Athens got Stiped

#remathens

The Athenian summer concert season just went out with a smashing bang thanks to Charismatic for the People purveyors R.E.M. What surrealistically started in June with local police locking up James Blunt's instruments inside the Lycabettus theatre (apparently the grandstand had become unsafe a few hours before the gig so lock and chain were applied for about 4 days) threatened to end in two Battle of the VIP Tickets playback pop overs between J-Lo and Madonna. But the saviour turned out to be an unlikely hero, MTV, who provided Athens with a free (!) mini fest headlined by Messrs. Stipe, Buck and Mills.

Now capturing Michael Stipe on camera is a music photographer's must, Danny Clinch has turned it into nothing short of an art form, but try telling MTV that who need the pit for their live broadcast equipment. So instead of spending 5 hours in line to get anywhere close to the first rows and then having to endure wannabe starlets, Heineken-wielding Britpoppers, and the mind-numbing commentary from "VJ's" who don't even bother doing an ounce of research (Hey Tim Kash, the album is not called "Accelerator" and this was not the end of their tour as we know it..) I watched the show from home. EVEN THEN Stipe managed to reach out to his audience. Bouncing on the edge of my big red sofa to Supernatural Superserious and singing aloud to The One I Love, I watched as the band tore down the "room", the classic Kallimarmaro stadium, and the whole city for that matter, right down to the last moment, when Mills cracked the head off his bass and rammed it into a amp. Take that, capitalist promoters!

P.S.: I didn't quite catch Michael's song of the summer, did he say Santa's Gold?