 |
| :: Radiohead @ Ziggo Dome |
|
|
|
| I do dislike the Ziggo Dome. I dislike the crass commercialism inherent in its name. What’s next? Are we to become like America, where the venues change name every couple of years as the sponsorship contract comes up for renewal and one vile corporation outbids another? Goodbye Chunky Chicken Nuggets Centre, hello Fat Fuck Doughnut Arena. I dislike that they named a rectangular buiding a dome. I dislike having to queue up to exchange cash for plastic tokens in order to buy food or even a drink. I dislike the pricing of said food and drink, which is not only expensive and misleading
(because the price expressed as tokens is less than the actual price in euros), but also guaranteed
to leave you with half a token at the end I dislike the poor sods whose job it is to plough a path through the audience whilst carrying a barrel of beer on their back, because they barge into me when they turn. Let the people who can’t live without beer go to the bar, where they’ll hopefully remain. I dislike the toilets with no lid, although these are not unique to the Ziggo Dome. Don’t they know how easy it is to drop recording equipment into the toilet? Bastards. I dislike the expensive car parks. Special event rate of 12 euro? Kiss my arse. Just a week ago, I parked for 7? hours in the centre of Cologne under the Philharmonie. Total cost? 3 euro. That’s a proper event tariff. Greedy bastards. I dislike the painfully slow car parks. The gig is over. I just want to leave, for fuck’s sake. I dislike queueing in the rain to go inside the venue. Why is it always raining here? Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “L’enfer, c’est les autres”. He’d probably just been to a gig when he penned those immortal words, because that’s the trouble with gigs. They’re full of “les autres”; and the Ziggo Dome has more of them than anywhere else in this overfull city. I’m tired of listening to the tedious conversations of other people. I’m tired of treading on their discarded beer glasses. I’m tired of their complete disregard for my comfort, because they just want to smoke at a Radiohead gig, man. It’s all about me, me, me, you know? I’m not content with it being more important that they go home with a shitty, shaky, three minute video clip of some flashing lights, morphing colours and a few pixelated ants, than it is for me to have a view unobstructed by their forearms. Radiohead are too large now. I mean, they deserve it, of course. They’ve worked hard for it and all that, so good for them, but bad for me. 15,000+ punters are here for this sold-out gig and many of them are, I suspect, people who attend approximately one gig a year. Neither their upbringing nor their experience of concert environments seem to have given them any grounding in how to behave courteously towards others. Would these people walk into a pub, strap on an electric guitar and start playing loud music, so that the other customers couldn’t hold a conversation? No? Then why the fuck do they come to a music venue and then chatter to each other while there is music being performed? We’d all be a lot happier if they’d stayed at home on the couch, with a chocolate biscuit and a nice hot cup of shut-the-fuck-up. Oh, and I should mention that each of these irritations is massively magnified when I’m sick and suffering from a headache. Such is the case tonight. I still haven’t recovered from Prague and I’m absolutely relishing the prospect of spending the next four and a half hours glued to the same spot. When I come to print out my tickets for this gig, I discover that I’ve purchased two of them, probably thinking that my wife might also like to attend. Too late now; I’ll have to sell the ticket at the gig, which has been sold out since the day tickets went on sale, seven months ago. How hard can it be? Shifting a spare ticket tonight proves easier said than done. It’s hard to tell who, if anyone, needs one. It’s also raining, people are approaching from several directions at once and the queue snakes around all over the place, making it hard to spot people who might be vying for a ticket. It’s hard to know where best to stand, so I stand everywhere and nowhere and manage to sell nothing. The clock is ticking and I need to start approaching random punters or I could be out here all night. I spot a middle-aged guy leaning against a wall near the ticket-office and ask him if he needs a ticket. He does! Sold! I finally get to go inside, out of the rain. The queues have significantly died down. I pick a door and chat to the purchaser of my ticket to pass the time as the queue is whittled down to where we are. As we get to the doors, I notice that the security staff checking people coming from my queue are being a little too thorough, so I veer left at the last moment and am waved through by the more relaxed guy manning that door. I’m in. A quick check of the hall reveals it’s not too busy in there yet, so I queue for some bloody Ziggo currency and then head into the lavatories to suit up. Taperman emerges and, one overpriced hamburger and overpriced juice later, heads into the hall to take up position between the stacks. It’s a lot busier now, but I still manage to secure a good central location at a decent distance from the stage. There turn out to be a couple of large pockets of fans sitting on the floor, closer to the stage, so as each of those groups gets up and the crowd moves forwards to fill the space, I go with the flow and see my own position promoted to ‘ideal’. I now form an equilateral triangle with the left and right PA stacks and really couldn’t wish for a better spot. Caribou come on at 19:30 and play for a measly half hour. All around me are people who would rather discuss the minutiae of their insignificant lives than listen to the music. How grateful I am for the selective hearing of supercardioid microphones. I wonder how I ever coped without them and I wish I could operate my ears in the same mode. Radiohead are punctual, arriving on stage at the scheduled start time of 20:30. For the
next two hours and a bit, they hold the audience captive and make it look easy. I’m less captive than
most, though, I must confess. I have put in plenty of effort over the years to become a big fan of
Radiohead, but Many people who know a thing or two about music will wax lyrical about the importance, influence, originality and brilliance of the band. I’m not about to refute any of that testimony, but I do sometimes struggle to simply enjoy the music for what it is. I’m one of those people who really liked ‘Creep’ and think that ‘Karma Police’ is sublime. The rest I can take or leave. On the other hand, I do have the utmost respect for the band and the way they conduct their affairs. In that sense, I am a fan, because I support what they do. I’m afraid Radiohead are destined to remain like fine wine to me. Whilst some people’s lives are hugely enriched by the pursuit of drinking wine, to the extent that they will travel to sample it and even devote a room in their house to its storage, it all tastes like fermented grapes to me; and so, too, do Radiohead, I’m afraid. On the other hand, I am blown away by the band’s light show this evening, consisting of multiple screens, suspended on wires from a truss above the stage. The screens do not form a contiguous whole. Rather, they can be individually raised and lowered, moved left and right and tilted from vertical to horizontal. Each tile displays a moving image depicting a small section of the live action on stage, but not necessarily a close-up of a face or a set of fingers. On the flat floor of the Ziggo Dome, with fifteen metres of the world’s tallest music fans between me and the stage, the view of the people performing on it is lousy, so I spend a lot of time watching these moving screens instead. All of Radiohead’s albums from ‘OK Computer’ onwards are represented here tonight, although the emphasis is obviously on the latest, ‘The King Of Limbs’ (which now seems so long ago). The sound in the Ziggo Dome is — I must finally give the place its due – superb. The lows, mids and highs all ring through with clarity, the buzzing low bass of ‘Feral’ in particular resonating with my eardrums and making them jiggle. This place is big and it takes a lot of sound to fill it, but Radiohead are playing nice and loud, so there’s none of that thin arena ambience that troubles a lot of shows in venues like this. Superb sound, a band firing on all cylinders, a good recording position and high quality recording equipment are the essential factors for a first rate audience capture, to which category I feel this recording may justly be assigned. Don’t let my complaints about the venue and my fellow man, or my indifference to the band fool you. The quality of this recording is outstanding and probably the best of the three concerts I have thus far recorded in the cavernous Ziggo Dome. It compares favourably, for example, with the recording of Lady Gaga that I made in September. As ever, samples are provided to help you decide whether this is worth the share ratio depletion for you. Cheers. |