Dropkick Murphys and Alkaline Trio at the Forum Theatre
I don’t appear to have written about it at the time of writing, but Sabriena took me to see Ben Howard at the Palais a while back, and now it was my turn to pick a show… and what a show it was: in around July, she noticed that the Dropkick Murphys were coming, and the opener was Alkaline Trio, two bands I really like (though I confess I’ve not listened to any of the last three Alkaline Trio CDs). At the Forum Theatre, we’ve never been there so that should be fun.
It was a work night (Sunday night), but no worries I can just take the next day off as I have plenty of PTO left this year!
So we organized to go down there, got there early to make sure we got parking ($27 for probably 6 hours right next door?), then walked up to Melbourne Central for some dinner. Back to the theater where the line got significantly longer, but they got every one in fairly fast just rapid-fire checking tickets. No one got carded, but I think that’s because it was pretty clear everyone was my age or older, and there’s no mistaking me for 17.
I dunno if Alkaline Trio shat in the sound guy’s cereal or if it was meant to sound like that, but I found their stuff really poor sounding - we were right in the middle of it (just in front of the sound booth, about a meter back from what would have been the pit if anyone was doing that), could barely hear the vocals (Sabriena had no idea what songs they were playing even though she knows a few and they actually played one of her favourites, “Radio” and she didn’t pick it up at all). The bass was simultaneously inaudible and obnoxiously ringing too. I’m no sound engineer (in fact I’m quite probably tone deaf) but I didn’t really enjoy it as much as I should have and the crowd didn’t really seem all that animated either (though I dunno what a bunch of 40 year old emos are supposed to look like?).
After that Sabriena wanted some air so we went outside for a bit, and when we came back we ended up further up the back, but the sound was significantly better and it was a brilliant show… probably evidenced by the fact I took seven photos total and three of them were when no one was playing. They played about two songs I couldn’t place, the rest were all great, they weren’t near as sloppy as they said they might have been, and the crowd was going bananas.
We got out fairly reasonably (traffic was a far cry from the Palais where we spent a good 30 minutes just sitting in the driveway of the parking lot) and made it home a bit after 3am, after a pit-stop at the Rockbank roadhouse for a coffee.
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Melbourne Central/300 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne Central, Melbourne VIC 3000, AustraliaNavigation: Older Entry