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Photo by Fotografieke
The Machine started playing, the Melkweg crowd waited in anticipation, and suddenly on walked two metres worth of legs in killer heels, attached to the rest of Florence. As she stood behind her flower covered mic stand, spotlight bouncing off her intense red hair, she had already won half the match.
Since seeing Florence + The Machine at Lowlands in August they seem to have gone for a more down tempo approach in quite a few songs in the set. Particularly early on, songs like My Boy Builds Coffins and Kiss With A Fist were performed slower and more drawn out. Halfway through, the energy picked up when Florence instructed the audience to start jumping during Dog Days Are Over.
Photo by Fotografieke
I really enjoyed the next few songs, highlights would have to be Howl, Cosmic Love and Fever Ray’s If I Had A Heart introduction to a beautiful performance of Blinding. There was a two song encore with You Got The Love and, of course, Rabbit Heart. It was quite a short set, I was left wanting more. Shame, because I’m sure some of her demo material, Hardest Of Hearts for instance, would stand up fine.
All in all a wonderful evening with the beautiful spellbinding songstress Florence and her Machine. Although, dare I say I did miss a bit of oomph in songs like Drumming Song and Hurricane Drunk, and a bit of sparkle compared to the magic of Lowlands?
SETLIST
01 Bird song
02 My boy builds coffins
03 Kiss with a fist
04 Are you hurting the one you love
05 I’m not calling you a liar
06 Hurricane drunk
07 Two lungs
08 Dog days are over
09 Howl
10 Druming Song
11 Cosmic Love
12 Blinding (intro: Fever Ray’s If I had a heart)
— encore —
13 You got the love
14 Rabbit heart (raise it up)
You’ve got to hand it to the innovative folks at Dutch copyright organisation Buma/Stemra, they’ve done it! They’ve found a clever way to battle all this file sharing malarky the kids seem to be so caught up in these days. I mean, the whole “internet thing” has onviously gotten way out of hand and somebody needs to step up to the plate.
By making interwebbers pay an alltogether reasonable fee, starting at 130,- euro for 6 embedded YouTube videos, they’ve managed to crack down on all those morally bankrupt people stealing material from its rightful owners.
In fact, I have some additional suggestions for Buma/Stemra. Just today I saw two people in the train sharing the two ear plugs connected to a single iPod. Best case scenario one of them might have paid for that music, but what about the other one? Perhaps train ticket collectors could be authorised to issue fines for this sort of blatant theft.
Another great idea comes frome a fellow concerned Buma/Stemra supporter, posted on this website. His suggestion is that the organisation should further explore the cash potential of ringtones and frequency of use. If a chatterbox gets more phonecalls than average, transmitting the ringtone more frequently, why not charge him more for its use?
Oh and Buma/Stemra, if you choose to implement any of the above mentioned ideas, I will be expecting compensation at a rate of let’s say 130,- euro per person fined/ charged additional costs. Are we good?
extra extra read all about it:
- Buma/Stemra announce new policy
- Bloggers, twitterbugs & co are outraged, start petitions, write letters
- Even politicians raise an eyebrow
- Buma/Stemra’s repsonse is as jurassic as it is brief: “Voor niets gaat de zon op” (the sun rises for free).
