This performance of The Greatest Show On Earth is taken from from Nightwish’s concert in Tampere in their home country of Finland in 2015.
This performance is over 20 minutes long and along with other tracks from Nightwish’s 8th studio album, Endless Forms Most Beautiful which was released in 2015, was inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Richard Dawkin’s book The Greatest Show On Earth which uses science to prove Darwin’s theory.
The Greatest Show On Earth is about evolution. It starts with the Big Bang, the development of life and more complex organisms leading to the birth of mankind. I won’t spoil your enjoyment of the live performance by commenting further on the song, but it has some great visual effects and great music from:
- Tuomas Holopainen – keyboards
- Floor Jansen – vocals
- Marko Hiatala – bass
- Emppu Vuorinen – guitar
- Kai Hahto – drums
- Troy Donockley – pipes, uilleann pipes
This live performance of The Greatest Show On Earth is my personal favourite, but if you really enjoy this, there is another version recorded on the last concert of this 2015 tour in Wembley Arena in London, with a special guess joining them on stage at the end of the performance. Both performances are worth watching and are slightly different, I love them both.
You can learn more about Nightwish and the album Endless Forms Most Beautiful on Wikipedia.
I thought my musical journey had ended years ago as I really don’t (or didn’t) like modern music (pop, hip hop, rap etc) and there is nothing that I like on mainstream radio. My love since my teenage years has been Classic Rock and Prog Rock, although I had added to that some World Music, Latin and New Country through living in the USA and working in Central/South America in the 1990’s.
Nothing really changed until Covid hit in 2019 and I ended up working from home. While working (Analyst/Programmer) I would listen to YouTube to help me focus and once YouTube started suggesting new artists to me, I soon went down a lot of rabbit holes on a musical discovery journey that is still ongoing.
Nightwish is one of the first artists that I discovered due to YouTube recommending videos for me to watch and the video was the full concert from Tampere in 2015, this song being the final one and I can’t think of a better way to end a concert than this.
I am now a huge fan of a number of bands in genres that I didn’t know existed, including Power Metal, Symphonic Metal, Nordic/Viking, Japanese Metal, European Pagan Folk and more.
In this suite of posts I am hoping to help enlighten more people who are only aware of the artists that they hear on mainstream radio, as there are so many other amazing artists out there that they have never heard of.
I have some live videos from concerts that I have been to on my YouTube Channel. You are invited to take a look and if you like what you see, please do subscribe to my channel.
If you would like to leave me a comment to let me know what you think of Nightwish or to suggest an artist that I might like, I would appreciate that.
