ooo... the sweetest thing

Friday night, 24 Nov will be a night to remember! I was not entirely excited about the concert for some reason. My bro couldn't sleep the night before as he was so excited about it. But I slept like a log, and neither did I get up early as well, in anticipation. In fact it felt like a normal day.

Got to the stadium at around 3 and went to buy a T-shirt before the hoards of people arrived. Then went to look for the blue tent as Elaine said. Got there and got in the queue and rang Elaine to say I was in the queue. Thanks to her I managed to jumped ahead by 50-80 people as she and her friends had gotten there around 1pm. Heh.. heh... But the good thing was the first 1800 (or so) people to queue got to be in elipse bit!! So I was so near the stage! I decided to park myself by barrier of one of the claw bits which meant that when Bono (or Adam or Larry) came out to the claw bit, they were like 2 metres away from me!! It was just unreal! Unfortunately, I hadn't bothered to bring my camera cos I thought the likelihood of being close enough to take a decent photo as close to impossible - afterall there were 42,000 at the concert and prob about 15,000 or some would be on the field. And in many ways, the concert sounded like a good ol' Kiwi sing-a-long.

The concert started with City of Blinding Lights, Vertigo and then Elevation where Bono made references to NZ. And of course he sang One Tree Hill - but not without poking fun at it first (he said to bring some seeds up there!) and managed to intersperse a few lines from 4 seasons in One day in it too. The stage set-up was just incredible. A giant screen (of sorts) behind them and video screens on both sides of the with a camera focussing on each one of teh band members. The set ended with One and Bono promoting the Make Poverty History campaign. It was awesome when he got everyone to hold their cell phones up cos it looked like the stadium was covered with fairy lights. Oxfam were there earlier selling white bands and hopefully the Make Poverty History campaign got more people signing up to the mailing list and from there more people wanting to be more aware and be pro-active on the issues.

I was pretty impressed at Bono's attempt to sing Pavarotti's part in Miss Sarajevo. Then it was cool havign Larry come out onto the claw (the one I as near) to play the tom and cymbal that was set up there for Love and Peace. Bono then continued the banging the drum in the intro to Sunday Bloody Sunday. There were two encores. Included was a rousing rendition of Angel of Harlem, and towards the end of Myterious Ways, Bono got a girl onto the stage and serenaded her with With or Without You. The final encore ended with Kite where Bono released a kite into the sky (which unfortunately got caught on the giant screen thing on the stage).

The only disappointment was that they didn't sing Yahweh or '40'. In the US and European legs of the tours, they mostly finished with '40'.

But still... I couldn't have imagined a better night. The concert was fantastic, and bring up the front was an unbelievable bonus. It definitely worked like a miracle drug.