Way back in the day, 20 odd years ago, when I was a student, I had a fairly obscure taste in music and wound up going to lots of gigs in a place called Whelans on my own because none of my friends had ever heard of half the artists I liked or was interested in trying. So now, it’s almost second nature for me ot go to concerts on my own; 20 years experience has taught me that going to concerts on my own is far better than sitting at home wishing there was someone I could go to concerts with.
So, during the week I decided to go see Tiesto at the O2. Tiesto is completely out of my zone and frankly if he is in the zone of too many of my classical music and alt-rock loving and trad loving friends, they’ve kept rightly quiet about it. Anyway, tickets were hard to come by because Tiesto sold out the O2. For someone not one of my friends has ever heard of, that’s quite an achievement. This means I was a bit surprised too.
I’m not sure whether you call this a concert or what. Being old fashioned, I like to see musical instruments at concerts, or see some semblance of a singer. You don’t get this at a DJ gig. They stand on a stage, and they mix stuff. It’s really way out of my normal experience, so anyone who is really into their dance music will have to bear in mind that I’m a slight bit out of my depth here. For simplicity’s sake I will say that Tiesto played a concert and leave it at that. It will be a useful way to cop the live music scene one anyway. Doors opened at 6. I’m not sure what time Virtual Vault, the warm-up stepped on stage, but he was already playing at 7 when I arrived post bag check, and age check and he played for at least another hour. I think he finally stopped around 8.15 and 2 minutes later Tiesto turned up on stage. This is where I get to show my naiveté. I assumed he’d play a 2 hour set.
He didn’t. When I eventually wilted at 12.50 Tiesto was still playing. I was somewhat totally stunned by this. I realise your average rockband will get tired in around an hour and a half but frankly I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rockband work as hard as either of those two DJs did last night. And the overwhelming feeling I got from the stage was that they were really getting a kick out of what they do.
I don’t listen to a whole lot of trance music so I hadn’t heard of Virtual Vault before last night. I do think he did a great set however, and I doubt any of his records will live up to it to be honest. I do listen to some of Tiesto’s stuff and I like his podcast which arrives once a week at the moment – it’s a very decent mix of accessible dance stuff. I can imagine some purists might find it a litte too populist; in the way I think that Kila desecrate trad music and Sinead O’Connor should never have been allowed release Sean Nos Nua when there are people like Lunasa, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and Cara Dillon around, but for someone completely from outside that scene, I absolutely adore what he does. Plus, he did a remix for Mylene Farmer of C’est Dans L’Air which I didn’t expect to hear last night (but did) [here incidentally is the extended club remix of same.
Show wise, it was one of the best I’ve ever seen. All out on the lasers, on background screen stuff, whatever. It really stuffed what Massive Attack did in the Olympia a few months ago (in fact all told the gig was 1000 times better than the MA gig). And everyone in the O2 seemed to be enjoying it.
One of the reasons I like some of the Tiesto stuff is that he seems to really, really enjoy what he’s doing. You can see it in every video clip of him mixing on Youtube for example.
Last night was a blast. In a lot of ways very surreal – jaysus you should have seen some of the outfits – and totally out of normal for me. And it’s not like I really knew what to expect either. What I will say is that it was one hell of a gig and if and when either of this pair were to turn up again in Dublin, if I heard about it, I’d go there.
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