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Frida in Munich - Erik Menkens FULL Report Here is my report! Monday morning at 5 I got up, and my flight landed in Munich/München at 9:30. I met a friend and his friends in a hotel opposite of Frida's hotel. They had just called every hotel (I guess starting with the most luxurious hotels working their way down) and asked if Frida or John Lord had reservations. And this way they had found out that Frida and Lord were staying in the Dorint Sofitel behind the central station. It's that easy! But nobody else had that idea. Or didn't try to find out. The hotel is nice and old from the outside, new and very modern and not everybody's taste on the inside. The gang had seen Frida briefly the day before and had also talked to Lord's manager, who had told them some things, which might be true or not. Obviously Frida refused to sing live, even though every artist in the show Sunday Nights Classics is supposed to sing live. But she also told them that Frida does not want to have to do anything with ABBA anymore. It must be fun to be a manager of somebody, you can fool people and you don't get in trouble for that. Well, she also confirmed Frida's participation in John's concert in Cologne/Köln in early October. I took the chance and used the restroom in the basement of this brand new five star hotel. When I came back, I was asked "Did you see her, did you see her?" "Where I was the chances to see a 'she' was quite low; who do you mean"? Stupid question, Frida of course! She had returned from a shopping spree in the city and had rushed up to her room. Duuuh! After 15 minutes, at about 1:15, she appeared with a trolley thing and was in a hurry and told us so, but stopped for two minutes to sign things and to allow us to take some photos before she left again. Somebody told her (in German) that the song is beautiful. And she replied (also in German) "Which song?" "The new one" "Oh, that one. Yes, thanks." And then she left. We were only 9 people, and one of us had a bus for 8 persons. I was number 9, so I had to get a taxi. Obviously my driver knew his way around, because when I arrived at the Bavaria Studios and found Lex, his friend Evelyn and Matti, Frida had not arrived yet. Am 07.09.2004 um 19:25 schrieb Matthew Crocker: >and then the stream of black mercedes started to crawl in with various guests. <gasps for air> Skoda, not Mercedes! We waited for some minutes, then Frida arrived, and suddenly everybody went crazy. I think we saw Vanessa Mae before Frida's arrival, but there were only 5 people or so around her. Now it seemed, Frida was surrounded by 30 (didn't count though). She signed things, said hi to people she obviously recognized, smiled, got flowers and went through the back door into the studio. And suddenly all the people were gone again. We went around the corner into the shadow to cool down again. It was a wonderful later summer day. We called people and sent text messages around the world. Lex and Matti managed to get photos signed and felt the urge to let everybody know. After a while we decided to get something to eat and drink. We stumbled over the red carpet, and a security guy told us that this carpet is for TV only. Only the celebrities will walk on this red carpet which will be filmed for the show itself between 7 and 7:15pm, the other guests will need to take a different entrance. We walked around the corner ... and found an open door and heard music. The rehearsals were ongoing. We stepped in, were not stopped by anybody, sat down, were not kicked out, not even asked what we were doing there. About 20 people were sitting quietly and watched. That was around 3:00. Suddenly they had a white costume on a hanger and somebody carried it around on the stage for light rehearsal. They called it "her costume", until finally somebody said "No, that doesn't work, she needs to wear it now. Do you think Frida would put it on now for a light test?" Oh my gosh! No, somehow they changed their mind, nobody needed to wear the outfit on the stage right now, let alone Frida. The rehearsals were stopped again and again due to various technical problems and human errors. It was very hot in the studio after several sunny days and there is no air conditioning. It was really a tough job for the orchestra and all the technicians and people who had to run around to get heavy instruments onto the stage and off the stage again. At around 5:30 or so we were outside for a few minutes to go to McDonalds just opposite the studio. But they were already closing! I hadn't eaten and drunk anything since 7:15 in the morning (and only a small sandwich) on the airport in Bremen, so we wanted to go somewhere else to get something, but we saw that they were closing the door to the studios, and we didn't want to take the risk of being locked out, in case Frida would rehearse. So we sneaked back in. At that point we thought that not everybody would rehearse, only a few names were mentioned. After a while we found out, that indeed nearly everybody would rehearse, and those whose names were mentioned were