Paramore LIVE!

I've been looking forward to this for a long time especially so after I've missed seeing them in Malaysia. I was already out of the peninsula when Paramore came to KL in October. I did notice their UK tour dates and that one of them fell on Manchester but again, I was looking for people to join me for it. After much effort in advertising around, I managed to find two people to join up and they're Serena (my law classmate) and Nick (CG and churchmate). Since it fell on a Friday, I had all day to prepare myself. My 16 GB SD card which I ordered from Amazon arrived just in time and I had Henna to thank for lending me her camera to film some videos from the concert. At around 4.45pm, I met up with Serena and Nick at the railway station to take the 5.08pm train and I'm impressed that the train actually left the station on the dot at 5.08pm.

A quick survey when we reached the Manchester MEN Arena was that there seems to be a higher proportion of high school kids than older people in the crowd for Paramore. For the Linkin Park concert, there were lots of older men and people with piercings and tattoos but geeezz, it's so weird that only "kids" turn up for Paramore concert in the UK. In Malaysia and most probably the US, Paramore is a big hit even among the University students. I guess part of it has gotta be attributed to the content of the lyrics..lol. And I saw lots of parents accompanying their kids to watch Paramore too. I, for one, can't imagine any Malaysian parents going to any rock concert with their kids...hahaha.

When we entered the arena, one of the opening acts was already playing. F.U.N. was halfway through some of their songs while we were finding our seats. I really enjoyed their cover for Queen's Radio Gaga. I find Paramore's opening acts to be much better compared to the one in Linkin Park although I don't fancy any of B.o.B's song until "Airplanes" came on. Hayley made a brief appearance on the set with B.o.B. for the "Airplanes" song before heading back to the stage during the interval. After a good 20 minutes meeting, Paramore kicks off the show with "Ignorance". After playing a couple of hard rocking songs, they switched to an acoustic set with the sofa, playing "Brand New Eyes", "Misguided Ghosts" and "When It Rains". As expected, Paramore did lots of fan interaction and this is something which I liked about them. They took time to get the crowd involved instead of many other established bands where it's just play and go.

Paramore left their best songs, and also my favourites too towards the end. "Pressure" got stretched to about 8 minutes plus because Hayley took the time to introduce the different band members one by one. The best thing was seeing Jeremy Davis doing his bass flip in "Pressure" with my own eyes and it looks amazing from the top at where I'm sitting. Unfortunately though, the battery for Henna's camera started to die by the time I reach "Looking Up", another big favourite of mind and I had to cut it short before the last climatic part. Arghh..low memory space was the bane for the previous concerts and I solved it by using a 16 GB card and now, the camera battery life can't outlast the amount of free memory space. The next best thing then was to revert to my own Nikon camera and record the last bits of the concert. It certainly does not have audio pick-up or video quality as good as Henna's camera, but it's still better than having nothing. Hayley and co. did something like a false "ending" when they said that "The Only Exception" would be their last song. It's kinda obvious that they would come out for an encore again because the two biggest songs "Brick by Boring Brick" and "Misery Business" were not played at all. It's a big crime if they don't play it at the concert, something like Muse not playing Supermassive Blackhole or Green Day ommitting Wake Me Up when September Ends. Paramore ended the whole night with a bang with some lucky fans at the standing area being invited to do a dance with the whole band on stage. Taylor York literally gave up his guitar to someone else to play while he ran around like a monkey on rabies on stage..lol. Btw, Hayley got an England jersey with the no.7 on it from the crowd..haha. At the end of it all, it was a great satisfaction that I had in attending yet another awesome rock night out. It's opportunities to go to nights like this that I'll remember for years to come :)