Djibouti misses out again

Here’s something that I never really thought about before I moved down here. World Tour. And what that actually means.

The world is a big place, and it’s pretty unreasonable to expect a band or artiste to play in every country. But the image below speaks volumes about what “the world” means to many people Up North.

And it also explains why we have to go to Bergen to see a band play. (Never mind that the Bergen dot is smaller than the Cape Town one, or that a-ha’s recent World Tour was an actual genuine World Tour.)

Next up for us in Cape Town is David Gray. Great for SA, sure, but Djibouti misses out again.

I’m In

Almost 12 years after their last ever concert (the one which I didn’t get to), and then 6 years after their last ever concert (the one we did get to), and then 2 years after we saw them in Cape Town, here’s… er… the new single from a-ha:

Predictably lovely stuff.

New album – True North – later in the year.

Whenever this sort of thing happens, people always ask if I feel cheated because they said that they were going to retire and now they haven’t.

No. No, I don’t. I’ve loving it.

Day 161, part 2 – Hidden scaffolding

I spotted this image on Brian Micklethwait’s (new) blog – a photo he describes thus:

I mentioned the relatively recent phenomenon of buildings covered in scaffolding, and the scaffolding then being covered with a picture of the building.
Last night, I came across an example of this in the photo-archives, dating from 2013

And here it is:

This isn’t something that I’ve seen much (any?) of in South Africa. It could be that I haven’t been in the right place at the right time, of course. Or it could be that we just don’t do that when historic buildings are being repaired.

Norway, though – definitely. I remember being fooled (from a distance at least) when visiting Bryggen – the old wharf in Bergen – part of which was being renovated.

I mean, now you know it’s there, you can zoom in and have a closer look and yes, there is the temporary false facade. Bingo.
But if I’d shared this image without context, you’d surely never have known that two of those seventeen colourful buildings weren’t genuine.

Go closer (by walking around the harbour to the end of the row) and the requirements of sheer functionality make it rather more obvious:

Somewhere out there, there is a company (in fact, possibly more than one) that manufactures bespoke scaffolding covers like this. They’re probably the same ones who have been making the massive decorative tarpaulins that have been covering the empty seats in football stadiums during lockdown.

It does seem an awfully specific product though. Presumably, when we’re not in the middle of a pandemic or repairing historic buildings once every 100 years, there must be some other use for huge specifically-printed pieces of fabric.

But right now, I can’t think what that might be.

We’ve been here before…

After a lot of teasing, they finally shared the tour poster yesterday:

And the idea sounds pretty awesome:

Magne Furuholmen, Morten Harket and Pål Waaktaar-Savoy will be performing in An Evening With format, with an interval. For the first half of the concert, they will play new and old, familiar and less-familiar songs. Then, after returning to the stage, they will play the ten songs of their 1985 debut album Hunting High And Low in the running order of the original release.

Which, as I recall from my cassette tape days is this:

Take On Me
Train of Thought
Hunting High and Low
The Blue Sky
Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale
The Sun Always Shines on T.V.
And You Tell Me
Love Is Reason
I Dream Myself Alive
Here I Stand and Face the Rain

I thought that I’d missed their last ever concert. And then I thought I’d seen it.
It turns out that I was wrong on both of those.

But it’s always been a privilege for me to see a-ha in concert, and I’m happy that they’re still around and – hopefully – producing even more new material. While this all sounds very special, the surprising omission of a South African leg on the tour, together with the frankly terrifying state of the South African Rand means that we won’t be going along this time.

Still, if they’re going to do all their albums this way, there’s always the 2020 Scoundrel Days tour to consider. And then another 8 to follow that…

I’ll start saving now.