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Greenland concert one for the record books

Apparently there is a Guinness World Record for just about anything, as an industrial metal band’s performance on a Greenlandic iceberg will be included in the 2016 edition of the annual reference book.

Published: 16 October 2015 12:01 CEST

Greenland concert one for the record books

Not a huge crowd, as one might imagine. Screenshot: Jägermeister/YouTub

Norwegian ‘black jazz’ band may have played a concert on top of one of Trolltunga, one of Norway’s most spectacular tourist sites, but they’ve got nothing on British industrial metal band The Defiled.

The four-piece played a 2014 concert on an iceberg in Greenland. The 30-minute gig was turned in to the short documentary that can be seen below (the iceberg performance starts around the 18:00 mark):

According to music site Metal Hammer, the performance will now be immortalized in the 2016 Guinness Book of World Records as the first ever concert on an iceberg.

“Breaking records certainly makes an interesting change from making them,” the band’s keyboardist, who goes by the name The AvD, told the site.

Greenland is an autonomous and largely self-governing member of the Kingdom of Denmark. With a population of just 57,000 and a land area of 2.2 million square kilometres, it is both the largest and most sparsely-populated island in the world.

The island’s ice sheet is melting rapidly, so there may not be too many more opportunities for iceberg concerts.

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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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