on tour again

I just discovered on youtube that Shakira is on world tour again, currently in the US and Latin America. It's been a while since I last saw her (list below) and various things have happened since then that have kept me away from the big arena gigs. One being a tinnitus that became permanent after the Halestorm gig I saw in 2013, the other the discovery that there are lots of opportunities around here for me to play wrong notes in public, which has shifted the focus of my musical interest from mostly listening to mostly playing. With all that, I missed the El Dorado Tour in 2018 (which also ran into trouble when Shakira had problems with her voice ahead of the first European dates).

Shakira performing at Medellin, Colombia. Photo: Wikipedia

I did watch a very lovely video of the New Jersey show from May 15 though (always good to be able to adjust the volume). From this I figured that the Las mujeres ya no lloren tour promotes an eponymous, all-Spanish album which I missed when it came out last year, so I ordered a copy of that. UPDATE 3.6. CD arrived today, after listening to it twice, I'm a bit underwhelmed, so may not be writing up a review.

Latin American dates are scheduled through to November. If and when the tour comes to Europe, I may have to think about some hearing protection ...

Previous Shakira concerts I attended (some of the pre-blogspot blogposts have disappeared):

London 16.12.2002
Madrid 25.04.2003
Madrid 22.06.2006
Antwerpen 31.01.2007
London 18.03.2007
Köln 08.04.2007
Lyon 17.11.2010
Paris 6.12.2010

PS Bonus video - La quiero a morir / Je l'aime a mourir - this wasn't included in the concert linked to above. This one hour video from Toronto is also lovely - seems to have a lot less advertising than the New Jersey one.

mi verdad

New video from Mana featuring a very pregnant Shakira:

Oh, and the baby was born on Jan 29th.

shakira - the eponymous album

It's a gift for anybody who loves the word "eponymous" as much as I do :) Seriously though, as I'm playing the album for the 5th time, here are my first impressions:

Having followed Shakira's output for nearly 15 years now, I expect nothing less than brilliance from her releases in Spanish but anticipate the English ones with some trepidation. Conflicts between the artist's vision and the label's views on commercial viability have obviously damaged past English releases. Considering this, the self-titled album is surprisingly good. All the eccentricities we've come to expect from her are firmly in place. The only obvious input from the sales guys is the duet with Rihanna, but as I like both the collaborator and the track, I'm fine with that. (I'm even ok with the football anthem.) Prick up your ears for the slower, more sensitive numbers, including cut me deep, 23, and broken record.

anonymously yours

Back in 2003, the web was a very different place – there was no facebook, and I used to socialise on the Shakira forum where at that point people still went by pseudonyms and didn’t show their faces except after you’d won their trust. I got to know quite a few lovely people this way, mainly by exchanging written words, and it always intrigued me how we influenced each other’s lives just through writing. I always wanted to write a movie script about that experience, but I didn’t quite have the right address book to make this sort of thing work.

Over time, I had the pleasure of meeting a few of my forum friends in real life, among them Ana Esther from Spain who spent a few months in Ireland and came over on a night coach to stay with my family for a weekend:

We met again for a concert in Madrid, but then lost touch, except for google+ which we both hardly use at all. Checking google+ this week, I found a link to one of her videos (she’s studied audiovisual communication) and through that discovered an earlier video where she examined the issue of anonymity in online chat. A boy who pretends to be a girl chats with a girl who pretends to be a boy. And when they meet up and discover their mutual deception, they look extremely cute and embarrassed.

Ana Esther wrote the script and plays the girl, check it out (Spanish only, I’m afraid), I love it to bits:

PS I'm basking in the warm glow of the illusion that I might have provided 0.0001% of the inspiration for this, even though I've never pretended to be a girl. Still, my nick, pensandoenti, may have come across as a bit girly, I suppose?

amor (celos de ti)

I just came across an audio file of Shakira performing this song on tumblr and didn't recognise it (it doesn't appear on any of her CDs). Investigating further, I found the video:

The song is by Puerto-Rican composer Pedro Flores and according to this site it was recorded for an anthology of his work.

pregnant bellydancing

loving the highlights video of Shakira's pregnant performance in Baku:

life is a mad circus

Review of (or, rather, a first attempt at figuring out):

Balada triste de trompeta (The last circus), Spain 2010, Alex de la Iglesia

based on DVD imported from France, as film was not released in UK.

