Led Zeppelin concert!
... and there are pictures up on Facebook!
A fantastic night of music! ... I missed Keith Emerson and Paulo Nutini because I was in the merchandise queue (conrunners could have told them much better how to organise that!) but Bill Wyman and his Rhythm Kings with guest stars including Albert Lee (who is the guitarist I want to be when I grow up!), Paul Rogers (All Right Now!) and Foreigner as warm up acts ... followed by nearly two and a half hours of Zep ... bliss!
Apparently there were 20 million applications for the 20,000 tickets, or so I've been told (that was according to the tabloid newspapers, the NME (New Musical Express) reckons 9 million applications!). I personally applied three times (home address, work address and my mum's address) so I reckon that there were probably only, say, 5 million different people applying :-) ... and one of my friends (wag_9393 succeeded. Now a concert like this isn't cheap ... they have to rig out a large venue for just one night, they have to hire the venue, get the bands in, organise ticketing etc. and then the concert was designed to raise money for the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, a charity set up to help musically gifted children reach their highest potential by providing university scholarships.
Ahmet Ertegun founded Atlantic Records, basically invented soul crossed with R&B (he signed Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and a vast array of other acts) and was very much hands on in the recording studio and in directing the careers of these and other acts he signed, like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Cream and Genesis!
The tickets were (gulp) £125 each (plus booking fee) so I owe Wag £138 out of my next pay cheque (eek!) ... still, for something like this, there were rumours of tickets selling for over £1,000.
They did everything they could to prevent touts buying tickets and selling them off at a profit on ebay (or through other agencies) ... when your name was picked out of the hat you were sent a passcode which would allow ONLY the person who registered to buy up to two tickets using a credit card that had to have the same name on it. But you didn't get the tickets then, you got a reference code. Then on Sunday the 9th or Monday the 10th (the day of the concert), you had to show up at the venue, with your reference code (with your name on it), your credit card (with your name on it), a photo id (with your name on it) (all three names being the same) and with the other person that you had bought a ticket for with you (you couldn't give the tickets to anyone else, you had to have one yourself and one for a person you'd brought with you to the ticket queues) ... at that point you got a wristband put on each of you (so Wag and I got ours on Sunday and had to wear them through to Monday night) and the actual tickets saying where you were sitting.
And then Monday evening you had to show up with your (untampered with) wristband and your ticket to gain admission. This made it very hard to sell off the codes and such on ebay (though there were a fair number of auctions on there, I'm not sure how many were even vaguely legit!)
Wag wanted to get there earlier on Sunday to register, but by the time we'd sorted that out, it was far too late on Saturday night so we agreed to meet at 1pm ... Wag got there at 12:30 and joined the U-Z queue ... and when I arrived at 1pm he was about 2/3rds of the way towards the front, and after about 20 minutes or so we arrived at the front of the queue and did the creditcard, photo id etc. bits and got our tickets and wristbands (red for seated areas upstairs, blue for standing and other areas downstairs ... we had red)
Merchandise was open on Sunday but the queue was terrible, so my plan was to get there early today to get a t-shirt (in the end, they had six t-shirt designs, but two of those were on "fitted" (ladies) t-shirts, and of the other four, by the time I got to the front of the queue, they only had one design left in my size in black (not white), the Big Names tshirt ... so that's the one I got.) The other merchandise items they had were mugs, programme books (with a DVD in it), limited edition posters and, er, that's it!
I arrived at the venue at 6:30pm, joined the queue immediately, and got served at 7:35 (the music started at 7:15 as it turns out ... one sign had said 7:30, the ticket said 7pm, and the announcer said they had always intended it to be 7:15)
Keith Emerson and Paolo Nutini were on first (so I missed them) but saw 15 minutes of Bill Wyman and Albert Lee, then spot on 8pm Paul Rogers ("All Right Now, baby it's all right now ...") came on to do a couple of numbers, followed by Foreigner ("I want to know what love is") and around 8:30-8:40 they'd finished and there was a gap while the stage was reset, and exactly on 9pm Led Zeppelin took the stage .... and they played pretty much non-stop from then until 11:15ish (two encores "Whole Lotta Love" and "Rock n Roll")
Led Zeppelin played:
'Good Times Bad Times'
'Ramble On'
'Black Dog'
'In My Time Of Dying'
'For Your Life'
'Trampled Under Foot'
'Nobody's Fault But Mine'
'No Quarter'
'Since I've Been Loving You'
'Dazed And Confused'
'Stairway To Heaven'
'The Song Remains The Same'
'Misty Mountain Hop'
'Kashmir'
'Whole Lotta Love'
'Rock And Roll'
NME short review here is very positive (and where I nicked the set list from!) and a little more here including links to the song by song blog! Wow, I'm impressed, well done NME!
