THE ROCK ADVENTURES OF MadART HURRY VOL 1 – IGGY POP, RELEASE FESTIVAL, 2019-06-08 ATHENS

Hey everybody! Long time no see, but I’m back for good this time and with a whole lot to share with you on a lot of interesting subjects! Some will be about having fun and living a full life like we all should, and some will be about sharing thoughts on overcoming personal difficulties and my observations on human behavior, patterns and workarounds.

With this one, I am starting one of my series, my rock (and not only) adventures! This year I decided that no longer am I gonna miss another great concert by groups and artists that I really admire, well at least not for an extremely good reason.

There are good chances that at least at the beginning these stories are going to be a little belated related to the time they actually took place, but bear with me, I have a bad sense of time and a hard time completing a task (although I am working on fixing both of them)!

Disclaimer: in some parts I refer also to my misadventures and unfortunate conditions. In no way I am complaining or being grumpy! I am just mentioning them because they are part of the stories, and some of them are quite tragicomic, while others can serve as lessons, both to me and to the readers if they want to take one! And to be honest, the last month I really feel like tragicomic is kinda hunting me, but I am sure that it’s just a phase and it’s going to pass and let only good times to tell about!

So enjoy, laugh, be wowed and feel free to feel like you were there too! Here we go!

Dear grown up diary ( 😛 ), time was running fast on the last week, everything still needed to be arranged and I now knew that it was my job to arrange most of them… Due to a series of misunderstandings, misfortunes and technical failures, the tickets to the event and to the excursion were far from booked and we were counting less than five days to the date!

Well, the tickets were finally bought from my fellow traveler, but the excursion was another story… We initially managed to arrange our participation in one of the excursions even last minute, but after paying for it we were informed that sadly there was a mistake and there were actually no empty seats for us. So, we are having the money returned and there we go two days before the show without a cheap way to travel there. Long story short, I ended up booking tickets with the train and we ended up paying double the price for our transportation. Here is a lesson for the next time: never let someone else arrange something that you know you can! Even when they have the best intentions, there is always a great chance for shit to happen if you don’t do it yourself a fair amount of time before. 😅

The next lesson that I learned was, never be too cocky to believe that you can get away with no sleep the night before in a trip on Athens in the summer, especially when you don’t know the ins and outs of the area you’re going to navigate. Also, don’t rely on you sleeping on the train or on the bus. That doesn’t work out anymore, you may sleep, but there are good chances that you will wake up far from refreshed and with a feeling that your body is gonna crack in several pieces. But we’ll get to that soon enough. The one thing I can tell you is that last night it was a night out with my fellow band mates (I play the bass in a heavy rock band with metal & punk elements), and as I returned home after midnight and I am notorious about my “not waking up when I should just wake up” habit, I decided not to sleep at all, so that I won’t miss the train! 😛

So, it’s 08’30 and I am on the station as planned, ordering a quadruplicate ( 😮 ) coffee and some snacks for the road and waiting for my fellow traveler to show up. Thankfully he did on time. We made it to the train platform, entered our wagon, and, holy buzzoly, I saw something that I had nearly a decade to see! The old fashioned blue, six seats wagons that were my favorite ones back in the time. Oh the emotions! :-D

After a short conversation, just enough so that the ticket collector showed up in our wagon, I said farewell to the world of the non sleeping state and well, I slept! The whole trip went like a breeze and we arrived in Athens around 13’30, hyped but not refreshed, with me trying to drag my bones and keep my eyes open!

I have many friends there, so we arranged coffee with two of them near the event’s location. Stavros Niarchos was the place where we went for a coffee, in front of a scenic canal, where I decided to practice some ninjutsu moves, wearing both my sight glasses and my sunglasses! ( 😅 )

Time passed like a breeze again, having a delicious lemonade that fooled everyone into believing that I had a mojito, great conversations with friends that I had a long time to talk with – making plans for how to make our lives the way we want them and a chance for me to freshen up and finally wear my contact lenses again so that I don’t have to go double-glassed anymore! 😆

It was time for my Athenian friends to leave us though, and hunger has worked its miracles on me, which in cooperation with the unbearable heat, the lack of sleep and the fact that the area we were on had no place to eat cheap and decently without walking for half an hour on the opposite direction of the festival’s location and asking half a dozen people where we can find fast food, admittedly worked miracles on me and made me, to say at the most polite way.. a little bitchy! I must have been a terrible company for the next 1,5 hour. Sorry friend, I’ll never allow this combination again! 😞

Anyway, we managed to find some food to keep us alive and up we headed back to Niarchos and on our way to Water Square for Release Festival!

