she recently re-recorded for the soundtrack of the movie Love in the Times of Cholera. On reaching the stage she switched to the dancey Why wait from the SheWolf album.
The setlist was something like this (no guarantees for the order of pieces especially around the middle, pretty sure about the front and tail ends of the show):
Pienso en ti Why wait Te dejo Madrid Si te vas Underneath your clothes Ciega sordomuda Whenever wherever Inevitable A'tini al-Nay (sample from an Arabic song by Fairuz) Nothing else matters (Metallica cover) Despedida Gordita Loca Shewolf Gipsy Las de la intuición Sale el sol Ojos así ----------- Antes de las seis Hips don’t lie Waka waka
Notable absentees were Estoy aquí which was kind of her signature tune before the crossover and which opened the programme of the last tour, and No. Overall, I counted 11 Spanish pieces out of 20, which looks about the right mix to me. I was chuffed to have Antes de las seis included, one of my favourite ballads from the last few years, along with the old favourites like Ojos asi and Te dejo Madrid.
Similarly, the current tour band is an inspired mixture of the old and the new. Tim Mitchell, Albert Menendez, and Brendan Buckley have been on board since the MTV unplugged concert or longer, so they probably communicate with Shakira by musical telepathy by now. Glad to see that someone “from the UK” has joined Olgui as a second female musician in the tour band, and plays interesting instruments including a violin amplified by a brass horn. There were also a couple of new boys with interesting hair styles on guitar and bass, and a new percussionist. Oh and two very attractive dancers. This woman does know how to please the male minority in her audience.
Overall, the impression was that of a more normal, relaxed, let’s have fun together style of show compared with the mongoose tour. I probably said the same about the Oral fixation tour, but this time she went even further in this direction. There were still surprises and interesting new takes on well-known pieces though.
Hint for future concert goers: the places around the end of the pier are good ones, as much of the show happens there, actually, including an acoustic session and some interesting dancing, along with the belly-dance lesson for three girls picked from the audience.
I was slightly disappointed to hear that Shakira’s use of French remained limited to “Bonsoir a tout le monde” and “Merci beaucoup.” I don’t think there is a place in the world where addressing the natives in English feels as wrong to me as it does in France.
I’m also missing the open air concert in Las Ventas (Madrid) like mad. Obviously, it didn’t fit the tour calendar this time, but to me Las Ventas was just the perfect venue on the previous two tours.
But hey, I’m not complaining. Lyon was brilliant, and I have two more gigs to go to …
PS (Dec. 2011): I'm very pleased to report that my criticism re. not speaking French to the audience has been addressed somewhat in the Dec. 2010 concert at Paris, and then very impressively in the June 2011 concerts that were recorded for the Live from Paris DVD.
Saw Marina and the Diamonds last night, and OMG she looked just like Shakira. Just kidding, this is a quote from her song "Hollywood", of course. But she does have some shakiesque features.
Great show, and I really liked the venue too. The Regal is a former Bingo hall that has been refurbished and converted to a music venue only recently, and this was the first time I saw it from the inside.
It just dawned on me that Shakira's world tour starts in a week, on Wed, 15th, in lucky Montreal, Quebec, Canada (see tour schedule). Over here in Europe we have to wait a couple of months longer, but the countdown starts now.
I understand she and the tour band are already in Canada and busy practicing:
... haven't found any good video, but here's a nice photo from ShakiraMedia.com:
With her playing in broad daylight and the rather undefined setting, where you can never tell which people are actually listening and which ones are just standing around in a field, I thought it looked more like a dress rehearsal for the upcoming tour.
Update 3.9.2010 The album "Sale el sol" is now due to be released in October, here's the announcement from the official blog:
We're very pleased to report that Shakira will release her brand new album, Sale el Sol/The Sun Comes Out, on October 19th. The album will feature Shakira's record-breaking global hit "Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)", as well as a new single "Loca". Recorded in the Dominican Republic, “Loca” is Shakira’s interpretation of Dominican artist El Cata’s song “Loca Con Su Tiguere". You can hear the Spanish version of the track, above. There will also be an English version, featuring a guest appearance from Dizzee Rascal, the UK's number one rapper. Read more: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=7490990&blogId=538767380#ixzz0yTKKLqVz
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A weekend video to match both the weather and the fact that Shakira is due to play Glastonbury next weekend (Pyramid stage Sat. 18:45, but I don't have a ticket, will have to make do with TV/online). This one is from the recent "Rock in Rio" festival confusingly held in Madrid:
Within Temptation at the Koningin-Elisabeth Saal, Antwerpen 28.4.2010
I just about caught the tail end of the second run of Within Temptation’s “theatre tour,” so by this time I already had the resulting CD “An acoustic night at the theatre” and was kind of expecting a live rendition of the CD. Although the programme started much like this CD (Towards the end, stand my ground, somewhere), it turned out to be much more. In fact, the acoustic set was interspersed with an equal number of pieces in full-on inferno mode, so we got two full hours of music (and thankfully, no support act!).
While the acoustic equipment included two guitars, piano, cello, and violin, the acoustic set wasn’t completely unplugged either, as the bass was still electric. One could feel immediately that some of the musicians and large parts of the audience weren’t quite comfortable with the low-voltage part of the programme. I saw one of the guitarists was fidgeting so much I had the impression he wanted to jump up and start headbanging. I, for one, think the music of the band would work well in an even more drastically unplugged version, eg in an MTV unplugged programme, with a few more interesting instruments.
Everybody’s attempts to stay in their seats faltered just before the half-time break, when the electric guitars came out, and the hard-core fans streamed to the edge of the stage. The second half alternated between acoustic and electric parts, with fans flooding forwards and being shooed back to their seats accordingly.
