Very busy week. My busiest day was on Wednesday, when I had five events. Luckily, the first four took place in three buildings that were 50 metres apart, so that was easy to manage. The first was a coffee with a banker, next was lunch with a global bank (lots of Chinese food, very noisy venue), then an interview with an IT company, then a local bank’s 2008 results (not too shabby), lastly there was a party with a big private bank in the National Museum of Singapore. That was my first time back in it since they renovated it. It used to have sleepy old world charm, but it’s been dusted off and modernized with a glass annex, escalators, all that jazz, so it’s half old and half new. Great, let’s compromise the centuries, then we’ll have the best and worst of both worlds!
Killing time, I hung out in Grammophone and made a big mistake. I found a Cream DVD at a good price and bought it without looking carefully enough at the packaging. I thought it was vintage cream from the 1960s, but when I opened it up I saw that it was from a recent reunion concert. And when I looked carefully at the cover, I saw that it has the date in 2005 of the show hidden in the hard-to-read psychadelic writing.
This is what I was expecting:
This is what I got.
Stupid me.
DVD review
Cream: Royal Albert Hall, London, May 2-3-5-6 2005 – The best thing about the DVD is the cover, which looks like an old Haight-Ashbury poster advertising a gig at the Fillmore East, the three members of the band looking in their 20s (rather than their 60s – Clapton was 60, Jack Bruce was 62, Ginger Baker was 66 – as they are onstage). Nowhere on the outside packaging does it say that the concert was recorded in 2005, other than in the cover graphic, there are no still pics from the show either on the back with the song list and DVD features.
I’m a casual Cream fan, and my interest is more in the “vintage look and sound” I expected from something archival. Knowing that I wasn’t going to get that, I still did watch about about four songs. The music is good, the sound not so good, and the sight of three aging hippies is unappealing, most especially the absurd close-up of Ginger Baker’s stockinged foot as he hits the bass pedal. He looks more like Margaret Thatcher’s late husband Dennis than a rock ‘n’ roller. Jack Bruce seems quite frail, while Clapton looks exactly as you remember him from the past 20 years – the signature hairstyle, the beard and glasses, he looks about 20 years younger than Bruce and Baker. I might skip through this to see if the extras have anything of interest, but I certainly won’t watch all of it. This is for fans only, people who remember the band when they were releasing new albums, people who maybe did see them in the day. I will probably see if someone else wants it, or just throw it in the garbage. Very disappointed. I should have done my research.