a-ha receive Cross of St. Olav

And, as many of you who have tried and failed to get your own Cross of St. Olav, that’s a pretty big deal in Norway.

Morten Harket, Magne Furuholmen and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy will be awarded the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, during a special ceremony in Oslo on Tuesday, November 6. The Order of St. Olav is awarded for distinguished services for Norway and mankind. The members of a-ha are receiving this Royal Order for their outstanding musical contribution.

And local newspaper Aftenposten pulled no punches in their adulations at the band’s achievements.

Du kan gå hvor som helst på kloden og plutselig høre en a-ha-låt fra en kafé, en bil, et hus. Du sier navnet Magne Furuholmen, og du blir bedt med inn på te i Bangkok, du nevner i forbifarten Morten Harket og drosjesjåføren i Buenos Aires slår av taksameteret. På en parkbenk i New York kommer du i snakk med en person om Waaktaar-Savoys «Velvet», og du har en venn for livet.

Or:

You can go anywhere on this planet and suddenly hear an a-ha song at a cafe, in a car, a house. You say the name Magne Furuholmen and suddenly, you are invited for tea in Bangkok; you mention Morten Harket in passing and the Buenos Aires cab driver stops the meter, you discuss Waaktaar-Savoy’s song ‘Velvet’ on a bench in New York and you find yourself a friend for life.

I have to admit that even as a big fan, none of these things have ever happened to me. Maybe I’ve been listening to classic 80’s synthpop in all the wrong cities. I’d love to be invited for tea in Thailand or get a cheap ride in Argentina. To be fair, I’m less interested in a friend for life in America, but that’s just a personal thing. Anyway, I don’t generally discuss specific pieces of music with benches or any other form of street furniture.

After that incident while chatting about Bohemian Rhapsody with the cycle rack it’s safety first for me.

Treehouse

It’s been a very busy weekend. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and it seems that I could have watched about 19 hours of live football over the two days. However, by some unfortunate twist(s) of fate, all I managed to see was the last 15 minutes of Liverpool v Newcastle, including another dodgy red card.

So busy, yes, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t fun. Birthday parties, braais, sleepovers and the highlight for us, the unveiling of an early Christmas present for the kids – a treehouse.

Here they are, on it as soon as they were allowed this morning (we like to consider our neighbours, see?).

This picture makes it look like our back garden is a forest, which obviously, it’s not. It’s a garden. But the treehouse is – rightly – a huge hit. It’s close enough to be safe, hidden enough to be “secret” and features a cleverly designed rope web which acts as a comfy seat for relaxing with a book and which has already seen extensive action. Already, it has been a castle, a fire engine and a streetlight fixing crane. Not bad for its first 24 hours.

In addition, because of this recent installation, I have been constantly humming a song featuring the word “treehouse” by these guys and I will be sharing that at some point in the near future.

Fairly incredible

I saw this on Dvice yesterday and had to share it.

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

Basically, rather than handing the tablets out, which is their usual m.o., they literally put the boxes containing one tablet per child in the village and then they left. No instructions, no lessons on what they were or what to do with them, nothing.

We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village.

Poison Arrow, or The Look of Love? Either way, great taste.

And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

Something is nagging me about the ethics of all this, but apparently, we’re told to gloss over that and appreciate the seemingly huge advances that this could mean for education and the spread of literacy in previously illiterate communities.

And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.

All in all, it’s a fairly incredible story. I wish all my experiments went this well.

80s Rewind Festival Review

OK, first things first: it was a great night. And sure, none of the acts on show at Grand West yesterday (and again this evening, incidentally) are cutting edge, but that’s not why anyone was there. So mock all you like. We had a great time reliving days gone by.
You’ll want to do it one day, just like I thought I wouldn’t.
Also, Golden Circle tickets and being right at the front made all the difference. This is the way to do concerts. None of that seated in the sky nonsense.

So, let me take you through it act by act.

First up, Leee John from Imagination. One wonders how many repeated vowels one needs in their forename. Their big hits were in ’81 and ’82 and came from roots of soul, RnB and disco. Thus, looking at the New Wave, Electronic and Pop acts making up the rest of the lineup, he didn’t really fit in here. Still, that didn’t stop him performing with energy and enthusiasm and he was well received. Most importantly, he didn’t take himself too seriously and set the scene for a fun evening. Yeah – nice warm up act, but that’s about all.

