These last few days I’ve been on vacation and I stayed home getting ready for the summer concerts and getting some beach and pool time in.
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Friday evening I went to Plateau with a bunch of friends. Amazingly enough (given my dancing music tastes) I’d never been there before. I don’t know how I can love dancing to 80’s rock music and never having been to Plateau but well, that’s taken care of now. Anyway, my friends tell me that the songs they played were more or less the usual stuff for the place and as far as I’m concerned they could ditch the disco stuff and stick to the rock and pop but, well, I can’t bring back the thursday (or was it friday?) nights at Coconuts with Miguel Simões pumping out rock’n’roll like there was no tomorrow now, can I?
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Saturday I went with a couple of friends on a lighthouse-seeking quest near where I live. It was fun and the Farol de Sta. Marta in Cascais, near the marina (the one in second life) has an interesting museum. You can not (yet) visit the lighthouse itself, but apparently that will change in the near future.
Unfortunately I didn’t know that Cabo d Roca’s lighthouse was being renovated so that was the main disillusion of the day… -
After our little lighthouse-hunting excursion we went to Sintra to the Fire & Ice “and friends” concert. I didn’t know any of the bands and went there on my friend’s Marcos suggestion.
My take on it is that Àrnica sucked, Barditus did an excellent job supporting the other two artists and they, in turn were quite good. Orplid put on a great and powerful show (it made me really sorry that I don’t understand german, but most of it you could understand perfectly just from his small –english-spoken– intros and the way he sang it).
As for Fire & Ice, well, there was a gentleman who really knows how to move an audience. I loved his songs with Barditus and also liked very much the two traditional folk songs he did on his own during the encore (when Barditus decided that they’d had enough). I think the best way to describe his voice is haunting. -
Meanwhile I’ve been to Lisbon a couple of times this week and ended up visiting Louie Louie’s Chiado store, again on a recommendation from a friend. So I came away with a few LPs under my arm and I’ve been listening to them over and over. There’s no scrobbling for vinyl, but I really don’t care, what I found there were some real gems. I even bought my very first vinyl copy of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (yes, I know, I’m unbelievably late to the party, sue me). ;-)
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And just yesterday the festivals started, with Super Bock Super Rocks’s second act. I skipped all the other bands and went there just for the Iron Maiden show.
What a show! As expected, of course. These guys are so great, even after all these years, it’s eery! An excellent concert, appart from a time in the middle of it when the usual stupidity set in and they stepped the volume up so loud that the bass and the guitars started sounding all distorted. Can you imagine Maiden with a crappy bass?? Urgh! Fortunately they decided that it was best to turn the volume down a bit and have decent sound (it still left my ears ringing, mind you, as any such concert should).
A friend I met there told me the line-up for this concert was exactly like the on all their latest shows and DVD and I can see why. It really, really works. Both the main show and the encore (surely one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen).
Amazing show, filled with only the classics –the Bruce Dickinson songs mostly– that everyone knew by heart (I surely did and I screamed like a madman through it all.)
UPDATE: See another wildly emotional review of this concert (in Portuguese) here.
Now I have to go rest by the pool to get my throat back in shape for this evening at the first day of the Optimus Alive! festival. It’s tough being on vacation during the festival season… :-)