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Concert review: The Baboon Show

Swedish punk four-piece, The Baboon Show launched its ‘best of’ album with a live show at Debaser Slussen on Wednesday night.

Published: 20 March 2009 17:52 CET

Concert review: The Baboon Show

Support band Little Marbles don’t look old enough to watch a scary movie without a responsible adult accompanying them.

The wild-haired, colourfully dressed Norrköping female duo armed with acoustic guitars and voices powerful enough to shake your fillings loose, win the crowd’s respect with a raw, inventive seven song set.

The set, much like their songs, becomes wayward halfway through but with time on their side and talent to burn, Little Marbles have the potential to become great. Watch out for them.

Headliners, The Baboon Show then rip through 60 minutes of ferocious punk rock, punctuated with affectionate words for the admiring crowd.

Powerful song “Under your trousers” and the 100 miles per hour “Faster Faster Harder Harder” are highlights and earn the biggest cheers of the night.

Lead singer Cecilia Boström is a star. She swings from the lights, runs around and jumps up and down like a woman possessed.

Energetic Håkan Sörle provides the driving guitar riffs and looks like Wolverine after a hair cut and 15 espressos.

Sörle, drummer Niclas Svensson and bassist Helen Lindberg all share backing vocal duties, creating an exciting dynamic.

The mixed crowd of young fashionistas and aging punks show love to the band, without ever becoming very lively.

Momentum is lost with a two song guest appearance by rapper Ken Ring. The collaboration never gets close to the standards set by rock-rap crossovers between Aerosmith and Run DMC and Linkin Park and Jay-Z.

The Baboon Show, though, manage to send the crowd home happy with an encore blast of high tempo pop punk.

Whilst they will never sell as many records as Green Day or be as inventive as fellow punk bands like Be Your Own Pet, The Baboon Show make catchy songs, give a great live show and are well worth going to see.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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