Bringing the crowded house down!
[this is an old post from my internet-less days that I'm still catching up on!]I've just come back from the Crowded House concert at Wembley Arena in London and it was f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c :) There is another concert on at Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday which was the only advertised concert for a long time. I'm missing it because I'd booked tickets for me and 17 other people at work to go outdoor ice skating, and I was really disappointed I wouldn't be able to see them. However I found out about the Sunday concert just four days ago by accident, when I took a day off work last week and hung around at Niall's recouperating from a cold and mooching on the internet. I bought the tickets on ebay the same day for cost price, so it's pure luck that I got to go at all.
Somehow they managed to make Wembley Arena - a venue the size of the entertainment centre - seem like a small, intimate room. It was one of the band members' birthdays and they were all in a good mood, very chatty and engaging and the sound quality was really good where we were sitting (right behind the mixer stand!) so it all combined to make it a fantastic experience. Our seats were in a really great position because we were centre block, first row behind a bunch of seats that had been left clear because there were cameras positioned in the mixer stand that were going to block peoples' view. So I could see the whole concert all the way through, yay :)
They played a mammoth 2.5 hour set, which included about 4 or 5 from the new album, and a lot of old favourites that were on the Recurring Dream album. They encouraged a lot of audience participation, dancing, clapping and sing along, which was what made it so engaging. The best part was they came out for a second encore which lasted more than half an hour which was very impromptu and very fun. You could also purchase the concert live on CD (which would be ready 10 mins after close for collection!), so of course many people did that before and after the concert was over. The actual purchasing/collecting of the CDs was a bit haphazard, but I'm sure it will be worth it when it arrives.
I ran into Daniel at the start of the concert - I imagine there were a lot of people there who were Australian or New Zealanders, I'm sure I would have known a few people in the crowd :) Tam included, she had tickets with friends sitting just one row behind us and to the left!
This was probably one of the best concerts I've been to, which prompted me to make a list of my favourite gigs (in no particular order)
- Gomez, Enmore theatre Sydney, 2000
- Moby, Hordern pavillion Sydney, 2000 (?)
- George and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Opera House, January 2001
- Crowded House, Wembley Arena London, December 9 2007
- Motor Ace, Manning Bar Sydney University, 2001
- Muse, Zepp Nagoya, March 2007
- Porcupine Tree, The Forum London, November 2007
- Nelly Furtado, Hammersmith Apollo, February 2007
posted by d @ 12:35 am
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