Athens Ready to Rock N Roll

Athens ready to rock’n’roll

Cultural event feature

By David John, Athens Star Staff

Unless you’ve been hiding your head in a cardboard box full of cotton wool over the last ten years, you have no excuse for not having heard of at least one of the eight rock groups playing at this weekend’s mammoth Rock in Athens Festival.

If you’re still in any doubt you can ask any one of the 60,000 or so music devotees from over 12 countries who will be crowding into the old Olympic Stadium (birthplace of the modern Olympic Games in 1896) this Friday and Saturday.

The Clash’s tough Punk-revolutionary stance, The Cure’s existentialism and pessimistic posturing, The Stranglers‘ dark visions, Nina Hagen’s outrageous operatics and Boy George’s cute dress code have made these headliners at Nouvelle Frontieres’ two day show infamous in the world’s media. In the argot of rock’n’roll, bad is good – and bad news is great publicity.

The festival promises to be the high-point of the summer’s cultural events in the city, an exciting release for concert-starved Athenian rock fans and a triumph of cooperation between four European countries. The French travel and leisure company Nouvelle Frontieres has funded the event to the tune of around $1 million, and organized charter flights for the 20,000 ticket buyers from most European cities. Technical production has been assigned to the Bretagne-based firm Roxane, who have contracted the performers, and Britain’s biggest sound and lighting company Entec to handle the building of the enormous stage rig.

The technical director, Roxane’s Jaques Abalain said in an interview with the Athens Star: “We’ve had fantastic support from the (Greek) ministries of Culture and Youth, and the French Culture Ministry... They have helped us with all kinds of details, like getting the equipment through customs.“

With a fleet of trucks and an army of technicians, music business representatives, musicians and their inevitable entourages arriving in Athens this week after passing through up to six European frontiers, the logistical problems needed all the smoothing-out that officialdom could manage.

The hugely successful Dire Straits concerts here in May proved that it could be done. “We were very impressed by what we saw (at the Palais de Sport in Faliron).“ Says Abalain, “and realised that what we were planning was possible.

Sour note?

Unfortunately, the Athens Police Department proved a little less cooperative. With the security problems posed by such a large gathering of young people in Athens‘ city center to consider, they are signalling extreme caution.

Although there will be a security force of 1,500 surrounding the stadium (there will be no police on duty inside the arena), and despite the exemplary conduct of Greek audiences at other recent mass events, the constabulary are making very few concessions. They have vetoed the closing of King Constantine Avenue (on which the stadium stands), ignoring the organizers‘ pleas that busy weekend traffic could be thrown into chaos as the fans arrive at the festival to find no parking facilities. “In this event the police will be forced to reroute the traffic anyway,“ said Jean Claude Brandon, director of Nouvelle Frontieres‘ Athens office. He added, somewhat optimistically, that he hoped that fans would leave their cars and motorbikes at home.

Musical waves

The first wave in the popular music revolution swept a large number of young musicians to international stardom with exciting new sounds and lyrical ideas. Many of those “woolly-minded“ supernovae of the affluent sixties weren’t sure whether they wanted to make people dance, think, drop out, revolt or just buy their records so that they could afford to drive Rolls Royces into swimming pools at Hollyweird (sic) parties (as the Who’s drummer Keith Moon is reported to have done). Nevertheless, they all learned to live up to their notoriety and many took to living in the sedentary style set by movie stars decades earlier.

The flame of cultural revolution that was kindled by the likes of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones during the 1960s, seemed to have burnt out by the mid-70s. The greats of the flower power generation had become too indolent or too stoned to blow on the dying embers.

It took the violent energy of Punk rock, unleashed in early 1976 in London, to spark off the “New Wave“ and reignite the smoldering ashes of thought-provoking popular music. The term “thought-provoking“ is used advisedly, since many people outside the echelons of the Punk cult saw nothing that could be deemed intellectually stimulating in the antics of the Sex Pistols and their followers, notorious for their penchant for brain-damaging decibels, glue-sniffing, safety pins through the nose and vivid green Mohican hairstyles.