The NME said they were all dressed in black except for the white shirt of Jimmy Page ... not quite true, Robert Plant was wearing blue jeans with his open necked baggy black blouse and Jason Bonham's black t-shirt had some sparkles near one shoulder (probably some embroidered beads) plus some white printing on the sleeve (gothy cross symbol and something else heavy metal-ish) ... John Paul Jones had on a black jacket which also had some black glittery embroidery on it. Jimmy Page started off with a black waistcoat on over his puffy white shirt, but lost that fairly early on. Jimmy Page looked at times like a favourite but slightly dotty elderly uncle with wild silver/white hair, and there were a couple of times I was a little worried about what he was doing with the guitar, but that might have been timing problems between the stage and my ears, because the rest of the time he was spot on and playing fantastically well (and yes, the violin bow came out to tremendous acclaim and good effect, as did the doubleneck guitar)
At one point John Paul Jones was sitting at keyboards (he did that for a few songs, including the "recorder" part of Stairway) and still there was someone playing bass that I couldn't see ... but then a camera shot revealed that he had an organ pedal board under the keyboard stack so he could be playing the bass parts with his feet, what a hero!
Jimmy played several guitars, including the double neck Gibson SG, a Gibson Les Paul (gold top I think) and a black Gibson Les Paul Special (as far as I could tell). Jason Bonham had a big drum kit in transparent greeny-yellow (with reinforced kick pedals we were informed!) with Zildjian cymbals and a big gong behind him (for a moment I was worried they were going to break into Bohemian Rhapsody! Though thankfully they stuck to their own back catalog)
What can I say ... Dazed and Confused, Stairway, Kashmir (a particular favourite of mine), Good Times Bad Times, Whole Lotta Love, Rock n Roll, Misty Mountain Hop and all the rest ... absolutely bloody fantastic!
The NME reviewer is right ... they were back on top form and beyond criticism.
And our seats? Up on the fourth level (so quite high up) but in row A (so right at the front, just above the VIP boxes) and DEAD CENTRE facing the stage. A little cramped for legroom, but I was expecting that from the Scissor Sisters Gig I went to there before. In this photo there are six entrances at the top middle, we were between entrance three and four, and right at the front of the balcony (this image uses a distorting lens to bring everything into shot, so while we were a fair distance away, it's not as far as it appears here!)
The whole back of the stage was one big cinemascope screen, and they started with simple graphics (a planet, or some geometric patterns) with some live camera work put in as small edgeless windows contain live camera shots of the band ... but as the gig continued it got wilder and wilder with all sorts of computer generated effects, split screen, spinning white bars and psychedelic imagery (including paisley and what looked like stained glass windows! And with all sorts of effects including solarisation, and showing the band off to great effect!) The sound was plenty loud enough (my ears are still ringing!) and the bass could be felt through the seat of your trousers and into your kidneys! Occasional very short bits of feedback, but for a loud rock act, I thought the sound crew did a fantastic job. And the lighting was brilliant, including a lighting rig that lowered and transformed for a few numbers, and green lasers (initially doing a slow rotating pyramid around Jimmy P. but then shooting out into the crowd ... yes, I have photos!)
From a selfish viewpoint, I want to have seen their last (and best for a long time) gig ... but from an equally selfish viewpoint I reckon this will just be the trigger for a world tour and I *will* go see them again (if there's any way at all that I can).
Wag had talked to one chap that had flown in from Brazil *without a ticket* and managed to find someone in the validation queue that had a code and everything but hadn't got a second person to accompany him, and was willing to sell the second ticket for cost price ... now that's dedication (he'd already offered £1,000 for a VIP box ticket but got outbid, so I'm glad he got a ticket at a sensible price) and I met two Americans that had bought their tickets as "2nd ticket" from a couple of people on ebay ... so it *was* possible to get in if you really wanted to and were prepared to risk it and were willing to pay. Useful advice if anything like this happens again!
And the O2 arena does some special things for O2 mobile phone contract holders ... they have a "VIP" lounge that you can take up to three of your friends into if you text "BLUEROOM" to a special number from your O2 phone on the night, and they were giving away a £3,500 Gibson guitar to one lucky O2 user on the night (again by texting in) ... so if you're going to the venue for something, it's worth borrowing an O2 phone off someone!
