Nothing says 'Happy Valentine's!' like 'Sheena Easton: Live in Manila!'

Anybody see ‘Battle of the ’80s Has-Beens’ last night? That Debbie Gibson can take a punch,” declared Alex Fletcher in 2007’s guilty pleasure rom-com Music and Lyrics. A washed-up pop star milking the nostalgia circuit, Hugh Grant’s character was fun and desperate in equal measure. His portrayal of Fletcher, half of a Wham-like band called PoP, was a spot-on parody of his real-life counterparts in the music biz.

I couldn’t help but pluck that reference from the pop culture ether because Manila has somehow become a magnet for these Alex Fletcher types. If you haven’t noticed — but you have, you know you have — acts that were long deemed dead seem to find their way to the Philippines, reprising their gold rush days and turning the local concert scene into a musical recycling bin. Though it’s been happening more frequently than we’d like, it’s not entirely bad, as I’ll explain later on.

Party Like It’s 1987

As tweens, teens, and twentysomethings crap their skinny jeans scrambling for tickets to next week’s Fall Out Boy pogofest, their parents (and grandparents) are probably staving off a stroke at the live entertainment options they have this Valentine month: Peter Cetera! Rex Smith! And…Sheena Easton! The gangster lineup is enough to make one’s pacemaker party like it’s 1987.

In fact, the last artist on the list has been so well hyped that most members of the general public — especially those born in the ’80s and ’90s — have found themselves saying “F*ck yeah Sheena Easton!” without even knowing who on earth she was. (How’s that for effective marketing?) I mean, come on. She was in Grease and she’s a cancer survivor! Or was that Olivia Newton-John? Oopsies. 

Resuscitate And Serve

Anyway, Danee Samonte, a.k.a. Steve O’Neal, is the dude with a lock on the mature gig-going market. In the January-February 2009 issue of Entrepreneur, the music industry veteran admitted to seeing the lack of entertainment for adults and executives in the country and realized that it was almost virgin territory. “I then decided that it would perhaps be viable to produce concerts catering to this age group,” he says.

Since setting up Steve O’Neal Productions in 2003, Samonte has flown in such boomer-friendly acts as Air Supply, Toto, Patti Austin, and James Ingram. And look, the niche promoter is also helping resuscitate Sheena Easton’s flatlined career by producing her one-night-only concert two days before V-Day. The idea of paying to see these performances maybe alien — even avant-garde — to us, but for those of a certain vintage, oldies are still, like, goodies.

Like a 4chan meme mystifyingly willed to life, ’80s pop relic Rick Astley barreled into town sometime last year. A runaway hit with both the olds (who totally dug the trip to flashbackville) and the youngs (who wanted to Rickroll themselves IRL), the ertswhile heartthrob’s show was less a plague and more a sign from the gods that the ballroom-dancing crowd still has it.

Back From Flashbackville

While it’s a fact that concerts headlined by retired new wave bands and their ilk are not as costly to produce (and therefore great for business), it’s also true that the overabundance of legacy attractions streaming into Manila only reinforces our reputation as the world’s ukay-ukay. By my definition, the scene needs more relatively cool performers — like Chris Brown, Rihanna, and Ne-Yo who stopped by the country in 2008 — to cancel out the numbing effect of people like, say, Julia Fordham or Journey. 

Again, I’m sure events organizers will point out that it all boils down to returns on their investment. They would probably also say that the Pinoy youth market is still too small unlike the ones in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangkok, which are more lucrative to foreign acts. That may or may not be true, but still — won’t it be awesome to have mainstream names like Franz Ferdinand of Montreal, TV On The Radio, The Virgins, or Kings of Leon rocking it out in our own backyard? So many young hearts would explode in glee. Till that day comes, I guess we’ll just have to make do with, sigh, Fall Out Boy. They may be too tweeny and pedestrian compared to the other groups I just mentioned, but no offense, I’ll obviously take their concert over Sheena Easton’s any given day.