Sunday, April 22, 2007

Tiesto @ Alexandra Palace

My brother had managed to get me a couple of tickets to arguably the biggest trance event of the year in the country this year. Tiesto is currently taking his current album "Elements of Life" on a year long world wide tour and this was his only English gig.

The event got off to a bad start with the slowest queue line in the world. I've been to a lot of theme parks but even their queues weren't as bad as this. It took a little over two hours to finally be let in and by the time I'd offloaded my bag Tiesto had already half an hour into his 6 hour set.

But the bad start to the proceedings was quickly forgotten by what was an absolutely blinding night. He played a brilliant set mixing up his earlier anthems and the new album tracks but also played lots of great old tunes. Hearing "Ayla" and Binary Finary's "1999" brought back really happy memories of my holiday to Ibiza, and he even managed to play a remix of Jaydee's "Plastic Dreams", a track that has to be around 20 years old.

The event had a theme of the 4-elements; fire, earth, air and water with backdrops reflecting the theme. Pyrotechnics helped move the theme along, we had flamethrowers in the fire set, cloud guns as part of air etc. There was no water sprays though, or maybe they missed me! Some of the movie playing behind him was a bit too arty for me and having seen what can be done with a screen at Fatboy Slim's gig a while ago I was a little disappointed with the theatrics but a minor complaint on a spectacular production.

Included in the set was his reworking of the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack and I think that for me was the track of the night. The visuals flashed up pirate messages and pirate imagery before I'd even recognised the track being played, and when the anthem kicked in everyone was going mental and I was drumming along to the music.

The event was excellent, and I'm not just saying that because my brother works there. The place has had a bad rep in the past for poor acoustics but there was none of that here, and it shows that if you put the right system in properly it can sound amazing.

Needless to say after 6 hours of pretty much solid dancing (surprised I managed it) I was pretty much wrecked but having been up for over 24 hours I now had to find my way off to Southampton for a club day.

I was so impressed with this show that I've started looking into where else he is playing as I want to go again. I've never smiled so much in one night!!! Oh, and I bought the album on the way back.

Bro! Thanks a bunch for getting the tickets. Without you being in the right place I wouldn't have been able to experience this.


Here are the pics. I'm not going to explain them.




















































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