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MUSIC

Rome ups concert fee after Rolling Stones row

Event organizers wanting to hire out Rome's historic Circus Maximus will now have to pay as much as €200,000 for the pleasure, after the city council upped the fee from the much-criticized €8,000 payed by the Rolling Stones last month.

Published: 24 July 2014 12:42 CEST
Rome ups concert fee after Rolling Stones row
File photo: Roslan Rahman/AFP

In a preliminary decision on the 2014 budget, Rome’s city council agreed to increase the original fee from €8,000 to a maximum of €200,000, Il Tempo reported.

The increase in rent will also apply to other squares and public spaces in the capital’s historic centre.

The complaint over the low price came despite the fact that the concert was one of the most profitable in Italian history, boosting the city’s coffers by €25 million in a single day.

Speaking after the event, Rome’s Mayor Ignazio Marino said: “Today Rome has almost 60,000 people on top of 10-20,000 Romans who came to this event.

“People who went to hotels, restaurants, who took taxis or had ice creams determined a profit for the city of €25 million in a day.”

The Rolling Stones performed at the ancient Roman chariot stadium on June 22nd where they delighted fans with classic hits including Jumpin’ Jack Flash, which opened the show, Streets of Love and Let’s Spend the Night Together.

Leader singer Mick Jagger even treated the audience to a few sentences in Italian, winning him praise from national media.

“Grazie. Ciao Roma, ciao Italia,” (Thank you, bye Rome, bye Italy) the rocker yelled at the crowd, according to news agency Ansa.

Their performance earned the band a glowing reviews from the Italian press, including Il Messaggero which wrote: “He [Mick Jagger] continues to jump, run, sing and spread charisma on a stage as big as a football field, demonstrating that he is one of the greatest performers in history.”

The positive reception came despite concerns raised among heritage groups in March who warned of "unpredictable consequences" and possible "acts of vandalism" in a "very fragile" area of the city.

READ MORE: Rolling Stones gig sparks heritage concerns

"The choice of the Circus Maximus for the Rolling Stones concert brings a measure of risk for the heritage of the area that is not only heightened but also hard to predict," the office of archaeological supervisors said in a statement at the time.

The concert was the Stones' first since March, when the band put their tour on hold following the suicide of Jagger's girlfriend, the designer L' Wren Scott.  

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CULTURE

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

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
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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