Beau Bristow Concert

It was an awesome and terrific time with Beau Bristow at Inti last night! Preparations, resources and time have been poured onto this massive event by ICF. From the band, publicity, booking of venues and PA system checking, it's a whole lot of work to do. At the start of the semester, the committee knew that this event will be a big one and there's gonna be lots of stuff to handle. For me personally, it was already rush of schedule on Wednesday itself. Besides having an almost full day of classes from 8am, the law magazine phototaking session was at 4pm. I think it's quite fortunate that I had only 4 semesters to handle since the other 2 senior semesters had a visa briefing. Even with the reduced numbers, it took more than an hour for the photos to be taken. Right afterthat, I had to hurry to the class rep meeting and then this was proceeded by band practice at Sports hall itself.

On the day of the concert itself, it's a stretch of classes from 8am till 11..then at break time, I needed to spend almost an hour getting the bookmarks done. We met Beau for lunch at the cafetaria and then I had to go to class at 2 all the way till 5pm. Immediately after class at 5, it was a straight march back to my room and be prepared for a final round preliminary practice and preparation at the Sports Hall. We went through a final round and at 6.45, the doors were open for registration.

It's been quite some time since I took to the stage with hundreds of people watching. The last major one was a long time ago when I was in Secondary 4 in SJI, performing for Teacher's Day concert. Of course, I do get a little occassional butterflies in the stomach, but I'm pretty much used to being on stage nowadays given my exposure in playing at CF meetings and Sunday service. We played three songs, "The time has come" and "Rooftops" plus "Endlessly" from Desperation Band. Lol, I've managed to improve my execution for "The time has come" this time round and the most challenging aspect of performance for the night is the 16-beat bridge where I had to have extreme concentration to prevent myself from being derailed. Haha..we did well as a band together and probably the only side is the minor technical problems like the mic not sounding loud enough and the bass amps that's muffling the air around me. As a result, I couldn't really hear the sounds since it's also drowned by my crashes. I had to run a parallel song in my mind to play along with the band..haha.

Beau took the center stage after us. He started off with a very familiar song, "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol and that was indeed an excellent and a perfect cover of it. Lol..I would say he's the true one-man band. Jordan would have salivate listening to him. Beau could literally do the bass, electric, acoustic, vocals and some drum rhythm all at a time with some really wacky gadgets that he has. The usual electric guitarist may have one or two of those pedals but he had one entire range of sixes to sevens! I would say I managed to discover a few "secrets" of bands here and there. I was wondering how the Ting Tings could maintain a constant beat of guitar or bass while Katie White played something else or how Katie White had two of her different vocals running simultaneously. Then, when I saw Beau playing all his parts at one time, I guess that's where I get the answer..ahaha. Oh another thing is that I spotted was that one of the songs in which Beau did some special effects sounded rather similar to Muse's starting rift for "Invincible". Lol, I found out later that Beau uses the plastic cylinder thing to slide his guitar strings, the exact one that Matthew Bellamy had! Amazing! Beau is only the second person that I know to do that sort of stuff after Matt.

After the concert, Beau spent the time autographing CDs and posing for pictures. It was nice of him to personalise his autograph for me..haha. The total estimated turnout was 250+ people! Woah, to think that we placed 80 as the expected number on the event proposal and I've only printed 150 bookmarks. Oh ye of little faith! I really wanna thank God for making the event such a superb success..hehe.

By the time we finished packing up, it was already 11pm+. Many of us did not have dinner, so we duly went to Al-Salam to chomp on some food with Beau. It was very tiring for many for us but at the same time, we felt that it was worth every single drop of sweat. A big thank you also to Beau Bristow for coming over to Malaysia and it was gracious of him to sponsor his own trip to Malaysia. It was a privilege indeed to listen to Beau and the sharing of his wonderful music :)