A tale of two concerts...

It is Bastille Day today -- so why not throw a post on here about France...

We recently went to two concerts within 5 days, after not going to a concert for two years... and both involved the Dave Matthews Band.

The first was 'Hard Rock Calling' at Hyde Park. We met friends at Automat. before walking over to the park and claiming our spot for the evening. I had the brunch burger... a burger with sausage, bacon, and a fried egg on it (good).

Here we are (minus me behind the camera as everyone is looking at a guy offering to take the photo with me in it... credit goes to Jen for holding the pose during a distraction - the others obviously need to work on their concentration)

Hyde Park was packed... with Bruce Springsteen fans. Apparently he was huge here in the 80's, and that demographic was out in full force. (reliving their glory days?) It was a near full day event - we saw just James Morrison, DMB, and the Boss... My favorite part of seeing Bruce and the E Street Band was anticipating when 'Little Steven' would take on his Sopranos character on stage...

-- it didn't happen though.

This was as close as I could get to the stage... people were being very territorial about their Boss viewing...

Just before the end of the show... 10pm curfew on a sunday night in Hyde Park - which apparently could be heard for miles

We then headed off on tour with Dave Matthews the following Wednesday to Paris - which surprisingly turned out to be one of the best concerts I've ever seen (bold statement, I know - but it was...)

this is how close we were to the stage
(with the camera zoomed in...)

We had no idea where or what the venue would be like... it turned out to be a small theatre (the Olympia) in the 9th arrondisement - general admission on the floor, and seating above. Our seats were on the far right balcony just above the stage...

here is our true view... in arsty black & white (I thought it looked cool)

We were in the middle of a heat wave in London, and it was warmer in Paris, and then incrementally warmer inside this small theatre (and in true parisian style there was only evian and badoit as water options) - and they put on an amazing show... either they were happy to be in Paris, happy to be out of the UK, or for whatever reason it all just 'clicked' for them that night. They played for close to four hours - mixed in old with with new music really well, and from time to time dipped back into the 'jam' roots of the 'new' band - with the new big guy on trumpets, one of the Flecktones replacing Leroi Moore on saxophone, and Tim Reynolds

here is the first encore - when dave came back out by himself, voice a bit shot from the show:


and here you can (maybe) see us here if you pause it at :47ish on this video up in the balcony when the woman's face is in the foreground...



this is from the opposite angle:


and this 'youtuber' was sitting right next to us - and took better videos than I did with my camera... so can be a proxy for us if you want to see a bit more of what we saw: http://www.youtube.com/user/lmcoelho666#play/uploads

and someone else's flickr page for more photos

definitely one of the best, and I have seen quite a few (not a boasting statement...its just what we used to do on Wednesday nights in Richmond at the Flood Zone where we went to many of these shows for $5.

Great fun... and then we headed off to the Basse Normandy coast the next morning - to a town called Deauville.. more to come on that.

test of a google streetview link below of the olympia theatre..


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