The O2 also has the Tutankhamen exhibition on at the moment, and an indoor ice rink (£11 for adults, and they also have 30 minute lessons for £15) though these *are* separate areas within the Dome. I saw a fair number of people at the gig and on the tube afterwards with Tutankhamen bags, so I assume they made a day of it and went to the exhibition first and then to the gig. Also at the O2 are a lot of restaurants (mostly slightly upmarket chains such as Thai Silk, Las Iguanas and other "date" restaurants, plus of course a Starbucks (and hot dog carts and candy floss carts, but no McDonalds or anything like that).
Incidentally, I was saying to someone that I've been to a music festival in September where I camped in a tent and was freezing, and here I was in December, in a tent, at a gig ... but inside the arena it was plenty warm enough (though it was a little cold in the main foyer with the doors open and all the smokers just outside letting the smoke blow back in!) For those who don't know, the O2 (as it is now named) was built as The Millennium Dome and is basically a very VERY large tent!
It's been redeveloped along these lines
yes, it really does look like that, well, aside from the cutaway of the top left image :-) The top right image is the entrance foyer (VERY big), the second image down on the left is where the ice rink is at the moment (it had an indoor beach during the summer!), the second image down on the right is pretty much the view we had, though more central and maybe ten rows forward of that, the bottom left image is the escalators up to the multiplex VUE cinema, and the bottom right image is where some of the restaurants are, plus the entrance to the smaller IndigO2 venue.
And finally ... the O2 (aka The Millennium Dome) is out in Docklands to the east of London and the sensible way of getting back into town is on the Jubilee Underground Line ... and it seemed to me that there was a bit less crowding this time than for the Scissor Sisters gig (possibly more people had driven, or were taking taxis home rather than the more proletarian Tube) but with getting out of the gig at 11:15 (then the queue for the toilets), then the queue to get into the Tube station (North Greenwich), I made it back to Waterloo at 11:48 (and so in time for the newly added 11:58 train, which was added after the previous last train of 11:30 starting in the new train timetables beginning on December 10th, today!) ... which gave me time to grab something from Burger King to eat on the train as not only did I have nearly ten minutes, but the train itself was five minutes late in arriving (five minutes after it should have left that is) so we eventually pulled out at 00:08 and I got back to Feltham at 00:38 with the last bus scheduled for 00:48, so I walked home and had the bus pass me as I passed my home bus stop (so I wouldn't have got home any faster, and the walk did me good), and I was in the house with the kettle on by 1am.
A fantastic night of music! ... I missed Keith Emerson and Paulo Nutini because I was in the merchandise queue (conrunners could have told them much better how to organise that!) but Bill Wyman and his Rhythm Kings with guest stars including Albert Lee (who is the guitarist I want to be when I grow up!), Paul Rogers (All Right Now!) and Foreigner as warm up acts ... followed by nearly two and a half hours of Zep ... bliss!
Apparently there were 20 million applications for the 20,000 tickets, or so I've been told (that was according to the tabloid newspapers, the NME (New Musical Express) reckons 9 million applications!). I personally applied three times (home address, work address and my mum's address) so I reckon that there were probably only, say, 5 million different people applying :-) ... and one of my friends (wag_9393 succeeded. Now a concert like this isn't cheap ... they have to rig out a large venue for just one night, they have to hire the venue, get the bands in, organise ticketing etc. and then the concert was designed to raise money for the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, a charity set up to help musically gifted children reach their highest potential by providing university scholarships.
Ahmet Ertegun founded Atlantic Records, basically invented soul crossed with R&B (he signed Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and a vast array of other acts) and was very much hands on in the recording studio and in directing the careers of these and other acts he signed, like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Cream and Genesis!
The tickets were (gulp) £125 each (plus booking fee) so I owe Wag £138 out of my next pay cheque (eek!) ... still, for something like this, there were rumours of tickets selling for over £1,000.
They did everything they could to prevent touts buying tickets and selling them off at a profit on ebay (or through other agencies) ... when your name was picked out of the hat you were sent a passcode which would allow ONLY the person who registered to buy up to two tickets using a credit card that had to have the same name on it. But you didn't get the tickets then, you got a reference code. Then on Sunday the 9th or Monday the 10th (the day of the concert), you had to show up at the venue, with your reference code (with your name on it), your credit card (with your name on it), a photo id (with your name on it) (all three names being the same) and with the other person that you had bought a ticket for with you (you couldn't give the tickets to anyone else, you had to have one yourself and one for a person you'd brought with you to the ticket queues) ... at that point you got a wristband put on each of you (so Wag and I got ours on Sunday and had to wear them through to Monday night) and the actual tickets saying where you were sitting.
