13 & 14 April 2013 (Days 103 & 104) – Music For Stadium PAs

Nothing much happened over the weekend.

Today (Sunday), “M” and I caught up with Mickey and family to watch the Western Bulldogs cop a 67 point hiding from a promising Richmond outfit.  Whilst we were a car wreck on the field, at least, the stadium music was great.

I think it’s fair to say that Melbourne’s stadia and music don’t have a great track record.  In their efforts to provide “entertainment” that most patrons actually don’t want whilst not offending them, stadium operators inevitably opt for out dated and bland mainstream music such as Eye Of The Tiger and Playing To Win.  Even then, for the 0.00001% of the audience that hasn’t heard these tunes at least a thousand times, the music is played way too high or too low to be truly appreciated.

In recent years, operators or sporting codes have attempted to provide live entertainment at their sporting events.  I haven’t had much personal experience of this, as I tend to attend matches where there is no perceived need for such entertainment.  (Translation: the Western Bulldogs doesn’t play before huge crowds.)  Last year Mark Seymour, a Bulldogs supporter anyway, played before one of our matches.  As much as I like his music, I found it to be a distraction from the real business at hand.  On another occasion, I arrived at the ground only to discover that I’d just missed a performance from the cast of the Rock Musical, Rock Of Ages.  If my memory holds, I think I caught just the last few notes of We Built This City, one of those truly annoying songs that would have resulted in my storming ground management and demanding they drown out the tune by playing Eye Of The Tiger.

Thanks to my team’s grim determination to find bizarre ways to lose Preliminary Finals (seven from seven played in the past 28 seasons), I’ve mercifully been spared the horror of the musical entertainment that the AFL puts on to torture the audience at the Grand Final.  However, that is something that will be the subject of its own posting when we get to this year’s Grand Final. Suffice to say, Superbowl half time extravaganza it is not.

But back to the game.  Picking up on Mickey’s suggestion of last week, I started recording all of the tracks played over the Etihad Stadium PA in my Football Record from the time I sat down until I left.  The play list is not as deep as I would like owing to our relatively late arrival, but it is impressive:

Pre match

1.                   The White Stripes – 7 Nation Army
2.                   The Rolling Stones – Sympathy For The Devil
3.                   AC/DC – It’s A Long Way To The Top (This is the AFL theme song for the second season in succession.)

Quarter time

4.                   Silverchair – Straight Lines

Half Time

5.                   Led Zeppelin – Whole Lotta Love

From now on, I’ll record the stadium play list for the games I attend.  Stadium operators, you have been warned.

Due to the lazy nature of the weekend, I had a bit of time for listening and so went through;

(# 283) Iggy Pop – Roadkill Rising. The Bootleg Collection 1977 – 2009 (2011)

This is a 4 CD set with each disc devoted to live recordings taken from each of the 4 decades covered.  No song is repeated, thus providing an overview of Iggy solo and as a subsequent interpreter of his Stooges past.  Not much of the album sounds like it’s come from actual bootlegs.  Rather, most of this is from well recorded sources such as radio shows which were, in turn, widely bootlegged.  The 80’s disc, for example, contains a great version of Kill City from the Channel nightclub in Boston from a broadcast subsequently bootlegged as Live At The Channel.

Each disc has something to recommend it.   The 70s disc contains about 10 tracks from his 1977 tour with David Bowie and forms a fine complement to the TV Eye album.  Among the tracks here is Tonight the Bowie/Pop tune that Bowie recorded as the title track of his 1984 album. The 80’s disc starts with a poor quality sounding performance from a venue in Detroit where the audience does not take kindly to his attempts to perform Nightclubbing, Puppet World, One For My Baby (And One More For The Road) and Take Care Of Me.  Kill City and High On You on this disc are fine but the rest is only so-so.  Half of the 90’s disc is fine, especially the opening quartet of Lust For Life, China Girl, Butt Town and Home from a 1991 Berlin gig.  The 00s disc appears to contain some superb material by the reformed Stooges including Down On The Street, Real Cool Time, Funhouse and Skull Ring from 2007.  The final 5 tracks from a 2009 Parisian show shows a completely, um, different side to Iggy with a track in French and Willow Weep For Me.