One of the bonus features of the event was to observe the violinist and the cellist during the louder parts of the concert. At one time they put on helmets (builders’, not motorcyclists’) as if they feared the building would collapse. At another time, one of the other musicians appeared to be instructing them in the high art of playing an instrument while jumping up and down. I certainly haven’t seen any cellist trying that before.
The background video projection was apparently shown on some sort of semi-transparent gaze, making it hard to distinguish between things that were real but behind the screen and those in the videos. Duet partner Anneke van Giersbergen appeared to walk in at the back of the stage but turned out to be a projection, while the cellist, violinist, and second drummer working behind the gaze initially looked a bit two-dimensional but turned out to be real.
For anybody who missed this experience, I recommend the live package “Black Symphony,” a recording of a one-off concert with the Metropol Orchestra and a large choir – the best and most generous live CD/DVD pack I own. I’m still hitting myself because I missed that concert when it happened.
PS didn’t get very good pictures from row 8, but here’s the stage before the concert (no idea where they hid the amps and everything, the big sound just came out of nowhere):
I think I’ve figured it out now – this event was really a therapy session to help us cope with the double embarrassment of being German and on the wrong side of 40. Tellingly, Nena included a song about each of these issues in her recent album, but played neither of them at this gig. “Made in Germany” wasn’t on the setlist, while “In meinem Leben” was, but was dropped as it didn’t fit the mood.
The audience consisted mainly of Germans (with the odd British partner in tow), and most must have been born in the 60s. Which would have been obvious to anybody looking at the queue outside the venue for two minutes, but apparently nobody told the musicians. After the first song (SchönSchönSchön from the new album), Nena addressed the audience in English, and set out to explain who she was (I’m that chick from the 80s), raising nothing but an amused chuckle from those of us who have known her for 28 years now.
Then the band went on to play her (or, strictly speaking her original band’s) debut track, Nur geträumt, dating from May 1982, and were practically blown off the stage by the audience response. They very clearly hadn’t expected that from a gig in a country where Nena is only remembered as a one-hit-wonder, if at all. “Woher kennt ihr das denn?” asked a very dazed and confused Nena.
The treatment of Nur geträumt, along with 99 Luftballons later in the show, shed some light on the age-related part of the therapy. Back in 2002, in a concert celebrating the 20th anniversary of that debut, she tried to destroy and reconstruct the old songs, which in my view didn’t work all that well. This time round, she played them pretty much faithful to the original versions, only slightly de-80-fied, and re-energised. So, as one tends to do around this time in life, she seems to have made peace with her more youthful self. Embarrassment No. 1 overcome.
Another interesting aspect of the age issue being resolved is that two of her children appeared on stage that night. Daughter Larissa, 19, appeared unannounced as singer of the support band “Adam & Eva,” but it took only a couple of lines to put 2 and 2 (i.e. her voice and her nose) together and figure out who she was. Larissa’s twin brother Sakias appeared as vocalist with Nena, this time with proper acknowledgement (and not unexpected, as he appears on the album as well).
Work on the second trauma, being “Made in Germany” is condensed in the title track of the album. In London she only picked up the sentiment in one or two announcements, referring to a song as very typically German, and pointing out that it wasn’t her fault. But the audience being either tourists or expats, we were of course acutely aware of this. We even managed to queue from the wrong side of the entrance – that wouldn’t have happened to a native British crowd.
The set ended with the 90s piece Liebe ist – by that time, the artists had managed to get their heads around the fact that this was essentially a home game 1000 km away from home. Still, it must have been a very different experience from the concerts in Germany, where they play large arenas with a more mixed crowd. Here, there were maybe 400 people, and there had been practically no advertising, so only people with an active interest would have known about the concert in the first place.
I could have easily missed it, in fact. What happened was that during my travel in Germany in April, I came across the video of In meinem Leben in a hotel room. This was rather curious experience as well, as I found myself covered in goosebumps several seconds before my conscious brain caught up and figured out what I was listening to. Because of the video, I bought the Made in Germany album, and as I liked that as well, I checked the website on my return, and found the info about the London concert.
Anyhow, a bunch of very happy musicians dropping with sweat played 99 Luftballons (original German version, the English version is rubbish in comparison), and another 80s classic, Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann. The last encore should have been In meinem Leben, but as they didn’t want to dampen the exuberant mood of the evening, we got a second playing of Nur geträumt instead.
Which was a bit unfortunate, as I had hoped to take a few illegal photos during the quieter piece (staff were quite fiercely stopping people from taking pix, but I had a plan). But it never happened, so all I have is a picture of the tour bus, and of the empty stage before the show:
First gig will be September 21st in New York, apparently. Four years and a few months after the start of the Oral Fixation tour - these Latinas do like to keep us waiting! but hey, with luck we might get to see her in Europe before the end of the year. Watch this space.
If you don't know who Shingai Shoniwa is, you're missing something. Ok, so I'm guilty too, I actually saw her perform last week without knowing her name. She's the face (and voice, bass player, and dancer) of UK trio The Noisettes.
Here's Shingai riding the crowds:
... mingling with the audience:
... caressing ...
... and walking on the audience:
She's also been playing the bass:
showing her legs:
... and bending over backwards to make everybody happy:
And guess what, it worked. Oh, and she can sing, too.
I'm a chemist turned biochemist turned science writer, covering everything from nano to astro via bio. Also trying to make sense of my life in writing about family history. Playing wrong notes on a variety of instruments. Current craze: repairing violins and learning to play them too.
