Friday 6 June 2008

Wallis Bird

Arriving late to an appointment with a friend of mine, I noticed that he had already arrived at the entrance of the venue and was chatting to the main gig performer and the official photographer. I approached them, said hi, got introduced and started chatting with them too. Suddenly out of the blue some random guy got close to us and said, hey, are you interested in buying tickets for this concert? The artist replied, no thanks, I am the one who is playing tonight.
The guy put an 'eat-me-earth' face and we couldn't help but laugh. 5 minutes later he managed to get rid of the tickets and best of all he gave a story for Wallis to tell at the concert.

The concert was fantastic. I haven't seen anyone in my life that has so much energy like this little, big smile girl. Unbelievable, she was constantly jumping up and down, connecting with the audience, transmitting such a good energy that by the end of the performance every body was singing and/or clapping with a few bunch of women ready to execute a streap tease by the blink of Wallis. I can tell you she is going to go far, very far.

Wallis Bird is another great Irish singer that plays the guitar in an extraordinary and particular way. When she was a child she had an accident and lost her left hand fingers, they got re-placed but they lost some mobility, so she decided to turn around her guitar and play the other way round, not exactly like a left handed person, but literally by holding the guitar in the wrong different way.

The way it works with the guitar is that the bass string are up (to make it easy to explain) and the high pitch strings are down. But the way she plays it is the other way around, bass strings are down and high pitch strings are up. So she had to re learn all the chords with very exotic shapes, the strumming was the same, but as it starts from the high pitch strings it gives a very delicious uncommon sound; also a lot of her riffs are in bass strings which is also not very common.

This picture may give you an idea of the energy that I am referring.
Last but not least this is the site of Andy, the friendly photographer that was fascinated with the hundreds of Latin American women that shouted papito at Juanes' concert.

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