scheduled to rehearse more than once. Finally, at around 7:00 Frida and John did their rehearsal. Wow, what an atmosphere! Frida was still wearing her black outfit that she had already on when she left the hotel, and she seemed relaxed and confident and patient while the technicians were running around her. Frida and John did the song twice which took about 18 minutes. It was playback, but it was hard to tell. Frida sings it so purely, no technical tricks, that it could as well have been live. But on the big screen above the stage you saw that her lip movements were not in sync with the song most of the time. The second time they did the song, she had a better timing. The backing track was the same as the one we know, but the orchestra still played over it, which you could only hear sometimes. The sound in the studio for the live parts was bad, but I guess that for the show on TV they will mix it differently. Maybe then they will push the orchestra a little more in the foreground. After all, it's a pop meets classic show, and Frida's song is not really classical music. According to the tickets, the audience was to be let in at 6:30, but it wasn't until 7:30 that the doors were opened for 800 people. We were still in the studio. We thought - and were told by another security guy - that everybody gets kicked out prior to the opening of the doors, in order to make sure that only people with tickets would get inside. We were not asked to leave though, so when we saw that the doors opened, we quickly decided to move one row up. The people in the first three rows sometimes would have had problems to see everything on the stage, due to half a dozen camera people moving to and fro in front of them. It was better to sit a little higher. The red carpet thing was scheduled for 7, but we didn't know if had been postponed too and if it would be worth it to go there and to lose the perfect seats in the middle of the studio. So we stayed. Others can tell what happened outside. Obviously John was outside and was asked if Frida would come too. He said he would go in and ask. But nothing happened. Some people came in and were disappointed, others had waited longer and did get autographs by Frida. Obviously this did not happen on the red carpet but somewhere else, because I was told, all the stars went down the red carpet, except for Frida. Some fans got extra tickets for the red carpet, but they were double screwed because they couldn't get there or something like that. Well, we will hear it from others or see it on TV if she was on the red carpet or not. At 8:30, half an hour later than planned, the recording started. The show was filmed in little pieces, and in-between, while the stage set up was changed and tons of instruments were move, a warm-up guy tried to entertain the people and explained what was going on. And again there were many technical problems. It had cooled down only a little in the evening, so the hosts of the show still had problems with their text. But I was surprised to see that they hadn't memorized any fixed text. When they did a part three or four times, it was always the same content of course, but put differently into words. The orchestra by the way is the Münchener Symphoniker. The warm-up guy told us some things about them, for example that this orchestra is the only one to ever have received an Oscar award for film music, namely they played the music for Silence Of The Lambs. The first artist was Vanessa Mae with some half naked dancers, then belcanto tenor Juan Diego Flórez from Peru, Lang Lang, a Chinese piano player (who in his white suit and shirt with big 70's collar and long sideburns looked like one of those notorious Elvis Presley impersonators), Zucchero (beard, green clothes and a green cap which made him look like Fidel Castro; played Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime), Hayley Westenra who did Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights with John Lord, German hiphop band Söhne Mannheims, Glassbrothers (or Classbrothers?) and Cuba Percussions (play a mix of classic and Latin or Cuban music, which sounded good), and some other violin player and her sister on the piano; opera singer Anna Netrebko who was not there. Frida and John came in the middle of the show. Most of the artists had an intro clip, Frida's ad John's clip showed Money Money Money and Twist In The Dark and John working in the studio (no Frida though), then the hosts introduced them and the song started, but before the first word, Frida turned around and let the technicians know that she cannot hear anything through her earpiece. But her voice was already heard, so most people knew it was not live. Those who hadn't noticed yet were told by our warm-up guy what was happening. He said that it was understandable that an artist is nervous and decides to do playback after so many years not being on stage. Then he kept on telling us about Britney Spears' first TV performance in Germany, when she had problems with a scarf that got caught in her earpiece cable during a live TV show. I had actually seen that