I went to a Snow Patrol concert on Monday night (September 17, 2007) here in Melbourne at the Rod Laver Arena. It was such an amazing show. I missed Snow Patrol at MSG in New York City back in March of 2007 (when they came with Ok Go). I would have never thought that I’d end up seeing the band in Melbourne of all places! Cool!

So the concert started off pretty lame. I thought the opening bands, Iain Archer and Silversun Pickups, were just bad (and wow…the girl vocalist in Silversun Pickups…WORST. SINGER. EVER.). You could tell that the crowd was there Snow Patrol and not particularly interested in the opening acts. I can’t blame them for being so lame. There was virtually zero energy in the performances. Plus, it didn’t help much that both bands seemed 1st-graders controlling their lights.

As soon as Snow Patrol took the stage, the place became alive. I loved their entire set from start to finish. They had this neat setup of large screens that showed different (and random) things for each song — sometimes it was polarized versions of the crowd and singer and other times it was just a moving graphic.

They played lots of old and new songs and ended with an encore performance of “You’re All I Have” which is one of my favorite Snow Patrol songs. Hearing them do “Run” and “Chasing Cars” was also pretty neat. All in all, they’re just a solid band and they certainly delivered.

So I ended up not bringing my SLR to the concert because I wasn’t exactly sure if they were going to confiscate it or not. The official rules were that no photography was allowed, but I knew that was BS since most places will allow you to bring at least a compact digital camera into the venue. It’s when you have a camera with a detachable lens that things start to get iffy in terms of being allowed to photograph. Anyway, so I left the big camera home and settled for half-decent photos with the pocket-camera.

It turns out that I probably could have brought the SLR in. There was no security check and it was completely dark in the venue. And since my SLR is black (and I wasn’t using flash), I doubt anybody would have seen it other than the people sitting directly around me.

I can’t believe I took all of the following photos with my compact digital (which, by the way, is nearing the 10,000th photo mark!!!).

Thanks to Jayde for the ticket! Check out the rest of the photos on the Snow Patrol @ Rod Laver Arena Flickr photoset.

Or…see some highlights inside…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Australia, Concerts, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.