But history has shown us that there was more to the beginnings of New Wave than spitting at people and doing the “Pogo“ (the Punk war dance). The old wave dinosaurs, though by no means extinct (a few, like Blondie’s Debbie Harry, even metamorphosed into pseudo-punks), were displaced by younger, fresher talent who challenged the complacency of the establishment in the context of economic crises, mass unemployment and global political and social strife. Many young people, especially among the lower classes of European society, felt they had found a voice in the raw new sounds of such groups as The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Cure, X-Ray Specs, The Jam, et al.

Although Punk was initially a British phenomenon, young bands all over Europe and the U.S suddenly discovered that they could save their pocket money, and for a modest outlay produce their own records. And as hundreds of them did so – sometimes quite successfully – the big record and management companies, and fashion pundits began to take notice. The former pariahs of the music business were turned into hot properties as dissent – an affordable luxury in Western democracies – became a highly marketable commodity again.

Since those heady days the polemics have all but sunk – though they can be seen bobbing to the surface now and then – as wave after mini-wave of new-glamrock and technopop steer the course of modern music. The mid-80s saw the return to the dilemmas of ten years before as the raging “anti-social elements“ weigh up their “street credibility“ (an absolute criterion for a rocker’s image) and their “pockets full of pretty green“ stuff, courtesy of the millions of record buyers (or “punters“ as they are called in the record biz).

The eight bands from Britain, France and Germany playing here this weekend represent a decade of musical innovation and music biz reorientation.

While The Clash, The Cure, The Stranglers and Nina Hagen have all managed to retain their fiercely guarded rough edges and street credibility over the years, Talk Talk, Depeche Mode and Boy George’s Culture Club – all relative newcomers – seem to have squarely plumped for the trappings of commercial success.

The French connection, Telephone are on the line dividing the clean-cut pop celebritities from the savage-tongued razor boys of Punk’s heyday. Although they have been hailed in their Gallic homeland as “extrmely controversial“ and “a phenomenon“, with records such as Crache Ton Venim (Spit Your Venom) and La Bombe Humaine (any guesses?) cementing their reputation as vicious eardrum vandals, their recent videos (aired spasmodically here by ERT television) give one the impression that butter wouldn’t melt on their guitar strings. They are widely considered as serious contenders in the songs-with-meaning stakes. If you want to know what that meaning is exactly, try asking one of the French people you’ll rubbing shoulders (elbows, ribs, toes) with amongst the festival throng.

Recycled grease

The pop music world has its own ethics and floating set of double standards, and so it’s not surprising that many rock aficionados are not too impressed by the candy-coated nihilism of such stars as Boy George. “The reason he’s accepted into so many American homes,“ commented England’s New Musical Express, “is that he never does anything unacceptable, at the same time managing to con people into thinking he’s changing things. The tradition of singing “War is stupid“ is so well entrenched it can quite happily be ignored – but it’s not exactly on the same level as exhorting people to burn their draft cards.“

For his own part the Boy claims “people are stupid“ and “they don’t care! They’re ignorant. Nobody cares about war until it’s on their doorstep.“

Political pressure groups and peace movements in the west have traditionally used rock music to further their aims (and vice versa!), though one British musician, Hugh Featherstone Blyth (unfortunately not appearing at the festival) bemoans the negative effect bland, escapist pop music has on young people:

“The music doesn’t have much to say no more;

It’s just recycled grease.

The world just goes from bad to worse,

And all the young gods

Throw parties on the hearse.

How can we have peace

If the kids don’t care?“

Though, as Bob Geldof – who had been accused in the past of jumping on the post-Punk bandwagon – proved in raising $50 million for charity through his international Band Aid concerts, the commercial side of rock isn’t all that bad.

It’s only R’n’R

At the end of the day (or in this case two days) what most people splash out their hard-earned cash for is the music itself – the toe-tapping, body-swaying, sheer jump-up-and-down excitement of rock’n’roll. It’s the end of another long, hot week in Athens, dammit, so they want to let their hair down, out or up (delete as appropriate).

For the ticket price of 2,000 drx. for two days, your ears will be treated to 60,000 watts of music power, your eyes will be dazzled by 40,000 watts of lighting effects, and if you find yourself at the back of the 250 meter long, horshoe-shaped stadium you will still be able to see every blemish on the face of your fave rockstar on the giant (38 sq. m.) color video screen over the stage.

So leave your cardboard box and your cotton wool at home and boogy, shimmy-shammy or pogo down to the Rock in Athens festival and have a real bad (i.e. good) time this weekend.