live from paris - review

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

rabiosa

One wouldn't be able to tell from the UK media, but Shakira has a new video out from the Sale el Sol album, called Rabiosa. The Spanish version features El Cata, the English one PitBull. Here's the Spanish one:



Oh, and the Sale el Sol tour is still going strong too, sadly I can't attend at the moment ...

A´tini al-Nay...فيروز_-_اعطني_الناي

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.

Which, it turns out, is a poem by Gibran Khalil Gibran, sung by Fairuz:

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.

And here's the version at the beginning of the Oral Fixation concerts, which then blends into Estoy aqui.

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.

photos of lyon concert

I do realise that my concert photos tend to be a bit rubbish, but here's a selection of the least worst ones from last week's event:

Te dejo Madrid ?

Inevitable - with the inevitable acoustic guitar, only this time it's red, it used to be a blue Ovation guitar.

UYC?

Loca or SheWolf?

Ojos así

Waka waka

Waka waka

Shakira at Lyon

Concert review

Shakira at Lyon Halle Tony Garnier 17.11.2010


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 …



Previous Shakira concerts I attended:

London (16.12.2002)
Madrid (25.04.2003)
Madrid (22.06.2006)
Antwerpen (31.01.2007)
London (18.03.2007)
Köln (08.04.2007)

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.

eyes like yours

warming up for the forthcoming European leg of Shakira's tour, here's a clip from the last one, Ojos asi live from Dubai:



PS watching that video again, it just occurred to me that Ojos asi was the first song I ever saw her playing live - see the ravings of my younger self here. No wonder it leaves me stirred and shaken.

loca loca loca

Have received my copy of Sale el Sol yesterday and played it on closed loop for last 24 hours (OK, I did sleep a bit, too). With the volume up and the bass boost on, I'm expecting the neighbours to come knocking on the door any minute ...



Am really puzzled now - is it me or is this album a million miles better than the English language She Wolf album? It may be that her recent attempts to adapt to the English speaking US market just don't work for me, or it might be that the songs she writes in Spanish are really better (and I mean musically more than linguistically). And to me the gap is much bigger than between the two Oral fixation albums (OF 2 had some really interesting tracks that should have been singles, such as How do you do, and Timor).

Any opinions from fans or others ?

PS really looking forward to the concerts now !

PPS Sony UK is being completely hopeless again. While the CD was available in Germany at the end of last week and in the rest of the world at the beginning of this week, the UK release date is end of November. I ordered mine from Germany, but amazon uk now also has some used copies.

taking off today

Sale el sol tour


PS the first review of the Montreal show I could find is here.

countdown

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:

.