The Chameleons live 17/11/2013 @ Bi Nuu, Berlin

There are nights you just know you won't forget in life; nights in which you should not care about your worries, about where you do come from or where are you going, in case there is a thing such a goal in life at all. I have had very few experiences of such nights in my life, and all of them were always tied to music, wether it was a concert or just some tunes playing while being with someone else.

You know that one of such events is coming from the morning itself, you wake up and you smell the greatness coming: you ask your wounds to hold on for a few hours, because there is no pleasure with no pain, and viceversa. My brief story starts thus from the average morning of a Berlin autumn Sunday, with that tiny and pleasing rain beating on your window, and a sun that seems so old and lazy to wake up even on weekend days, gifting me with just a subtle semblance of the bright light he is used to give during the warm season.

I have been so lucky to gather all the vinyl of one of my favourite bands during latest month, and yesterday evening I had the very special chance to get them signed after a killer show of the band itself: ladies and gentlemen, we are not floating in space, but we are talking about The Chameleons.

The Chameleons, led by bassist and singer Mark Burgess, achieved the perfection in every single aspect of music composition: songwriting, sound and texture design, technique, lyrics, and concept album delivering. Their production features twisting and frenetic songs, sparse and touching ballads, mellow and dreamy tunes, and quality and different arrangements for some of the same tracks as well. And without ever mentioning, not even remotely, any love topic: I find that being a concrete and remarkable achievement when it comes to put such touching and brilliant thoughts in music.

So I pack my beloved records and I head for Bi Nuu Club in Schlesisches Tor, where I am welcomed by some pre-show airing of Death in June music [ Fall Apart, He's Disbabled, My Little Black Angel among the others], due to which my feeling of the blissful event coming reaches its climax. I really want to be in the very first row just below Mark, so as soon as the place starts getting crowded I take up the closest spot to the stage, right in the middle.

It's half past ten, room music stops in order to let our favourite reptiles come up to the stage. Bear with me for a second: we are prisoners in space, times and categories, and we can't to much to fight them. We die for being too old, we struggle for having beloved people far from our place, and we often cannot make it up due to constraints and dichotomies that are just bigger than us. We can just find those rare moments in which there is no space because everything we need is right there, no category at all because we are all the same, and no perception of time because we want that very second to hold on forever.

And what a better welcome signal to such healing and dionysian ritual than Swamp Thing?

I don't want to go through the mere setlist: every single song from them is superb, and I lived the concert as a whole, from the classic episodes of Tears, Second Skin, Don't Fall, Caution, Perfume Garden, Soul in Isolation just to name a few, to a couple of new themes straight from the brand new EP.

I just want to put the stress on Monkeyland, my favourite song ever, possibly the one that I would choose over a million in order to explain my whole life, which starts playing with its unmistakable hats intro, making me realise to be just part of it: I know every single note of all the instruments composing it, I know how such maidens love each other and get together to craft such masterpiece, and all the words, whose meaning is always clear during everyday's listening, now lie down to depict something I won't be able to grasp at all, at the end of the experience. I end up holding the hand of a perfect stranger because I need to let my fathomless feeling flow and fill the outer world, and I feel relieved not to have been rejected for a genuine sign that would have been for sure, in a different context. I really don't know if my creator is God or a man, as long as someone, somewhere, does care or understand.

Thank you Chameleons for letting the inexorable flow of existence stop even if for a brief moment only, and to all the souls gathered there to let this happen. And thank you Mark for greeting me in such a warm and friendly way, it's an inestimable pleasure to be remembered by someone I have in such high consideration, both as an artist and as a man.

This time I know for sure, it was the trick of no light : ))

D.