Transferred from my old blog: Dido Concert

May 19, 2004

I took Bryan to see Dido in concert a couple of nights ago. Its not that I had to drag him exactly, and he wasn't kicking or screaming, but I don't think he would have gone to the concert if I had not bought him the ticket.
The warm up act was half of a duo known as Aqualung. The half that we saw was named Ben, and he was only half of Aqualung that night because the other half, his brother, had flown home for the birth of his child. So it seemed that ben was the lesser half of the duo, and the performance didn't come across even vaguely resembling the songs I had heard. Ben's voice is more a background vocals kind of voice so it was all sort of wishy washy sounding. It wasn't bad, but we ended up going to the bar and people watching.

Dido came on stage at the very sensible hour of 8:30 pm. She played a great set and the band was really good - the band played a much bigger part of the live act than they do on her CD's. A great bass player who I distinctly remember from the last time I saw Dido. Incidently the bass player was wearing the same football shirt he had been wearing the first time I saw him. The percussion player was also very good, and really took her job seriously. She played every percussion instrument imaginable, from the triangle to a rain stick, to a sand box.
I knew all of the words to her songs, but so did everybody around us. There was a group of about 8 girls in the row in front of us, who were quite clearly tanked. One of them wanted to be the only person in the theatre to be standing up during the performance. We (and many people sitting around us) had to make her sit down forcibly a few times just so we could see Dido.Then when Dido actually invited us to stand up for a couple of songs, the girl in front got kind of rude and showed us a selection of her fingers. I could tell her friends were embarrassed but were sufficiently tanked themselves that they had to hug each other between each song. It made me feel old actually.
Anyway the show ended at 10:10 pm. Bryan said he had enjoyed the show, and recounted to me some of the highlights. Then we went to a bar, a very upscale place called M-Bar, an add-on to the usually economy-scale Moxies. It was good! I had a few cocktails, which went down very easily considering the nightmare of a day I had had up until the concert. (You might have read about my nightmare of a day, on a post that I have since deleted.)