The Mandoki Soulmates were invited to the American Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this week. Vice President Jason Hanley praised Mandoki’s use as a musical bridge builder.
In the sold -out Rock Hall Theater there was an evening full of stories and music. A film showed how the musicians go to work in the studio and on stage. In addition, there was a lot of learning about the background of the current successful album “A Memory of Our Future” – one of the very few records of recent times, which was produced completely analogously from the first grade to the final vinyl.
Mandoki compared this as a manual work with a “handwritten love letter to the audience” compared to an SMS.
Leslie Mandokis worked after his escape through the iron curtain for Phil Collins, Chaka Khan and Lionel Richie, Eric Burdon, Jon Lord, Robin Gibb and Peter Frampton, but also for Jennifer Rush and Bonnie Tyler and especially with the Mandoki Soulmates.
Mandoki Soulmates want to encourage
For the invitation to the Holy Hall of Rock Music, Mandoki thanked the personal words: “What an honor to celebrate here in the legendary and famous Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for 30 years of soulmates with our current album. My father was really right when he had given me on his deathbed as a 16-year-old son ‘Dreams don’t dream your life, live your dream’. That became my motto of life. “
In 1992 Ian Anderson, Jack Bruce Al di Meola and Leslie Mandoki founded the now durable band project. In the meantime, it is a one -time supergroup from band leaders with 13 common albums to date. Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake & Palmer) once enthusiastically judged the Soulmates: “One of the best bands you will ever hear.”
With intellectual, poetic texts, the band takes a position on socio -political changes. Not least on “A Memory of our Future”, where it is above all about giving courage in an increasingly chaotic world.
“In this melancholy time in which the bridge builders are missing, we artists have the commitment to return to the audience with respect – for his decades of love and for the fact that it still carries us on my hands,” said Mandoki about the band’s new songs. “I was particularly able to spend a lot of time in New York because many American media representatives ‘A Memory of Our Future’ consider one of the ‘most important albums of the year’. At the Times Square Billboard in New York City, our album shone with the quote ‘Modern Day Masterpiece’ as a video in constant loop. Everywhere in the trend record shops in New York or in London, our LP is exhibited with the black swan as an eye-catcher on the shelves and in the truest sense of the word it shone like a light at the end of the tunnel for my soulmate John Helliwell and me from the LED wall when we stood in the dark at the Waterloo Station in London. ”
Mandoki continued: “As a teenager, I was extremely proud when I was able to get a Jethro Tull album as a mono-copy of the seventh generation for my Tesla tape. At that time I always dreamed that one day you could buy my own records in the legendary HMV flagship panel shop in the London Oxford Street. ”
After the acclaimed event there was a lot of autographs from Leslie Mandoki at a late hour. And the desire to continue on all sides to continue for many years.