show back then and found it very funny. After a while Frida got a new earpiece, the music started to make sure Frida could hear it, but she couldn't, so the technician and then she herself played around with the transmitter. The music started again, she beamed a smile and shouted "okay" and the audience cheered. The make-up lady came to her. A fan shouted "I love you" (I think) in Swedish, she smiled and said "Tack" while not moving under the make-up lady's busy hands. Somebody else shouted something nice, and then there it was: a man shouted "Sing live or go home". I didn't understand the first two words, but it was clear it was something negative, whatever it was. For some reason I thought it was a Deep Purple fan ... It took everybody who did understand it some seconds to react, and the audience got a little restless and started mumbling. John Lord on the piano obviously had heard it too, but he also turned around only after a few seconds and you could see that he was mad. Our warm-up guy who probably didn't hear it, said "please don't use flash lights" and then the host of the show shouted "I don't think that is nice of you, we are happy that Frida is here with us", which made the audience applaud and cheer. My friend Frank from Stuttgart sitting next to me and Frank Horstmann who was sitting next to the first Frank, had understood what the guy had said and told me, and they said it was the weirdo guy from Roosendaal who we had seen earlier (with a sigh of relief, because the seats next to us were already taken). I don't know his name, but I have to admit that I think he is German. I am not sure because I never talk to him and never listen to him. Everybody ignores him in Roo ... and the funny thing is ... he always ignores being ignored by everybody ... To me it was not clear if Frida had heard the insult, as she was still being worked on by the make-up lady, who then left. The hosts did the intro again and Frida started singing. She looked radiant. Her hair was a little more ... how do you say ... fluffy ... In her creme white costume (jacket and pants, white scarf around her waist) she looked like Joan van Ark. As far as I could see she had a good timing for the lip syncing. It went fine, everybody was happy, the audience cheered and applauded, a John Lord fan behind us, who later outed himself as being from New York, screamed "We want more". Frida kissed John left, right, left. Marco, the host of the show came onto the stage and interviewed them. The other artists were not interviewed, only Frida and John. Frida starts talking, but you cannot hear her. Marco translates: Frida was happy to be on the stage again after 17 years. She knows German, but after so many years she would feel more comfortable with English. That was it. It lasted for 15 minutes. Later John is interviewed again together with the conductor of the orchestra, obviously they had worked together on the Telemann Experiment. Telemann was a composer and John likes him and found out that one of his songs has the same rhythm as the Swedish dance "poster" (that's what the name sounds like), so they decided to mix these two songs. Very ... interesting. The recording of the show dragged along slowly, and people started leaving at 10:30 or so, after two hours since the start. Some Frida fans waited outside for her, and actually she left the studio before the finale of the show, and so some fans got lucky, as she signed things, but she also said she was tired and wanted to go home. As far as I understood earlier she had already checked out of the hotel that noon, so I don't know where she was going. More and more people were leaving, at midnight the director of the show said that the remaining scenes could be shot without the audience, so everybody jumped up and left. Except for a 5 minute break outside, I spent 9 hours in the studio. I really got my money's worth. I took a taxi to the airport. I could have taken a hotel of course, but my flight left at 6:20 in the morning, that would have left me with around 2 hours of lying awake in a hotel bed, which could also do for free in the airport. There are no flights between midnight or so and 5:30 in the morning. München airport is the second biggest airport in Germany I think, but it was totally empty. It had some kind of apocalyptic feeling, walking through these endless deserted halls on the hunt for food. I finally found an ice cream vending machine. I nearly collapsed when it refused my first 2 Euro coin, but fortunately it accepted the only other coin I had. Later I found in the main terminal an 24 hour snack bar and got sandwiches and soft drinks. At 3 I lay down on one of the benches and had two hours or extremely restless sleep. But better than nothing. And above this, it didn't cost a thing! I was home at 9:00am. 2004 is getting better and better ... I am working on uploading photos (quality is not good, don't expect too much), you will find them on: photos.yahoo.com/wikingerik Have a nice day! Thanks to ABBAMAILer Erik Menkens from the little farm of horror amidst the green meadows of Wangerland, Germany |