Attack, Decay, Sustain

I feel priviledged to have so many interesting people following my work, having attended to so many concerts all around the world for a long time. Thanks to all of you.

I recently spent some time with some of them, notably Mark G (the first founder of the U.K. Fan club, before Duncan Walls took the reins ) and the people from magneticfields.dk to discuss about revamping my website: Jacob Gunness, Claus Lundholm, dear Signe Zacchi and Ras Bolding, Henrik Gilvad and everybody. Thomas Alsina and the Aero team, Fiona Commins and Louis Hallonet were there as well. I really enjoyed the discussion. Through the years, we have established a good link far beyond the usual "Artist / Fans" one..

Actually, these days, I consider the core of fans much more as part of a club of people sharing the same values, tastes..etc and it is along this mindset that I would like to develop the web site in the future. We exchanged a lot of ideas to improve it, starting from the fact that I have never been really satisfied by my websites so far, being often designed by record companies mainly based on direct marketing around the current album, as is the case for a lot of artists. I really want to change that..
We are thinking about many things, i'll let you know..



This week, I also met M. Matsura, Director General of UNESCO and Vice Director Marcio Barbosa to discuss the Concert in Canary islands in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy. The project should happen under the banner of UNESCO and involve a lot of different sectors, quite exciting....

M. Matsura suggested that I should be "Special" UNESCO Ambassador for the International Year of Astronomy.. I contacted Garik Israelian and Brian May to let them know about all this. Both of them were very happy about the news,

(Brian is currently very busy with the Mandela Concert in London with Queen. He actually should be on stage at the moment...)

This concert related to Space and the stars is a great and unique project for me and obviously I'll keep you posted.

I do think it is time to re-evaluate our link with space.

Like I was saying on stage during the last tour, our vision of the future has changed. In the the 60's, everybody had a rather innocent view of it, full of hopes and dreams. 2001 was ahead of us, the Arthur C. Clarke's novel and the Stanley Kubrick's movie managed to create a rather epic vision of the future and influenced an entire generation, and for the first and the last time so far, a man walked on the Moon...

Today, 2001 is behind us, it is as if Sci-Fi and our vision of the future was behind us. We have much narrower and somber feelings about the next century. Our vision and hopes have shrunk: Are we going to survive on our polluted planet?...etc.

It is probably time to consider our planet in a different context, it is probably time to listen to Astronomers and Astrophysicists, to tell our children how great it can be to get a better understanding of Earth exploring, watching and listening at the Universe.

It is the reason why the International year of Astronomy is important and the reason why this concert is exciting.

I then met Mark Richmond, in charge of the "Sustainable Development Decade" at UNESCO. He asked me how I could help promoting his program. I told him that in my humble opinion, the main difficulty is to make people understand what it means and the first step should be to find a simple and clear definition for it. I mentioned this exercise we had at the University: trying to resume a book or an idea in one page, one paragraph, one sentence, one word. What could it be for "sustainable development?

I also gave the exemple of this great speech this young girl did at United Nations ( see my 24-06-08 blog post). Chidlren have a natural respect and an instinctive strong link with Nature, but it seems to decrease, if not disappear, as soon as we become adults.

First of all, instead of complaining, giving lessons and feeling guilty, we should send a clear message with simple words and remedies. Mostly everybody today is keen on doing something, but when we're told that we have to "save the planet", it is suddenly a bit too big for an individual's shoulders, and daunting. We need a bunch of simple acts which anybody could do easily every day, every week...

I also suggested to launch on You Tube a big video competition. I could create, for instance a 2-minute piece of music on which anyone could express one positive idea about the environment, in any way, film, photos, animation...

Mark Richmond said he is going to work with his team on few bullet points in order to clarify the term "sustainable development" and was very positive about the You tube idea, saying that it could be linked with the World Conference they hold in Bonn next year.