Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

The other day I went together with a few friends to the WhiteSnake rock band concert in Nicosia.  It was the same venue and more or less the same setup as for the concert of the legendary Deep Purple back in 2005.  Except that:

• the sound was really crap this time
• WhiteSnake is not Deep Purple by any means - much more commercial, less passionate
• both video and photo cameras were not allowed, so no pictures
• there was much more advertising for the event, and the place was crowded
• there was a warm-up band, which actually performed better than WhiteSnake at certain times

A few things that I was thinking about during the concert:

• we need more beers
• “F*ck this” and “F*ck that” in between the songs doesn’t suit the romantic mood of many songs.  Like, “Is this love?”
• we need more beers
• like we have SEO - Search Engine Optimization on the web, some over-commercialized bands probably have CCO - Concert Crowd Optimization.  Pointing fingers to random people in the crowd, waving, shouting “Let’s make some f*cking noise!”, and other attempst to engage the audience strongly suggest that.  Plus a few other things.
• we need more beers
• “Ozzy!  Bring back Ozzy!  Ozzy rocks!”
• “Smoooooke on the water!  Fire in the sky!”
• we need more beers

Overall, I did have a good time with all the noise, beers, and fooling around.  But I won’t be going to the next WhiteSnake event.  One is just enough.

P.S.: If you want to see pictures, Flickr can help you out - thanks to small size of modern cameras and huge disregard to rules by rockers all over the world.

Wagamama franchise opened the doors of its first food spot in Cyprus.  Located in Nicosia, close to other famous food brands like Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Costa, and Burger King, it’s the first of the planned three restaurants.  Financial Mirror provides some details, such as:

Noodles are also the ideal fast food offering a nutritionally complete meal in a bowl, in addition to the rice dishes and a range of fresh juices, while for the hungry, the restaurant offers a variety of side dishes including meat and vegetable dumplings, skewered chicken, deep-fried prawns and raw salads.

Today I attended a kickboxing competition, organized by World Kickboxing Network. The event was held in Strovolos Municipality in Nicosia.

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Finally I got my act together and processed all the pictures. Out of 250 frames I selected 125. Mostly those are of Ian Gillan with a microphone. Steve Morse with his guitar and Don Airey up at his keyboards are the next most covered. Basist Roger Glover and drummer Ian Paice were on the other side of the stage, so their pictures aren’t as spectacular as of others, but I’ve go them covered anyway.

I’d like to thank Slava who started the whole argument with the security stuff and found out that it was OK to bring in the photo camera and that only video cameras were banned. If it wasn’t for him, I would leave my camera in the car and none of this pictures would have seen the light of the Web.

Without further a do…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-07-15_Deep_Purple_in_Cyprus

This is just a quick note to let all of you know that Deep Purple really rocked today! The concert was superb and I think everyone loved it there. Many thanks to all involved. It was worth every penny and more.

I made around 250 pictures today so it will take me some time to sort them out and select the good ones. I did a quick overview and it seem there were a lot of nice shots. I will post all the pictures most probably by the end of the tomorrow. Stay tuned.

On the personal losses: my voice is gone. Again. I hope it will return in a couple of days. And all my muscles hurt. That’s from too much jumping. Especially with Slava’s 12 year old son on my shoulders.

Awesome. The whole thing was awesome!