And then Monday evening you had to show up with your (untampered with) wristband and your ticket to gain admission. This made it very hard to sell off the codes and such on ebay (though there were a fair number of auctions on there, I'm not sure how many were even vaguely legit!)
Wag wanted to get there earlier on Sunday to register, but by the time we'd sorted that out, it was far too late on Saturday night so we agreed to meet at 1pm ... Wag got there at 12:30 and joined the U-Z queue ... and when I arrived at 1pm he was about 2/3rds of the way towards the front, and after about 20 minutes or so we arrived at the front of the queue and did the creditcard, photo id etc. bits and got our tickets and wristbands (red for seated areas upstairs, blue for standing and other areas downstairs ... we had red)
Merchandise was open on Sunday but the queue was terrible, so my plan was to get there early today to get a t-shirt (in the end, they had six t-shirt designs, but two of those were on "fitted" (ladies) t-shirts, and of the other four, by the time I got to the front of the queue, they only had one design left in my size in black (not white), the Big Names tshirt ... so that's the one I got.) The other merchandise items they had were mugs, programme books (with a DVD in it), limited edition posters and, er, that's it!
I arrived at the venue at 6:30pm, joined the queue immediately, and got served at 7:35 (the music started at 7:15 as it turns out ... one sign had said 7:30, the ticket said 7pm, and the announcer said they had always intended it to be 7:15)
Keith Emerson and Paolo Nutini were on first (so I missed them) but saw 15 minutes of Bill Wyman and Albert Lee, then spot on 8pm Paul Rogers ("All Right Now, baby it's all right now ...") came on to do a couple of numbers, followed by Foreigner ("I want to know what love is") and around 8:30-8:40 they'd finished and there was a gap while the stage was reset, and exactly on 9pm Led Zeppelin took the stage .... and they played pretty much non-stop from then until 11:15ish (two encores "Whole Lotta Love" and "Rock n Roll")
Led Zeppelin played:
'Good Times Bad Times'
'Ramble On'
'Black Dog'
'In My Time Of Dying'
'For Your Life'
'Trampled Under Foot'
'Nobody's Fault But Mine'
'No Quarter'
'Since I've Been Loving You'
'Dazed And Confused'
'Stairway To Heaven'
'The Song Remains The Same'
'Misty Mountain Hop'
'Kashmir'
'Whole Lotta Love'
'Rock And Roll'
NME short review here is very positive (and where I nicked the set list from!) and a little more here including links to the song by song blog! Wow, I'm impressed, well done NME!
The NME said they were all dressed in black except for the white shirt of Jimmy Page ... not quite true, Robert Plant was wearing blue jeans with his open necked baggy black blouse and Jason Bonham's black t-shirt had some sparkles near one shoulder (probably some embroidered beads) plus some white printing on the sleeve (gothy cross symbol and something else heavy metal-ish) ... John Paul Jones had on a black jacket which also had some black glittery embroidery on it. Jimmy Page started off with a black waistcoat on over his puffy white shirt, but lost that fairly early on. Jimmy Page looked at times like a favourite but slightly dotty elderly uncle with wild silver/white hair, and there were a couple of times I was a little worried about what he was doing with the guitar, but that might have been timing problems between the stage and my ears, because the rest of the time he was spot on and playing fantastically well (and yes, the violin bow came out to tremendous acclaim and good effect, as did the doubleneck guitar)
At one point John Paul Jones was sitting at keyboards (he did that for a few songs, including the "recorder" part of Stairway) and still there was someone playing bass that I couldn't see ... but then a camera shot revealed that he had an organ pedal board under the keyboard stack so he could be playing the bass parts with his feet, what a hero!
Jimmy played several guitars, including the double neck Gibson SG, a Gibson Les Paul (gold top I think) and a black Gibson Les Paul Special (as far as I could tell). Jason Bonham had a big drum kit in transparent greeny-yellow (with reinforced kick pedals we were informed!) with Zildjian cymbals and a big gong behind him (for a moment I was worried they were going to break into Bohemian Rhapsody! Though thankfully they stuck to their own back catalog)
What can I say ... Dazed and Confused, Stairway, Kashmir (a particular favourite of mine), Good Times Bad Times, Whole Lotta Love, Rock n Roll, Misty Mountain Hop and all the rest ... absolutely bloody fantastic!
The NME reviewer is right ... they were back on top form and beyond criticism.
And our seats? Up on the fourth level (so quite high up) but in row A (so right at the front, just above the VIP boxes) and DEAD CENTRE facing the stage. A little cramped for legroom, but I was expecting that from the Scissor Sisters Gig I went to there before. In this photo there are six entrances at the top middle, we were between entrance three and four, and right at the front of the balcony (this image uses a distorting lens to bring everything into shot, so while we were a fair distance away, it's not as far as it appears here!)