And then Nik Kershaw. Shorter than you might imagine, Nik was there to play his music and it was really obvious that playing his music was really important to him, as he fiddled with his distortion pedals and drifted off into professional, faultless guitar solos. After opening with Wide Boy, we got all the hits, which, after all, was what we were there for. The Riddle, Don Quixote and, as he described it “the song that changed my life” Wouldn’t It Be Good. And in the middle of all of this, Chesney Hawkes’ 1991 hit I Am The One And Only. As Kershaw plainly stated: “I wrote it, so I’m going to sing it”. And that really got everyone going.
He ended off with I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me and even as he took his tiny frame off stage to you could hear bucket lists being ticked off all around us. Excellent.

My highlight: Martin Fry of ABC was up next. Three letter bands from the 80s: I just love them. Looking like a washed up TV detective, he wandered on in a 80s style blue suit and promptly banged out some great tunes. Complete with frequent Jonny Vaughan style “point and wink” at apparently random members of the crowd, he duly went through his hits, again demonstrating that you don’t lose a great voice, even thirty years after your first hit. All of My Heart was rudely chatted through by the typically rude SA audience, while more up-tempo numbers like Poison Arrow and When Smokey Sings got people moving.
He signed off with The Look Of Love, nothing unusual, just the straightforward Radio Edit. And that was exactly how it should be – people were craving familiarity and they got it. For me, this was the perfect performance, perfectly executed.

     
Photos courtesy of Mrs 6000’s cellphone

So far, so good. But then the slow motion car crash that was Belinda Carlisle. It was disastrous, but you just couldn’t look away. Don’t make me see anymore! I CAN’T TAKE IT!
Ill-fitting clothes (and they have to have been really bad for me to have noticed – I’m not huge on fashion), facelifts so tight that her chin is still in 1989, and poorly-disguised industrial underwear presumably worn in a forlorn effort to take everything in place. Sure, from a distance, I’m sure it looked ok, but up close it was just horrendous. She kicked off with Runaway Horses (scraping into the 80s by just two months), before greeting the audience with “Do you remember the 80s?  Because I don’t.”
I said earlier that the acts don’t take themselves too seriously. Belinda looks like she’s seriously taken everything. She has allegedly been drink and drug free since at least 2007, but if that’s true, then it’s clear that the damage has already been done. Slurred words, missed lyrics, frequent tuneless bellowing. It wasn’t great.
That said, again, the familiarity of continually repeated choruses kept the crowd happy.
And, on the plus side, if you are looking for a walking advertisement for not doing drugs, Belinda Carlisle is it.

But then, there was Tony Hadley.
Tony Hadley was great when he came over with Spandau Ballet in 2010 and the voice, the showmanship, the easy relationship he has with both parties in his role as a channel between the songs and the audience was there again. A different set this time: nothing new to sell, just entertaining us with his amazing talent and his chatty style. We started out with a cover of Feeling Good, before he did True and borrowed Duran Duran’s Rio to move the energy level up again. Through The Barricades and Gold ended the performance.
There’s just something exceptional about his power and stage presence – I noted this back in 2010 as well. Is it that he’s really that good or is it that he carefully engineers his performances to come immediately after something wholly unprofessional (Alphaville that time, Carlisle this)?
OK, let’s be honest – he’s just really, really good at what he does.

It gave Rick Astley a tough act to follow. But bizarrely, the crowd was just so anxious to see him that he could have totally Carlisled and it probably wouldn’t have mattered.
Astley was one of the first “manufactured” pop artists, coming out of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman stable in 1987. If you can look beyond that alleged crime though, he has got a superb voice – even if his hits never really challenged or showcased it. He played to the audience with constant and repetitive jokes about “his effect” on “the ladies”, which grated after the first few times, but – perhaps because of “his effect” on “the ladies” – “the ladies” totally lapped up. He insisted that he and the band (who were absolutely exceptional from start to finish, by the way) got beer delivered to them on stage. He mocked the on-stage camera guy. And in between all of that, he sang his songs and I was reminded that they were rather ordinary songs. As was the performance: nothing exceptional, just standard delivery with apparently minimal effort.
Musically, it was a real disappointment, because that voice could do so much more.
Predictably (but remember that predictability was why we were there last night, so this was a good thing), he finished with Never Going To Give You Up, giving us all a nice feelgood singalong before we headed home.

One note on the venue: Grand West do concerts ever so well. Pre-paid parking, priority lanes out on exiting, Traffic Police organised for the roads outside. It’s really very good and the fact that you don’t notice anything wrong means that they are actually doing things right.

Anyway, if you’re going along to the show tonight or up in Gauteng on the weekend, you’re going to enjoy it. The acts are there to do what you want them to do: sing the hits that you enjoyed back in the 80s. No alarms and no surprises.
Sure, some do it better than others, but the emphasis is on fun and yes, it was fun. Nice work.