I belong to an odd generation.

You’ve got to understand something. Back when I was a kid, there was not much music I could appreciate to be had. Hell, I can remember the old vinyl LPs. That’s what it was like back in the seventies. And that music was stuff I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, then or now – wailing “devotional” music and so on, mostly Bengali or rarely Hindi, which was even worse, because I couldn’t then speak the language. The only one from those days I remember as worth the recollecting was Lal Kamal-Neel Kamal, a fairy tale about two princes, one human and one half-demon, who take it on themselves to rid a kingdom of man-eating demons. I can still recite most of it verbatim, for what it’s worth.

Anyway, those were also the days when there simply wasn’t much money around in my family (for reasons some of you already know and the rest of you will know when I decide I can put up a blog about it), and the middle class Bengali household, in any case, was loath to spend a penny more than absolutely necessary. One of the standard excuses my family used for not buying a tape recorder was ”Nobody sings in this family, so why should we buy one?” I finally got a player of my own when I was eighteen. I still have it, though cassettes are obsolete and I haven’t turned it on for years.

Oh, and then it happened, I got turned onto that artificial construct of lip-synch and pretension, only I didn’t know it then, BoneyM. Hell, I thought they were – to use a word I hate – awesome. But that was then.

You must understand, those of you who aren’t Indian. In those days, the early to mid eighties, one had to wait a whole month for fifteen minutes of what was referred to as “western music” – which was usually played around midnight, unannounced, and figured such staggeringly famous luminaries of the music scene as Dschingis Khan or Sabrina. You’ve never heard of them? Well, you could google.

So when I finally acquired some money of my own and could buy my own music I was fairly indiscriminate in my choices. I’d never heard any of this before, you see, and I hadn’t really heard of many of them before, either. It was buy, hear, and then pick and choose your favourites. Some of the stuff was fairly good, although I no longer listen to it, like Lobo, for instance, or Pet Shop Boys, or the acme of camp, Queen. Some of it was pure gold. I bought Meat Loaf, for instance, without ever having heard of him before, and he’s still one of my favourites (but then I still listen to the Beatles sometimes, I must confess).

Well, fairly obviously, I had to buy what was on offer, and what was on offer at the time was what most people would buy. So most of what I ended up buying was slow rock (some of which was good) and pop (most of which I learned to despise early on). I could only find hard rock and rap in the late eighties and early nineties, and I got tuned on to Meat Loaf, Scorpions, and the Strolling Bones, sorry, the Rolling Stones, and so on. I never really liked reggae – to this day, the only reggae that gives me any pleasure, apart from Bob Marley, is Inner Circle’s Whatever Happened To My Garden Of Black Roses. Country – one exposure to Kenny Rogers and Lucille turned me off country for life. Rap of the time – I can take it or leave it. Mostly I leave it. And as for hip-hop, I’ve told you all what I think of it here.

So, for years, my musical tastes basically revolved round (mostly) hard rock. I thought it was getting, like, set in stone. But in these last months I find myself getting sick and tired of the boy-chases-girl repeat motif. In fact I’m getting so sick of it that it turns me off right away ( I don’t know about gangsta rap. Maybe they talk about other things, but I can’t understand a word anyway).

And concomitantly I’m getting turned on to thrash metal, including rediscovering bands like Motörhead and Metal Church which I’d heard sing before but not taken to. Yeah, metal groups have been accurately described as "skinny men with big hair and tight pants", and I'd laughed my ass off when I read that back in 1991 - but they seem to be the only genre any more that talks, as a whole, about social issues and war and so on. Well, I’m taking to them now.

Better late than never, I suppose.       

  

Another underappreciated Thrash Metal band with their take on the horrors of war.

The Atheist's Anthem.

Not a sugar-candy song. That's why I like Motorhead. They sing on real issues, things that most people don't like to talk or think about.

For reasons that most of you will already be aware of, I have deleted most of my music. I just retained the album by Valerii Leontiev and "Ah Kakaya Zhenshina" by Fristail, on the theory that Russian music will be less likely to attract the wrong sort of attention.       

I have worked far too hard on this blog to lose it because of some Multiply idiocy. Giving up the music is a small price to pay.

And here is the famous one.

Wish they were still around.

The concert was due to begin at three in the afternoon – I had asked. And the tickets specifically mentioned that the gates would be open to the public from 12 noon. So I finished work early, shut down the clinic, posted a notice on the shutters to the effect that due to “unforeseen circumstances” I would be unavailable, and went home. I fed the kids, grabbed a quick lunch, changed into black - leather jacket and driving gloves, denims, shoes and socks – and drove off to the stadium. Didn’t have any problem parking but found the lot already half-full. It was a pain getting in – each ticket was scanned, everyone was (very casually) frisked and then allowed in. I’d got the front standing tickets (choosing them over the sitting area tickets) and when I arrived the place was still empty enough for me to get a place near the railings near the stage. Nothing happened for a long time. People just kept drifting in.

Let me put in a word about the arrangements – they were atrocious. There were no toilets (something I’d anticipated and prepared for), no proper barriers (later, people would climb easily from one section to another, and the barrier in front of me would break down) and absolutely no enforcement of rules. The tickets said there would be no smoking or drinking allowed and drunken people would be refused entry even with valid tickets. Well, people were smoking even during the concert and there were guys around me with little bottles full of gin or vodka in their pockets. And there was only one point of exit. It took me over half an hour to exit the stadium after the performance, and I just wonder what the hell would have happened had the stadium caught fire or something similar had happened.

I didn’t move from my position all the time everyone waited for the concert to begin. I was sure I wouldn’t get another place right up front. I even kept a death grip on the railing with one hand, something that certainly helped me a lot when the main concert began.

Sometime during the afternoon Klaus Meine and Mathias Jabs arrived, photographed the (still thinnish) crowd, and vanished. I saw Meine in the flesh! Can you understand the sensation?

The preliminaries finally got under way at a half past three when Akhia (a local heavy metal band) came on. The Great Society followed. Nothing very much to either of these. The people kept coming – the final attendance was somewhere between 35000 and 45000.

About the concert itself I’ll let the videos tell the tale – the sound quality is poor and the images are blurred, but the actual songs are ones I already posted in proper form. The videos are more about the response of the crowd – and it was electric. Right from the waving German flags to a sign saying S-C-O-R-P-I-O-N-S StingOurAss, to the short guy in front of me who kept jumping till I was afraid his head would smash into my nose, to the screaming girls, to the fat Sikh with a camera with a lens the size of an astronomer’s telescope, they all – I included – shared a common feeling, a Zeitgeist, may I say? It was incredible, despite the agony in my back from standing six hours in one place without moving.

I wept on the way out of the stadium, from happiness. I’ve been a fan of Scorpions from the eighties – and never would I have thought I would ever see them in the flesh, before me, right in front of me and singing at me.

Also, I was surprised at how many young fans the group has here. The older set of us were fans of Scorpions since before the majority of the audience was born.

Meine and Co. may have got more people to listen to them in their follow-up performances in Bangalore and Mumbai, but I don’t think they got a more committed one.  

 

   

    

Scorpions, Shillong, 12 Dec 2007. "Rock You" was supposed to be the last song. But due to crowd demands they agreed to sing one more, "When the Smoke is Going Down".

The combined video length is slightly longer than ten minutes. So it might be snipped. Sorry about that:(

This is the second part.

Because of a cell phone glitch I had to shoot this video in two parts.

While the rest of them were changing their clothes, James Kottak entertained us on the drums while Pavel Maciwoda kept some bass up from the sidelines. It's a pity this video couldn't show Kottak better. But it certainly shows the energy of the crowd.