A Different PoV
And,
happy melodist, unwearied,
For
ever piping songs for ever new;
More
happy love! more happy, happy love!
For
ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
(John Keats, Ode on a Grecian
urn)
It all happened over 30 years ago, at the end of the This Way Up Tour.
The 12 months between November 1986 and October 1987, when Peter and the band travelled
all over Europe and the USA, have already been quite well described on the special
book issued on the occasion of the official So album re-release, together with
the companion audio and video sets previously known as P.O.V. (you can
read about it here).
There is nothing of great significance I could add to
what better wordsmiths than I have already said and told. And I don’t feel any
need to bore anybody to death with loads and loads of very personal memories:
suffice it to say I have witnessed in person 50 of the European tour dates – all
that took place bar 6, which I sadly missed being busy with my journalist exams
in Milan –, sharing travels, accomodations, stories and experiences with a
bunch of fabulous friends all across France, Italy, Germany, UK, Belgium,
Sweden, Holland, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and, finally, Greece.
But to stay with the title
of the old VHS release, I wished to briefly add my very own – a fan’s – Point
Of View about those last 5 nights, which are some of my most cherished
memories, still incredibly alive and vivid in my mind. And in my heart.
First of all, as the website states, The Making Of P.O.V. did happen “over three nights”: to be precise, on Monday the 5th of October, Tuesday the 6th and Thursday the 8th. I saw the first from the front row, but then I decided to tape the remaining two shows and sat a few rows in front of the mixing desk to get perfect sound and views. Those recordings, including a few “Extras” J, make up the first 8 discs (all audio-only) of the whole package that the most avidly oriented fans and collectors can now find on the Genesis Movement Torrent Site .
But from my very own “fan P.O.V.”,
the real essence of that week were the 2 special filming nights which
happened on Wednesday the 7th and Friday the 9th. Nights like
no others, that’s for sure (which on the Movement site are also available as
dvds).
Doors opened – for free… –
at 7.00 pm, and the proceedings started soon after, as soon as the sun was
down. The Lycavitos Theatre is situated in the middle of a park on the top of a
hill with amazing views of the whole Greek capital and nobody to disturb in the
neighborood. This means there was no curfew, and the only “limit” was due to
the sun rising again in the morning at about 5.30/6.00 am. All in all, then,
the audience was treated to just about 10 hours of “performances”.
During those long hours, since I knew a friend was
filming, I had no need to tape or record. I was thus free to stand in the front
once more. The stage was quite high and I had to hang onto it most of the time
to keep my head above it, and at the end of the night I ended up with an actual
piece of the stage in my hands!!
As the following videos clearly
testify, it was slow going: some songs had to be repeated to catch different
angles with different cameras set-ups, while the usual technical hold ups
caused real long waits before everything was ready for every shoot. That’s especially
true for the second night, when almost nothing seemed to go according to plan: at
the very beginning Peter announced a mini-set of 6 songs to be played back to
back, which never materialized because of one single spotlight was not behaving
correctly! And it took at least a couple of hours to get it fixed… while the
planned setlist was changed, and scrapped, again and again.
But that doesn’t mean the
audience had a chance of getting bored!! The pauses between filming were filled
up by Peter and the band playing a whole bunch of songs as crowd pleasers,
accepting requests, trying out numbers that were not in the usual tour setlist,
or improvising a few ‘grooves’ for numbers that would then be performed “for real”.
On to some brief technical notes…
The video wa shot on a Sony
Video 8 camera by a close friend. He made frequent pauses in filming, as he
only had 3 batteries which should have lasted about one hour each, and all in
all I believe he did a fantastic job capturing the best of those 2 nights. Then
there was humidity, as those Greek nights were a wet nightmare, rather than a
dream! This meant a sudden death for the third battery on the first night,
which means he could obviously film but a fraction of what was played: I’d say he
managed to cover about 4 hours per night, with the other 5 or 6 sadly
unrecorded and unaccounted for.
Because of humidity, the Video
8 cassettes also suffered a lot: most of the problems like stuttering,
dropouts, tracking issues, etc., were on the original masters (now sadly lost) which
were transferred (at the time) to my VHS copies. I digitized those about 8
years ago, and since I started working on this project in 2010 I have been
constantly trying to tweak and improve both audio and video. The many works and
re-works, tests and experiments have inflated the *PG ATHENS* folder on
my Mac to over 800 GigaBytes! But it was time to put it to rest and accept
that, as you will see, the overall final quality is still very far from perfect..
Still, for a 30 years old collection of private tapes I reckon it still
makes for a more than pleasurable viewing and listening experience.
I hope you’ll enjoy it…
february 13th, 2018
