Sunday 20 January 2008

The Police and Fergie in concert

After a long saga which involved buying tickets for two concerts and flying between three cities, a friend and I made it to The Police concert at Western Springs in Auckland on Saturday night.

Fiction Plane started the concert with an average performance; nothing really wrong, but not much to grab my attention either. Fergie and her entourage were in fine form. Her band was made up of outstandingly talented musicians and her dancers added both colour and character. I was impressed with her Black Eyed Peas medley and some of her other rock medleys, although there were a few questionable inclusions there. The dance-off during costume changes was a great feature and really showed off the talent of the backup dancers.

The Police were back in New Zealand after a 27 year break, and family and friends had raved about the Wellington concert. I wasn't disappointed. With such a full sound, it's sometimes difficult to remember that The Police are simply a three-piece band, with no backup musicians, second guitarists, extra vocalists, etc (apart from a faint click-track on some numbers).

For me, there are always 1-2 songs at a concert that colour my whole experience. I was looking out for two things here: the drum interlude in Walking on the Moon, and the whole of Roxanne (pure magic, as far as I'm concerned). While I didn't get what I wanted from Walking on the Moon, Roxanne was fabulous. Plenty of other highlights and, overall, a very slick performance ... will wait until I get back to Welly to do the full post-mortem with my muso dad, who used my concert ticket on Thursday night.

No comments: