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read between the lines
switchfoot's final asian leg despite parental objections (or should i say my mother, who'll never understand a lot of things including why it isn't a "waste of money" to watch a band i'd just seen perform again), i flew up to kl to catch switchfoot at the close of their asian leg and was extremely thankful i'd done so. the local organisers didn't do a good job of controlling traffic flow as the event, on the 6th floor auditorium of a community mall, saw thousands of us squashed together like flies in a trap outside the auditoriom.all i know is, i unsuspectingly rode the escalator up from the 5th to the 6th, only to almost have my footwear squashed at the top. i had to bang into a girl standing (which i now saw was not her position of choice but was because there was simply no place else to move) at the top, apologise to her, and try to squeeze myself into some other pocket of space before the unsuspecting tudung-clad fan a few steps behind me also ended up in the same predicament. the last time i had this panicked escalator near-accident was a few years ago on chinese new year at the top of level 5's entrance to city square jb's only cinema. anyway after a lot of apologising over elbow-bumping, i made my way to the wall only to be stuck there for a good twenty minutes, as the doors were still closed despite it being past the scheduled time that the event was supposed to commence and despite people piling up at the escalator and lift entrances. none of us could feel any air-conditioning and eventually we all worked up a good sweat. unsafe and stinky, the crowd unanimously sang "wo-oh-oh, woh-oh-oh, oh-oh-ohh" (hello hurricane's intro) in an attempt to get the organisers to let us in. five minutes later, the doors finally opened and the tide of the crowd eventually pulled me towards that direction. i nearly missed my cordoned-off entrance to the 'intimate zone' (a fancy name for the mosh pit, basically) because the tide of the crowd was so strong and i happened to be at the fringe of it -- thankfully the crowd was pretty respectful and didn't erupt into a stampede. security made me trash my waterbottle just so i would be forced to buy the organisers' waterbottles, selling at a costly rm4 per bottle (talk about blatant moneymaking).the majority of us were unable to get our admission slips exchanged for real concert tickets as keepsakes because in a terrible oversight, the organisers didn't have enough of those to give out (what were they thinking?). thankfully these are about the only faults the organisers made. their tie-in with airasia red tix (contributing to better-than-sg event promotion), absence of chairs (which we were told to remain seated in at the singapore leg for the opening acts), workable sound and lighting systems, sufficiently air-conditioned auditorium, less time allocated to opening acts and longer duration of concert minutes contributed to an enjoyable concert experience for all present. i believed it this time round when jon foreman said that all of us in the auditorium were a big family (not really the singapore audience's fault, considering that security shushed us whenever we tried to yell or clap too loudly and only allowed us to stand from our seats after the opening acts were over) because the majority of us (me included) sang along with all their songs and cheered/jumped/clapped/screamed at the appropriate moments. a 'safe' and 'united' moment for me was when the band sang this is home (from the second chronicles of narnia soundtrack) -- at that point it just felt like i was in a worship segment of a church service, except one that was made up of different races and religions. i later described the 'safe' feeling to a friend as one of those rare times in life where you feel like you don't need to hide or look over your shoulder anymore, like you're finally safe and free to just be yourself without getting criticised or ostracised for it. [note: i actually went through a week-long anti-climax after the unexpectedly climactic feel of this event...something i hardly experience these days.] the band was clearly feeling the vibe, because they came back for not just one, but two encores (compared to zero in sg), possibly from mass numbers of us calling them back by spontaneously singing hello huricane's intro and chanting "we want more" respectively. it made my (and a lot of people's, since the band said it was by popular request) sadly, there was no autograph-signing or photo-taking session at this venue either, although a lot of us (like me) took photos with life-sized posters of the band and took whatever memorabilia they could get off the venue (posters, the mat topi cap that drew threw to the crowd at the show's end, what looked rubberbands that the tech crew threw to the post-concert audience as the crew dismantled equipment onstage). we definitely got our money's worth tonight. |
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