Velvet Revolver gig. Manchester, UK.

[madformac]

For those of you wanting to read my thoughts on last nights VR gig, which were included as a post on a different thread, here it is on it's own thread..

We arrived at the gig for about 5:30pm.. The doors opened at 6pm...

The first thing I noticed was that I felt very old. I'm 30, which is not considered exactly written off and assigned to the archives age, but of the 80% or so of the crowd (which I estimate, given the venues size at about 15,000) were between the ages of 10 and 17.

It's great for the band that they have a lot of younger fans but this was ridiculous, you had guys taking their daughters of 8 or 9 to see these guys. Maybe they were naive but VR ain't exactly a teeny bop group you know? Their website has an 18 rating for a start..

Anyway, the doors opened and in we went. We were standing and made our way to the front of the stage in front of Slash's microphone. I guess there must have been maybe three or four rows of people in front of us, mostly kids.. I found it quite amusing that here we were, two older fans from the GNR era, surrounded by pubescant teenage boys all trying to cultivate some form of facial hair... haha, it was really strange and funny but later all this teen angst around us would manifest itself in a more dangerous way.

So we were in place at 6pm.. The warm up act, I think somebody said they were "the Datsuns" came on quite late, about 7:40pm or so, so the crowd had been waiting 40 minutes over the start time already... The band were pretty good although they seemed to expend more energy in spastic movements onstage than in their playing... These guys finished their set at around 8:20pm.

Then we waited, and waited.... And waited... And waited... Some asshole was shouting "Slash!!" so loudly next to us it actually hurt our ears more than the show itself! But we waited... The background music was repeated over and over and the crowd were getting restless. All these impatient kids down the front were getting pissed off and started booing. You could feel the situation and it was getting quite tightly packed at the front..

Eventually the band came onstage at 9:45pm, 85 minutes after the warm up act finished.. They played "Sucker Train Blues" and all the impatience of the young crowd was released in a dangerous way. I've been in mosh pits before, I know what they are like but this was very different. The surge of these kids, some of them obviously on various substances started literally going mad.. The whole area became so tightly packed it was difficult to breath, the huge swell of the crowd was pusing left then right as one and we looked at each other and decided it was just too dangerous. If one of those kids fell they would have been trampled to death without question. Both of us are physically very strong and we had to work very hard to push our way out of the situation. But we did.. It was a miracle nobody was seriously hurt. All these young fans being made to wait so long was the deciding factor in the situation, no question. Security were not good enough and lacking in numbers for such a huge crowd.

Anyway, we moved to a safer position towards the right of the stage and apart from some guy in front that stunk of **** we enjoyed the gig tremendously. The crowd at the front seemed to calm down after about 3 numbers and it was much better.

Scott Weiland seemed off his head. If he's off heroin then he's an extremely good actor in my opinion.. Slash was just Slash.. Brilliant as ever and delighted to be playing so close to his birthtown.. "Hi to all my distant cousins" he yelled at one point.

They played the majority of the Contraband album plus "It's So Easy", "I Used To Love Her" and an awesome "Mr.Brownstone" from the GNR days. All in all a good performance.

If the fan base around the world is like the one at this gig VR could become a very big band indeed.. It's a Big Machine...


I took a few pictures at the gig but due to the rather stressed conditions involved in taking them most were pretty bad... Here is one of Slash that came out OK though.... And one of Scott & Dave too...