Upon approaching we started hearing the current playing band’s music and returned to hyped state, the tiredness leaving more and more! Apparently we have missed the opening local acts due to our hunt for food and we also had a little unpleasant surprise on the entrance where the ticket and security people informed us that we could bring nothing but water inside concerning food and drinks… We still had our snacks for the return train with us which costed approximately €15 combined, so that was really uncool. Of course, being Greeks and having a fair amount of disobedience, resourcefulness and thinking out of the box in our personalities, we managed to find a way to pass them in and save them for our trip back! 😝

The things that I really liked about the organization of the festival from the beginning was the great variety of food – drink (really regretting the hunt for food at that moment, when thinking that we could just eat here, but my experience from other festivals didn't allow me to foresee it), the lockers where we could leave our staff and move freely (Rockwave Festival are you listening?), the nicely arranged kiosks with things to explore, and, oh well, the pillow puffs where we could finally rest our tired bodies while waiting for the main acts! That was a blast! On the surprises of the evening I can count the really many kids with their parents!

As it turned out to be, we remained on the puffs for the whole appearance of James, as their music can possibly be equally enjoyed in a state like this as it would be standing in the middle of the crowd. Different experiences, but equally enjoyed! On the downsides of our choice was the fact that we had not the same sound as we were informed later by other friends that we met.

We listened to many great and really loved songs of them, both old and new, such as “Come Home”, “Nothing But Love”, “Five-O”, “Laid”, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)“, “Sometimes” (my personal favorite from them) and many more, as well as “Sit Down” for the encore.

I would really love to listen to “Born Of Frustration”, “Lose Control”, “Destiny Calling” and “Senorita” also, but sadly that didn’t happen…

The true experience and the long waited moment for many of us though, was to come right after! As soon as James said goodbye, we popped up like we were on one of these cars on comics that throw you off your seat, and up to the front we went! Well, as front as possible. Until the 10th row approximately, getting through was fairly easy. But when we reached this point, it was the turn for my fellow traveler to say enough is enough and he denied to move further. So we stayed there. Not for a very long time though, as later we would move towards all the directions of the horizon, along with our fellow ecstatic friends all around us!

And, another cult reminder with memories from my childhood this time, the t-shirt that the guy in front of me was wearing! Can you tell the movie?!!

Iggy Pop’s appearance started with howling dogs, a prelude to let us into the hymn “I wanna be your dog”, with an Iggy rushing on the stage and taking it over, followed by the rest of the six membered band!

The “Godfather of Punk” during the whole set of his appearance showed us that true spirit has no age, by running all over the place, singing, dancing, parading in front of the crowd and hugging them, untired, unintimidated by some idiots that threw him bottles at some point (I think that he avoided them with some dancing moves and I am sure that I saw a middle finger raised in the photos later 😃 )!

We experienced more than one and a half hour with masterpieces delivered to us one after another like a tornado, a tribute to the unforgettable and beloved David Bowie, as well as a cover on Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” for the closing.

“I Wanna Be Your Dog”, “Gimme Danger”, “The Passenger” with a lot of trumpets and La La La La La La Las, “Lust for Life”, “Skull Ring”, “I’m Sick of You”, “Some Weird Sin”, “Repo Man”, “Search and Destroy”, “Mass Production”, “The Jean Genie”, “1969”, “No Fun”, “Down on the Street”, “Real Cool Time”, “Nightclubbing”, “Sixteen”, “Five Foot One”, “Real Wild Child (Wild One)” and, well, you get the picture!

People on a frenzy, singing (and screaming) along, jumping around, pushing and being pushed, smokes and a suspicion of a fire lit somewhere, and of course the smartphones weren’t absent (O tempora o mores!). True, I used it too, but only on specific moments that I wanted to capture the picture, and that wasn’t more than a 5% of the whole show! On the rest of it I was banging and singing and jumping around! People, you’re missing some experience there!

And an Iggy, expressive even when he had expression on his face, saying to us something around the lines “We’re not talking about controversial shit, no, we’re going to the jungle, we're facing life and death”!

“No more beating my brains” is my moto from the night! Παίχτε πανκ!

After the show has ended and we were numb from what we have experienced and trying to collect our brains back, we met another friend of us. The night was still young for us, as we had several hours left until the dawn that our train was leaving for Thessaloniki. So we decided to spend it in Gazi and Interpid Fox, a bar that has been in my heart ever since and will surely be revisiting whenever I happen to be in Athens again!

Tired but whole and full of great memories, we returned the other day to our city and our homes to sleep our day away! 😃

Waiting for the next one!