The artists who will perform in the city in the coming days are located at opposite poles of musical history. Cher and Tony Sheridan are classics of the sixties, their names are written in big bold letters in all rock encyclopedias, and it’s a shame for a music lover not to know them. Placebo and Reamonn are young and trendy modern bands with an unclear future, but already quite a successful past. If you haven’t heard of them, you are elderly, incurious, or have lost interest in life. However, this can be fixed.

On Tony Sheridan's posters it is written that he is supposedly the first vocalist of The Beatles. I think the late John Lennon would have been offended by such posters, although he would have been happy for Tony himself. By the time the Beatles met Sheridan in Hamburg in 1961, they were already an established group with three vocalists and their own repertoire. Another thing is that the harsh laws of show business forced them at that moment to agree to Polydor’s offer to accompany on the recordings a pleasant young man with a voice and manners slightly reminiscent of Elvis Presley. A dozen songs were recorded, which were later included in the album “The Beatles with Tony Sheridan”, which is still published in different covers to this day. Within two years, The Beatles became world famous, but Sheridan’s career did not work out: he lacked the repertoire and “star” charisma. So for the rest of his life he remained “the guy who once recorded with the Beatles.”

Unlike Sheridan, Cher’s entire creative destiny is a direct ascent to the heights of mass culture, a gradual transformation from an ugly duckling hippie into a sex symbol, movie star and pop icon like Barbra Streisand, Whitney Houston, etc. In this regard, Cher's arrival is like scraping the remains from the bottom of some tasty pan: almost all the living legends and classics of popular music have already been to Russia, perestroika is over, the harsh everyday pop life has begun (despite the fact that Cher is beautiful in herself, and I I often pull out some record from the shelf from the year 1975).
So, within the framework of this very everyday pop life, in order to dilute the well-known list of domestic rock-pop, which has already bored us with all the radio programs and at concerts, the Europeans Placebo and Reamonn will perform at the Maxidrom festival.

The trio Placebo appeared in 1994 in Britain, but from the very beginning it featured an Englishman, a Swede and a Swiss. Formally, they belong to the Britpop generation, but they always stood out sharply from the crowd with unusual arrangements and the bright vocals of lead singer Brian Molko, who embodied in his work not only a tender love for David Bowie, but also his own very original talent, as well as the so-called “androgynous image”, in Russia simply called “blue”.

Reamonn are as cosmopolitan as Placebo - five Germans and the restless Irishman Ree Garvey, who for some reason found like-minded people only on the continent. The 2000 hit “Supergirl” brought the group to the international stage, and since then it has been hanging around the cities and towns of Europe, not really striking the imagination of the Anglo-Saxons, overfed with good music. In any case, it’s a pleasant addition to the program of any festival, and for fans of Celtic folk rock, it’s another drop of honey for a heart exhausted by the northern snows.

I have a suspicion that fans of Cher's work will never find themselves at a Placebo concert in their lives, and fans of Maxidrom are unlikely to go to Gorbukha to listen to Tony Sheridan, so, in general, we have no problems with choosing for the next week No.

Sherochka with a masherochka