I love Alex de la Iglesia’s knack for absurdity, and I don’t normally mind his over-the-top violence too much, as it is clearly described as absurd, so it’s just actors messing about with ketchup, as far as I’m concerned. So I do make an effort to get to see his films, even if it's sometimes tricky around here.

I suppose this one is about trauma handed down from the generation of the Spanish civil war to the next one, along with cultural traditions and the jobs of circus performers. Very normal in one way, but also completely pointless once you start to question it. As in the previous films I saw, there were lots of absurd details I liked in this film too, but I was somehow missing a positive element to balance it out. As the only female protagonist is variously beaten by one clown and kidnapped by another (just like in real life, come to think of it), I was missing a positive character, like the prostitute in 800 balas. The only relief we're getting here is the realisation that our real lives aren't quite as mad as the mad circus shown here.

Still no reason to censor it, as de la Iglesia clearly has meaningful things to say, even if he expresses them in unusual ways. For instance, the satirical depiction of Franco and his people will have been more meaningful for the domestic (and older) audience than for a foreign observer of post-Franco Spain like me. I'm looking forward to seeing what he will (one day) make of the absurdities of the current economic disaster that has befallen Spain.

I was intrigued to see the film uses a Spanish version of Je l’aime à mourir, by Francis Cabrel – wondering whether that’s what inspired Shakira to use it in the concert for the Live from Paris DVD. The film was released in Spain on December 17th, 2010, and the song showed up in the Paris concerts of June 13th and 14th 2011. You do the maths.

cover of the French DVD, which I ordered from amazon.fr. It doesn't have English subtitles though. There is a US edition available as region 1 DVD, under the title "The Last Circus"

both of us

I loved B.O.B.'s airplanes (with Hayley Williams) at the time, but that could have been a one-off. Now he's done it again, with Taylor Swift:

Oh, and price tag, with Jessie J, was good too. So, conclusion (and memo to Shakira) B.O.B. is the man to duet with ... seems a much nicer guy than that pitbull person.

addicted to you

I'm loving the new Shakira video, which was released just a few minutes ago:

and that wasn't a foregone conclusion, I could name one or two that I hate :) In this one, I'm loving the hat, in particular.

Now for the fun part, watching how UK music channels will completely ignore this. Living in the UK one can quite easily forget that this woman is quite successful in the rest of the world.

je l'aime a mourir

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:

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

Shakira live from Paris

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.

we're all Africa

It doesn't happen that often that I get the chance to use a quote from Shakira in my writing, so I jumped at the opportunity to open my article about African genomics with a reference to last year's Fifa World Cup and its official tune, which includes the spoken words at the end: "We're all Africa."

Because, you see, considering the facts that we all came from Africa at one point, sooner or later, that most of human genetic diversity is found between African populations, not between "races", and that a large part of the global disease load weighs down on Africa, it really is quite weird that the new investigation of personal genomes so blatantly followed the money rather than the scientific interest in sequencing lots of males of European descent before even beginning to include some token people of different origin (or even gender).

Obviously, I have phrased this sentiment much more diplomatically in my feature and I also report on several initiatives which aim to empower Africans to take part in the genome revolution and also to reap the medical and economic benefits from it.

My feature is out today in Current Biology:

African genomes
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 13, R481-R484, 12 July 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.06.047

Summary and limited access to PDF file



Shakira performing "Waka waka: This time for Africa" at the closing ceremony of the 2010 World Cup.

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 ...

feliz dia!

In celebration of Shakira's birthday today I've dug up a video that's 15 years old this year:



hasn't she grown ?

Also, I have a theory that every Spanish verb form that I'll ever need is contained in this song somewhere. Just listen to the song to appreciate the grammatical sophistication.

Shakira at Paris

Shakira live at the Bercy, Paris, 6.12.2010

concert report / review

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.

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.