Friday, January 21, 2005 at 8 PM.
Belgrade Fair
If it hadn’t been for the concert of a pop band R.E.M., Friday would have looked like teachers’ jokes.
The above mentioned cold and dry day didn’t promise too much, and offered, at the very least. Most Belgrade’s citizens were making an end to the working week, while a handful of us, the happy people for Belgrade standards (about 10,000), were waiting for the band, whose intoxicating quality even the President Tadić perosnally couldn’t resist to, to listen to alive after two decades and a half since it was founded.
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The band Brainstorm, likeable guys from Latvia, appeared on stage first. As they themselves say, they grew up musically influenced by local pop music and the Soviet cartoons, so the result is surprisingly cheerful – easily sung Baltic pop.
Whoever doubted the concert capacity of R.E.M., can eat his heart out now! In a word – fabulous! The Band sounded compact and rich, offering recognizable and concise music pulsing to its listeners, to put it simply, they presented us with completely R.E.M.ian enjoyment.
Similar to a dessert, the visual enjoyment of the concert was left for the end. The last week’s performance can also be added to the artistic postulates „for the eye“, which placed Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel on a pedestal.
Unpretentiously, but markedly suggestive, their lighting (lighting effects screen and neon light vertical signs) and specially the films on a video beam following its appearance, offered the most truthful escape from reality and the unfinished insight whose coauthors we are.
Igor Mihaljević – Novi Sad News
Set list:
- I Took Your Name
- Departure
- Aftermath
- So Fast, So Numb
- Hi-Speed Train
- Everybody Hurts
- Electron Blue
- Drive
- Leaving New York
- (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville
- Orange Crush
- I Wanted To Be Wrong
- Final Straw
- Imitation Of Life
- The One I Love
- Walk Unafraid