Live From Leeds

On Saturday Me and Amanda went to Leeds for the Robbie Williams Close Encounters concert. Amanda has been a Robbie fan since Take That were around years ago, so she was quite excited about seeing him live again. We left the house at 12 and drove up to Leeds. It only took about and hour and half to get to Leeds, but once we turned off the motorway the traffic slowed to a crawl. It took us over an hour to go just 1 mile.



Once we had parked, we phoned our friends, Sharon, Mark and Sharon's sister Cheryl as they were going to the gig too. They were already in the arena so we walked around to the main gate and started the impossible task of trying to find them. This involved lots phone calls and waving arms around. There were probably already 50,000 people in the arena at this point, so you can imagine how hard it was to find them. The gig had a capacity for 90,000 people, and the tickets had sold out.




This concert is the first concert to be broadcast in High Definition and it went out live on Sky as well as 26 other countries. Not bad!!. We had a long wait for the first support act to come on. Unfortunately it was too difficult to sit down due to the amount of people, so we had to stand. The first band Orson, didn't start until 6pm. Orson were pretty good, nothing special, but they played some good songs. They were only on stage for 30 minutes.



The second band on stage were Basement Jaxx, and they were amazing. I was looking forward to these, probably a little more than than the main act :-). I didn't think Amanda would like Basement Jaxx, but she seems quite content dancing away.


Luckily Basement Jaxx were on for nearly an hour unlike Orson. I personally think Orson were there to test the speakers for the Jaxx and Mr Williams. lol


Once Basement Jaxx finished we had a 40 minute wait whilst the stage was prepared for Robbie Williams. 5 minutes before he came on stage, the director made an annoucement reminding everyone the concert was being broadcast to half the world and to make a lot of noise, and 90,000 people all shouting certainly makes a right din. 70,000 of those must have been women :-)


The concert started to the tune from Close Encounters, and then following lots of firework, and fire, Mr Williams popped up from the middle of the stage and all hell broke loose as he started the first track. The lighting , and screen rigs on the stage were phenomenal, a lot of effort had obviously been put into the design. But I'm a geek and am impressed by that sort of thing. :-)


The concert went on for 2 hours, and I must say it was rather good. I'm not really a Robbie Williams Fan, unlike Amanda, but he does know how to put on a good show. Once the concert ended, there was the mad crush to try and get out of the arena and back to the car park. It took us about 45 minutes to get back to the car, and then a couple of hours trying to get out of the car park. The traffic getting out of Leeds was terrible as you could quite imagine. We didn't get back home until gone 3 in the morning. But never mind, We got to have a lie in on Sunday.


The concert was repeated on Sky 2 on Sunday night, so we decided to watch it. It was interesting to see how different the concert looked on TV compared to seeing it live. Naturally, seeing it live was an order of magnitude better than TV. I would like to see the High Def version but we haven't got a High Def TV. Amanda, can we get a HD TV? ;-)