Portugal, Rádio Comercial, So Get Up, and Ithaka Darin Pappas

Portugal, Rádio Comercial, So Get Up, and Ithaka Darin Pappas

During a one-year period from late 1992 to late 1993, the Greek-Californian artist Ithaka Darin Pappas, who lived in Lisbon for a six-year duration, hosted a small English-language segment on Rádio Comercial called Lounge Lizard Larry within the daily afternoon show, Quarto Bairro.

Quarto Bairro was produced by Eduardo Guerra and recorded by Pedro Costa (currently a DJ at Antena 3 (Portugal)), with news by Sílvia Souto Cunha (present day editor of Visão Magazine). For the Lounge Lizard Larry sequences Ithaka would, for the most part, read his own poems, written specifically for the show, on top on B-side instrumental hip-hop tracks.

On one day in late 1992 at a café outside of the Rádio Comercial studios in the neighborhood called Amoreiras, Ithaka wrote a poem called, The End Of The Earth Is Upon Us and some minutes after completion read it live on top of a Naughty By Nature instrumental. A couple of months later, he recorded a demo of the song in Manchester, England with original music. And about eight months after that, the electronic music group Underground Sound of Lisbon, who had been hearing him read his writings on-air, invited him to rerecord The End Of The Earth Is Upon Us with their music for the B-side of a 12" vinyl single they were recording. Thru the decades the song, retitled So Get Up, has achieved a wide range of releases and remixes by international artists, but the original recording of the vocal-poem took place at Rádio Comercial in Amoreiras.