Okay so I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve been a McFly fan since they started out nearly 10 years ago. I’ve seen them live an uncountable number of times, and loved every minute. But I can safely say last night was the best fun I’ve ever had at a gig of theirs.
This was due to a number of factors. The fact I love their music, yes. The fact we were stood right at the front of the stage, definitely! And partially down to the vodka too I guess, which cost an extortionate price of £5.50, I repeat: FIVE POUNDS FIFTY. To our annoyance we also found that not once were our bags, or barely even our tickets checked once in the venue, so we could have sneakily brought our own drinks in for free.
But whatever, this was my view for the evening, so I certainly wasn’t complaining…
Being this close, we could have been conscious of the boys being able to see us singing our hearts out and dancing around like loons, but that didn’t stop us. And although we didn’t quite get dragged up on to the stage, or the marriage proposals that myself and Lottie were after, between us we did manage to get a plectrum plus Dougie’s water bottle. Well we stole that from the stage, cos THAT’S HOW CLOSE WE WERE.
So, I should get down to mentioning the gig itself. The tour was called ‘Memory Lane’, after the song from their 2005 album Wonderland, which is literally one of my ultimate favourite songs of theirs. And although at first I thought, oh yay another greatest hits tour, with this year being their 10th anniversary as a band it seems pretty fitting.
Support came from a band called ‘The Vamps‘, we didn’t manage to catch them as they were on quite early but I’ve been told they were good. From looking on their YouTube page I can see why they were chosen to support McFly, they’re young, alright looking and they’ve even done a mega cringey version of McFly’s song ‘That Girl’, amongst various other pop covers including One Direction and Taylor Swift.
McFly came on at an unusually early time of around 8.45, but maybe it came round quicker due to the nights ‘host’ Ant Brant (or as they called him ‘Mr Antastic’) keeping the audience entertained for a short while. I say entertained lightly, because sorry but he’s really not very funny. Now if anyone remembers the band V (around back in the early McFly days and sang ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’, he was a member.
The show began with an acapella version of ‘Memory lane’, but soon enough the curtains dropped to reveal their impressive stage set up, the distinctive intro to ‘That Girl’ kicked in, and the whole place went nuts.
The set list all in all was great. On top of all of their greatest hits including ‘5 Colours In Her Hair’ and ‘Obviously’, they were sure to please their older fans by performing some album favourites that haven’t been played live for a long time. One of the best parts of the set for me was when they played my favourite 3 songs from the radio:ACTIVE album: ‘Corrupted’, ‘Nowhere Left To Run’ and ‘Lies’.
They then toned it down for a short while, with Tom putting down his guitar and moving over to the piano as they performed a brilliant stripped down version of ‘I’ll be OK’, followed by the ballad; ‘Bubblewrap’.
Not wanting to let their audience get bored, naturally after the band had performed ‘Smile’ we were greeted with Danny stopping the show to request various hats to be brought out for each member. Ant Brant returned to the stage, the sax players even stepped down to join the band, and they performed a cheerful medley of covers consisting of ‘It’s Alright’, ‘Don’t worry Be Happy’, and ‘Y.M.C.A’.
The show was soon to come to an end, with Tom announcing before they played the full version of ‘Memory Lane’ that it was their last song. For Dougie to then pick up his setlist and inform everyone that it wasn’t, it was in fact just the encore and that they would soon be returning to play three more. But in all fairness everybody knew that anyway, what band doesn’t do an encore?
Off they went for a minute or so, and as they came back and Tom picked up his pink ukulele we knew what song was coming next. After a good sing and dance to ‘Love Is Easy’ with it’s catchy chorus and ‘do do do do dooo’s’, it was time for ‘All About You’. They then went on to end their 1 hour 45 minute set with what was definitely the best and most heartfelt singalong of the night: ‘The Heart Never Lies’. All in all I couldn’t have enjoyed it more, and whatever your opinion is of bands like McFly, you really can’t deny their talent once you’ve seen them live. Even my dad would agree there, I only ever had to beg him once to accompany me in seeing them live (when I was 11) and he still happily came along again!
I took a few video’s, YouTube destroys the quality of them a fair bit, oh and sorry about our singing haha…
Corrupted:
And here are a few more of my best photographs:
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love it!! so jealousssss