Back in London for the second time in a week, and you may well wonder what possessed me to attend an arena concert, after many years of shying away from such flagrantly gaudy spectacles.
Well, I guess I couldn't miss the opportunity to see yet another Canadian band I've been an admirer of for over a quarter of a century.
And heck... it's Rush, man. The band that is so much the epitome of uncool, they turn the corner into cool.
And I thought it was about time I tried an arena out for size...
As with the previous concert visit earlier in the week, this one was almost shelved a time or two due to family difficulties. As a result, I'd lost a lot of enthusiasm for the whole event largely due to interminable reviews of my ability to be away from home for four nights.
So, what was initially intended as an interesting experiment and a change of approach to concertgoing, had become a somewhat ambivalent affair I wasn't looking forward to all that much anymore, to be brutally honest.
But then again, "Clockwork Angels" isn't a bad record to tour off, I was genuinely interested how the promised string section would work with the band dynamic and... heck, it's Rush, dammit!
Of course, the venue itself is an interesting one, being the ex-Millenium Dome that everybody took the piss out of in the 1990s for having the nerve to try to be unique. (Which generally doesn't go down well in England, unless it's to do with something really fucking useless. Like sport, for instance).
Having last walked past the Dome in the mid-2000s when it stood abandoned amidst a wasteland not too dissimilar from the Silver Nemesis locations it usurped, I was now disheartened to see the initial effects of regeneration in its environs. (In other words, the whole area will soon look like Downtown Disney, the bit of the theme park that tries to look like more or less normal and fails due to still being utterly divorced from reality).
Anyway, the staff were surprisingly pleasant, and I joined the rest of the audience waiting to be let in, enduring a lengthy delay which was reported to involve chasing a fox out of the arena.
Having secured what I imagined to be a good seat in the stalls in front of the stage, I was more than a little annoyed that the instant the band came on, everybody stood up. Normally this would not have posed a problem, but the stage in the O2 Arena is very small and very low. The result? Any view of the actual band was totally obscured, and being reduced to watching events on the sole projection screen felt like watching a DVD in the company of thousands of strangers.
Interesting lightshow, though.
Still, it could have been much, much worse. Reading a handful of reviews from other attendees made me glad I was so near the mixing desk and enjoyed a pleasingly good (if slightly muffled on the drums) sound, as elsewhere in the arena, the acoustics were reported as being dreadful bordering on the unlistenable. (Oh yes, and the seats right up at the top are apparantly as scary and vertigo-inducing as I'd suspected).
Setlist surprises: Four tracks from "Power Windows", a personal favourite Cold War-flavoured album.
Setlist disappointments: Nothing to compare with the general disappointment of paying over the odds for a ticket and not even being able to see who was performing.
And don't even get me started on the prices of tour merchandise...
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