Anita and I last night went to the 2nd annual Big Night Out show at the Singapore Indoor Stadium to see Rise Against, Saosin & Muse. We had been looking forward to the show since it was first announced as we had tickets to see Rise Against in March 2009 in Sydney. We weren’t able to go as we we moving over to Singapore a few weeks earlier, a real dampener as we both really love Rise Against and when they were announced as part of the Big Night Out show we were quite excited that we would be able to see them.

We got to the Singapore Indoor Stadium after grabbing some tea around 7pm thinking that we would be able to walk straight into the general admission area as we’ve done at so many other shows, alas were we mistaken! The queue to get in was about 400 metres long winding 1/2 way around the bloody stadium! So we joined the end of the queue and patiently waited while Saosin started their set (It must have been really empty in there), around 45 minutes later, about 8pm we reached the doors and finally made our way through police checks and onto the floor. It was a pretty strange feeling being only 20 people back from the front considering we waited for that length of time outside. Some things Singapore just has no idea about, and organising large (if you call 6000 people large) public gatherings is one of them. It would have been great to see Saosin, while not being a massive fan it’s nice to see them doing well as I have fond memories of hanging out with them in Sydney when I worked for EMI.

Anyway, we were in and thats what mattered, Rise Against came on shortly after and played a pretty powerful set of tracks mainly from their last 2 albums, Appeal To Reason & The Sufferer & The Witness. The crowd reaction was a lot better than I was expecting with quite a few singing along, to the new album mainly. Unfortunately you could tell that they had just finished the Big Day Out tours in Australia as they did look a little bit out of it and the vocals suffered a little as a result. The middle of their set was punctuated with Hero of War and Swing Life Away, you can watch a couple of minutes of the latter on the video player below (filmed with my iPhone 3GS so excuse quality). A 45 minute set is never quite enough and while they played a lot of their most popular tracks there were at least another 10 or so that would have been really awesome for Neetles and I to hear, especially some older tracks. So, after years of being a fan, I finally got to see them and it’s only left me with wanting to see more, lets hope they tour the next album to Asia, or that we are back in Australia by then!

Muse were on later with a pretty large stage production and light show including some pretty interesting video walls. I’ve never really been a big Muse fan, there is just something about every song sounding really similar that really annoys me. It’s like they get into the studio and try to write the most epic songs ever, and for me it always seems a little contrived. However, seeing the crowd reaction I am definitely in the minority here with the crowd really coming alive for the headliners set, It was good, but I don’t think I would ever see them at their own show, and we snuck out before the encore to get a cab home.

A pretty good night in the end but just makes me miss the music opportunities in Australia just that much more…