Stereophonics at KL Live (28 April)

This is the 700th post in this blog (which is about six years since I started it). Not bad eh considering I'm not a full-time blogger? Another milestone.

Well, nothing to be proud of. This entry should have came sooner considering that it is about a concert which happened here three days after Kelly Clarkson's.

I bought the ticket (yes, ticket, read that as ONE) to Stereophonics' show the same time I bought the tickets for Kelly's. That really dented a hole in my wallet for a while. But it was all well worth it. One thing I learnt from this whole week though: never go for two concerts within the span of a week. Other than being costly, it can be very tiring (for the throat especially) and dehydrating. But like I said, well worth every penny.

On the ticket it was printed showtime begins at 7:30pm, so I arrived at a comfortable time of 7:30pm. There was a queue... a long queue. Wait, the doors are not opened yet? Why not? Looks like I didn't have to wait so long compared to some of the rest who I reckon were waiting there like for God knows when. While queueing there were some girls from some tobacco company doing some research and were giving away lighters in exchange for personal information. Typical. Within 15 minutes, I met Roy and he was accompanied by his colleagues one of which was Jian Loong, a former neighbour of mine. Amita, I was told by Roy, was also coming for the gig. If I knew they were also going for the gig I wouldn't have had to go buy tickets all by myself. Anyway, I was already prepared to go to a gig on my own. It's cool, but it's not as fun I suppose. Amita agreed with me in admitting that we were not really big Stereophonics fans and we only knew a few songs.

We only got in at about 8:30pm, I think. After getting in, it was more waiting. While waiting, Amita and I got a beer each at RM10 per pop and were surprised to see that the beer they served were Tiger Ice. It came in a bottle reminiscent of Corona but tasted like Tiger Beer nonetheless. It tasted lighter than the usual Tiger though, not too sure how high is the alcohol percentage in comparison to standard Tiger. I was quite surprised to see that gweilos made up more than nearly 30% of the crowd (I could be mistaken about this figure but there were quite a lot of Caucasians in the crowd).

By the time the band took the stage it was already 9:20pm. So much for 7:30pm, and they didn't even have an opening act. Stereophonics started the night with a song from their latest album Keep Calm and Carry On called Live 'N' Love. It was loud and lively enough to kickstart the night.

After the first song, they proceeded to play A Thousand Trees and some songs which were more familiar to me. "More familiar" in this case means songs that were in their greatest hits compilation, Decades in the Sun. Some of the favourites that they played that night were My Own Worst Enemy, Pick A Part That's New (the one with the cool Italian Job parody video!), Maybe Tomorrow, Superman, Mr Writer, Have A Nice Day, Local Boy in the Photograph, Just Looking (... I'm not buying!!!), The Bartender and the Thief, and their very very smashing and rocking UK #1 hit, Dakota.

I made sure I charged my camera battery so that it could last me till the end of the night; I somehow knew that Dakota would be the last song of the night. My battery lasted me till the end of the night. Problem was the memory card didn't. So midway through Dakota, my greatest fear came through. I ran out of memory space after shooting all the other songs that preceded the encore. Bollocks! So I had half of Dakota in my camera and the other half in my iPhone, and I still haven't got round to editing the videos and somehow mashing them up together. But damn! I need a memory card with a bigger memory.

I had one other complaint though: when Kelly Jones took out his acoustic guitar and played a slower, intimate number, I was annoyed to find that so many of the people upstairs (I'm not too sure about downstairs) were talking among themselves like some pub with people more preoccupied with their own conversations over beer than listening to him belt out a song about red star, or whatever. And it was getting quite loud too, till at some points the voices from conversations nearly drowned out Kelly's voice from the speakers. I mean, we all paid good money for the show, so why couldn't they just STFU and listen? Yes, maybe the song was unfamiliar to many but this is no pub band. This is a paid-for concert, and the rest of us want to listen to the artist as well. It seems like as if the audience only responds to loud, heavy distorted guitars.

But there's no doubt about this one thing: Kelly Jones, like his namesake Clarkson three days' earlier, can sing live and can hold his own amongst the best British vocalists for a rock band with his famous whisky voice.

Check out the vids for yourself...