The whole back of the stage was one big cinemascope screen, and they started with simple graphics (a planet, or some geometric patterns) with some live camera work put in as small edgeless windows contain live camera shots of the band ... but as the gig continued it got wilder and wilder with all sorts of computer generated effects, split screen, spinning white bars and psychedelic imagery (including paisley and what looked like stained glass windows! And with all sorts of effects including solarisation, and showing the band off to great effect!) The sound was plenty loud enough (my ears are still ringing!) and the bass could be felt through the seat of your trousers and into your kidneys! Occasional very short bits of feedback, but for a loud rock act, I thought the sound crew did a fantastic job. And the lighting was brilliant, including a lighting rig that lowered and transformed for a few numbers, and green lasers (initially doing a slow rotating pyramid around Jimmy P. but then shooting out into the crowd ... yes, I have photos!)
From a selfish viewpoint, I want to have seen their last (and best for a long time) gig ... but from an equally selfish viewpoint I reckon this will just be the trigger for a world tour and I *will* go see them again (if there's any way at all that I can).
Wag had talked to one chap that had flown in from Brazil *without a ticket* and managed to find someone in the validation queue that had a code and everything but hadn't got a second person to accompany him, and was willing to sell the second ticket for cost price ... now that's dedication (he'd already offered £1,000 for a VIP box ticket but got outbid, so I'm glad he got a ticket at a sensible price) and I met two Americans that had bought their tickets as "2nd ticket" from a couple of people on ebay ... so it *was* possible to get in if you really wanted to and were prepared to risk it and were willing to pay. Useful advice if anything like this happens again!
And the O2 arena does some special things for O2 mobile phone contract holders ... they have a "VIP" lounge that you can take up to three of your friends into if you text "BLUEROOM" to a special number from your O2 phone on the night, and they were giving away a £3,500 Gibson guitar to one lucky O2 user on the night (again by texting in) ... so if you're going to the venue for something, it's worth borrowing an O2 phone off someone!
The O2 also has the Tutankhamen exhibition on at the moment, and an indoor ice rink (£11 for adults, and they also have 30 minute lessons for £15) though these *are* separate areas within the Dome. I saw a fair number of people at the gig and on the tube afterwards with Tutankhamen bags, so I assume they made a day of it and went to the exhibition first and then to the gig. Also at the O2 are a lot of restaurants (mostly slightly upmarket chains such as Thai Silk, Las Iguanas and other "date" restaurants, plus of course a Starbucks (and hot dog carts and candy floss carts, but no McDonalds or anything like that).
Incidentally, I was saying to someone that I've been to a music festival in September where I camped in a tent and was freezing, and here I was in December, in a tent, at a gig ... but inside the arena it was plenty warm enough (though it was a little cold in the main foyer with the doors open and all the smokers just outside letting the smoke blow back in!) For those who don't know, the O2 (as it is now named) was built as The Millennium Dome and is basically a very VERY large tent!
It's been redeveloped along these lines
yes, it really does look like that, well, aside from the cutaway of the top left image :-) The top right image is the entrance foyer (VERY big), the second image down on the left is where the ice rink is at the moment (it had an indoor beach during the summer!), the second image down on the right is pretty much the view we had, though more central and maybe ten rows forward of that, the bottom left image is the escalators up to the multiplex VUE cinema, and the bottom right image is where some of the restaurants are, plus the entrance to the smaller IndigO2 venue.
And finally ... the O2 (aka The Millennium Dome) is out in Docklands to the east of London and the sensible way of getting back into town is on the Jubilee Underground Line ... and it seemed to me that there was a bit less crowding this time than for the Scissor Sisters gig (possibly more people had driven, or were taking taxis home rather than the more proletarian Tube) but with getting out of the gig at 11:15 (then the queue for the toilets), then the queue to get into the Tube station (North Greenwich), I made it back to Waterloo at 11:48 (and so in time for the newly added 11:58 train, which was added after the previous last train of 11:30 starting in the new train timetables beginning on December 10th, today!) ... which gave me time to grab something from Burger King to eat on the train as not only did I have nearly ten minutes, but the train itself was five minutes late in arriving (five minutes after it should have left that is) so we eventually pulled out at 00:08 and I got back to Feltham at 00:38 with the last bus scheduled for 00:48, so I walked home and had the bus pass me as I passed my home bus stop (so I wouldn't have got home any faster, and the walk did me good), and I was in the house with the kettle on by 1am.