“When will this loneliness be over?”

That was one supermassive gig.

As I posted yesterday, one of the companies my company does work with had some customer tickets for the first of two Muse gigs at the band spankin’ new Wembley Stadium. After a quick check with our corporate ethics line about the acceptable size of gifts from suppliers, I was off.

First, Wembley the venue: amazing. It’s huge, certainly one of the biggest stadiums in the world. The architecture is amazing, and the giant load-bearing arch means that there are no columns or pillars required inside for support, thus no obstructed views. The seats are steep and high. Being on the concourse is like being in an airport, they’re so huge and shiny. Toilets are plentiful, and are still sparkling clean, with vases of flowers inside. There are plenty of helpful staff. Food and drink is plentifully available, although food is exorbitantly expensive (the smallest non-snack item is a cheeseburger at £7.50).

I met the rep from the other company there. The area we were seated in was Club Wembley. This meant that we were under the north roof (although it didn’t rain during the gig yesterday, luckily) in wider, cushioned seats with padded armrests. Being in a cushioned seat rather than a hard plastic one is definitely worth it if you’re going to be there for 7 hours, as we were.

First act: Rodrigo y Gabriela, a Mexican duo who play acoustic guitars in a pumped-up Spanish-folk-rock kind of way. I’d only heard one or two songs by them before, but I was keen to hear them live. I thought that they were good, and their sound quite exciting with the percussive guitar-body thumps they do. Two people sitting on chairs in the middle of Wembley isn’t much to get a crowd fired up, but the fans seemed to enjoy them quite a lot.

Second act: Dirty Pretty Things. When The Libertines broke up a few years back, the two main musical forces in the band – Pete Doherty and Carl Barat – went off and formed new bands, Babyshambles and Dirty Pretty Things, respectively. DPT is, to my ears, the same old jangly indie rock you get anywhere else these days. Except for one or two exciting songs, most of their set was posing hipster blahness. The crowd was polite, but that’s it.

Third act: The Streets. Mike Skinner and co., the distillation of British urban white yoof hip-hop culture. I like The Streets a lot, since they unashamedly maintain a completely British presentation. A lot of hip-hop acts aren’t very good live, though, and I wasn’t sure how they’d handle Wembley, but despite a slow start they came across pretty well. The band sounded good, and Skinner’s rambling raps came out better as he proceeded. He worked the crowd a bit (mostly through repeated attempts to invoke Freddie “crowd hand-clapping to Radio Ga-Ga” Mercury), and even threw in a chorus of Muse’s “Time Is Running Out”.

Then came Muse. I sometimes find it strange that three young guys who do operatic space-rock have become one of the biggest bands around (in Europe, at least), but I guess that as long as you keep your prog-rock upbeat and exciting the kids will go for it. I really like Muse, in a nerdy way, and have their last three albums.

Last night they ascended in an explosion in the middle of the stadium and took to the stage and played 2 hours of every good song they know. I always say that any good band sounds better live. Well, Muse is no exception, and I would say that when it comes to big stadium bands they’re probably the ones that have the biggest recorded-to-live improvement ratio. They were phenomenal. They played every hit, of course, my favourites being funky “Supermassive Black Hole” and the immense “Newborn”, which closed the regular set. They were triumphant, soaring, spot-on. They sounded huge, and they rose to fill Wembley. One thing I hadn’t realised before: what a good pianist Mat Bellamy is.

The stage was huge, and the guys ran around a lot. There were giant glowing satellite dishes and huge coloured orbs in the stands up behind the band. There were giant video screens, some prepared animations, some weird video effects on live shots of the band. It was all very cool. There were two encores: the first was mostly slower songs, and acrobats hanging from giant balloons drifted over the crowd. The second was more rocking, and ended in more balloons and fire.

A review from the NME.

The full setlist:

1- Knights of Cydonia
2- Hysteria
3- Supermassive Black Hole
4- Map Of The Problematique
5- City Of Delusion
6- Butterflies and Hurricanes
7- Citizen Erased
8- Hoodoo
9- Feeling Good
10- Sunburn
11- Invincible
12- Starlight
13- Man of Mystery
14- Time is Running out
15- New Born

16- Soldier’s Poem
17- Unintended
18- Blackout
19- Plug in Baby

20- Micro Cuts
21- Stockholm Syndrome
22- Take a Bow

Definitely a top gig, and most certainly the best free (for me) gig I’ve ever been to. The folks I was with really enjoyed it as well. The only downside to the evening was that bus chaos meant SWMNBN had to come pick me up; luckily, we’re not far from Wembley.