The first big outdoor stadium gig here for quite some time and after a mate pointed out they were coming I thought it might be worth going along. The Foo's are a majorly successful rock band but I am not all that familiar with their music, sure I know some of their "hits" from radio, but I don't own any of their music. I thought I should get more familiar with their stuff before the concert and so listened to them on Spotify while working in the office. I wasn't overly excited by their music and so wasn't overly excited about the gig, but we are starved for concerts here and one must take advantage of them while they are happening. I missed Nine Inch Nails and Queens Of The Stoneage last year.
The concert started quite early, with gates opening at AMI stadium about 4:15pm on a rather hot summers day. Mrs. Roddus I myself headed off into town to pick up the two mates also attending with us after 5PM and after a quick feed at Burger King we found a car park on some quiet side street and walked about 1.5km to the stadium arriving some time close to 6:30pm. The Foos were due on at 7:15pm.
Here things fell apart somewhat as the que at our gate was rather large and rather slow moving and the entrance to the venue was rather small and there were only two of them to let in 26000 people. So there was a lot of grumbling as we spent nearly 45 minutes shuffling inch by inch closer to getting in as the time got closer and closer to the band starting. We actually got to our seats about half way through the first song but many didn't get in for another 30 minutes. Terrible organisation, you would thing they would have things like this sorted by now.
We took our seats in the south stand and started to tune in to what was already happening on stage, Of course it was bloody loud, and as it goes with these type of rock concerts there is a wall of noise blasting out during the heavy numbers and it took a while for my hearing to get use to it. Overall the sound was average, lyrics were quite hard to hear and as I said we were quite often assaulted with a wall of distorted white noise.
As the gig progressed My ears adjusted and the quieter songs and Dave Grohls's solo songs sounded fine.
An obvious thing was the amount of times Dave Grohl used the word FUCK or derivatives of, It got quire ridiculous. Mrs Roddus made the comment that she though was quite immature for a man of his age. I tend to agree. Also there was some fairly cliched rock guitar god posturing from Grohl ans he ran out onto the long stage extension that went out to near the center of the park, with him flinging his hair back and forward with his legs wide apart, you know the drill.
Still, Dave's banter with the crowed was pretty good and every body lapped it up, especially his story about his early morning bike ride through the earthquake ravaged Eastern suburbs that day.
I was enjoying the music more by now and actually enjoyed some of the songs I didn't know more than the ones I did, there were two great rockers I didn't know that really got my foot tapping. The other very cool thing was when the whole band rose up on a small stage about a quarter of the way out into the park and played several songs, one being a great version of ACDC's "let There Be Rock". The band played for about 2 and 1/2 hours and I think overall it was a pretty good gig.
No comments:
Post a Comment