Happy new year! Are you ready for a new instalment of ‘Inspired by’?

OK… I’m going to warn you in advance: this is going to be a looooong post. That’s because to me this ‘Inspired by’ was a little bit different than our previous challenges. Different because of the absence of visual aspects and different because of the kind of inspiration it evoked in me. Let me explain, by talking you through my stream of thoughts.

When Riikka proposed Libertango by Astor Piazzolla for this ‘Inspired by’, it didn’t immediately ring a bell. When it comes to tango (or tango nuevo), I’m practically clueless. I do know one particular piece by Piazzolla though, that virtually everyone in the Netherlands knows (scroll to 14:10!):

I think I even got this on CD somewhere! But to go back to Libertango: I didn’t expect to know what it was. That is… until I heard it!

Ha! I’ve seen THAT face before!

And actually, for the Dutchies, it also reminded me of this…

http://youtu.be/3uc-elu7OFM

Turns out I do know Libertango. And I associate it with a royal wedding, Grace Jones and a terribly outdated Dutch soap opera. What on earth am I going to do?

I decided to listen to it again… and again… and again… I read up on Astor Piazzolla. He was born in Argentina, but he moved around a lot and Libertango was recorded in Milan in 1974. But somehow the piece sounds like Paris to me…

Back to Grace Jones then: Grace Jones reminds me of A View to a Kill. Paris again! And that movie also reminds me of Duran Duran. OK, now I’m getting somewhere: Paris or Duran Duran. I have loads of photos of Paris… but I feel more like telling the story about how I became a Duran Duran fan.

I wrote the story first, but if this was going to be a layout I needed some kind of visual too. My first thought was to photograph my records. And then I thought about this flyer I had. I knew it would’ve been something I’d keep… So maybe…

This suitcase lives in my attic. In contains all the school stuff, letters, cards, diaries and scrapbooks I couldn’t bare to part with from primary school up until I graduated from college.

I say couldn’t, because when I go back to find stuff now, I only look at what I ‘need’ and I gladly ignore the rest. So there could be stuff in there that I’d want to part with now. But instead I choose to leave it alone, for now…

OK, this time I’m looking for the scrapbooks. Not the kind of scrapbooks we create now, but the old-school kind with (in my case) clippings and stories about horses, Madonna and… Duran Duran!

And there it is, in that yellow binder!

Wow!!!

I also found a bunch of loose magazine clippings. And I know just what to do with those:

There you have it. A layout inspired by Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango… Now I urge you to go over to Riikka’s blog to see what she created with this tango nuevo in mind!

Oh and I’ll leave you with this,  just in case you want to know the story I wrote:

How do I become a fan?

This story begins somewhere in 1983 or 1984, when a Video 2000 recorder appeared in my grandparents house. With the recorder you could record TV programs, but you could also watch (rented) movies. James Bond movies were our favorites and we watched those with the entire family.

In 1985, a new James Bond movie hit the cinema: A View to a Kill. My dad took us to see it during the summer. We loved it! I brought home a kind of flyer that I taped to the back of a bookcase so that it was hanging above my bed. There was a picture of Roger Moore and Grace Jones on one side and a picture of Duran Duran on the other side because of the title song.

Somewhere in the 5th or 6th grade (I was 11, 12 years old), it became important that you had an idol. Of course we were just about all fan of Madonna. But Susanne was also a fan of Bruce Springsteen, Xandra of A-ha and Martine was a fan of Simon le Bon.

I think at first I said I was a fan of Roberto Jacketti and the Scooters… but I quickly changed my mind about that. Duran Duran was much more interesting! And besides, they’re (tiny) picture was already hanging above my bed. Martine did not like it. We just couldn’t have the same idol. Luckily I thought John Taylor was better looking than Simon le Bon, so that problem was quickly resolved. The pictures and posters collecting could begin!

The first Duran Duran record I got hold of was a second-hand Arena, which I copied on a cassette tape and played on repeat…  Notorious came out a year later. I didn’t buy solo projects like Arcadia and Power Station, but I taped those songs with my cassette player (Quickly hit play+rec when the radio-DJ stops talking and then keeping the fingers crossed that the DJ keeps his mouth shut until the song ends).

It took years to collect all my Duran Duran LPs / CDs (and a cassette tape!) and I still don’t have them all. Doesn’t matter. I’ve heard Arena and Notorious so many times that the bass lines became part of my system. It wasn’t until 2005, that I got to see the band live. According to Wikipedia, they still exist, but I’m not really paying attention to them any more. The only thing I know is that hearing a Duran Duran song on the radio still makes me extremely happy!