Europe's The Final Countdown is one of those albums that brings me back to a very specific time and place in history. The year was 1986, and I had recently gone from graduating from a small town high school in Maine, to settling in at my first overseas duty assignment with the U.S. Navy at a remote base in northern Japan. For a 20 year old, small town boy, who had really only left home the few times my Dad and I made the trek south to Boston to see our beloved Red Sox play, the Navy may as well have sent me off to Mars. In 1986, The Final Countdown had just exploded on the world, and it was particularly well received in the hair-metal-worshiping land of the rising sun.
I had already heard the album's title track on the radio enough times for the song's infamous keyboard riff to become permanently ingrained into my skull, and the ballad "Carrie" was starting to get tons of airplay as well. I never really thought enough of the music to actually buy the album, but after hearing the entire thing at a party one night, it became clear that The Final Countdown was one hell of catchy pop metal album, worthy of further consideration. This excellent DVD celebrates the 20th anniversary of Europe's The Final Countdown album and world tour, with two concerts that were filmed on the 26th and 27th of May, 1986, at Solnahallen in Stockholm, Sweden. The two shows were edited together to appear as a single, one-hour concert.
The song "The Final Countdown" has made a few worst song lists since first cracking the top ten in 1987, and I think this is mostly undeserved. I believe that many people simply got annoyed from hearing the thing so damned often. Hell, I change the dial now if "Stairway To Heaven" comes on the radio. This slick pop metal anthem boasts some brilliantly bombastic vocals and the most memorable keyboard riff this side of Van Halen's "Jump". It also features some of the silliest lyrics imaginable: "We're heading for Venus and still we stand tall, cause maybe they've seen us and welcome us all." To be fair, it was supposedly inspired by David Bowie's "Space Oddity", and I doubt these young Swedes even knew English at this point.
The song has been used for everything from the closing ceremony of the 1988 Summer Olympics, to the Detroit Pistons' game opening theme song. It also makes for one hell of a rock concert opener in1986, and that is exactly what Europe did on the tour. You can imagine how pumped up the home town crowd must have gotten, when the lights went out and the strains of their new anthem filled the arena. From there, they proceeded to play seven of the ten songs from the new album, along with four songs from their previous one, Wings Of Tomorrow.
Along with the title track, three other songs from The Final Countdown made the Billboard Hot 100 list during 1987; "Rock The Night", "Cherokee", and "Carrie". The power-ballad "Carrie" made it all the way to #3, and drained the fuel from many lighters that night. These performances were the obvious high points of the show, but the two-song encore of "Stormwind" and "Dance The Night Away", from the harder edged Wings Of Tomorrow album, really allowed guitarist John Norum to strut his stuff and show that Europe could rock with the best of them. Well, "them" being 80's hair metal bands. The encore was even concluded with a short reprise of "The Final Countdown" - and they wonder why people got sick of the song.
Article comments