Within Temptation, Wembley

Last Saturday I went to Wembley Arena, London, to see Within Temptation perform. If you don’t already know of Within Temptation they are a symphonic rock band who have been around for quite a while, forming in 1996 and having released several albums since then, the most recent being ‘Hydra’, released this year in February. I had really been looking forward to the album and bought the tickets in advance, but was not initially as pleased with the album as I had hoped for some reason. On reflection, it is actually pretty great and I don’t know what else I was expecting it to be.

When queueing up to get in I couldn’t help but notice the recurring theme of people’s clothing – a line of people dressed in black, elaborate dresses, leather jackets and tall gothic boots – it was quite a good sight and meant that I knew I’d come to the right place.

I stood in the standing area with a good view (despite the tall guy in front of us). The support act was Delain, who I didn’t really know of and had looked up before, but it was pretty awkward not knowing their songs as people were singing along. Well, they were pretty great and similar to Within Temptation in many ways.

After a 20 minute wait Within Temptation came on stage, introduced by a dramatic dropping of the curtain and a short video about the Dragon to set the Hydra theme.

The setlist was (as found on setlist.fm):

1. Let Us Burn
2. Paradise (What About Us?)
3. Faster
4. Iron
5. Edge of the World
6. In the Middle of the Night
7. Our Solemn Hour
8. Angels
9. Dangerous
10. And We Run
11. Tell Me Why
    Elements Intro
12. See Who I Am
13. Stand My Ground
14. The Cross
15. Covered By Roses
16. Mother Earth
    Encore:
17. What Have You Done
18. Whole World Is Watching
    (Acoustic)
19. Summertime Sadness
    (Lana Del Rey cover)
20. Ice Queen

Within Temptation performed for two hours and were absolutely brilliant, Sharon’s voice being so beautiful. It’s so much better gathering with other fans and listening to music live than on your iPod. The time went so quickly and I actually find it surprising to know that 20 songs were played! Sharon wore three outfits (shown in the image above) which was quite impressive for one show as she went off stage and changed between songs. The Hydra World Tour has been going on for quite a while and I don’t understand how Sharon still manages to sound so great and reach all the notes perfectly!

At the end there was a group picture taken of Within Temptation with the audience to keep as a memory. It was a great night. I love how sweet the members of Within Temptation are, making videos for their fans on YouTube and writing and replying to them on Twitter. Within Temptation retweeted my tweet of a picture of them the next day! 😀 Yay!

The Horne Section Recording

On Friday I went to another recording at BBC Broadcasting House of the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Horne Section (well, technically two as it was a double recording) and it was a good laugh. This radio programme features Alex Horne and the band performing humorous songs about a variety of pretty random topics vaguely related to the topic of the programme such as Shopping (consumerism) which was one of the topics of one of the recordings.

There were many guests, including Marcus Brigstocke who sang about an experience of his in a pub in France and Adam Buxton who sang about music festivals and had a joke about the name of the show, and also Pedro playing the saxophone in the band (shown to the right in the picture above). Pretty cool, eh?

We managed to get in to both recordings and also hung around at the end to get autographs. The cast were very nice and there was some nice audience participation to get a couple of audience members involved, such as letting someone play the trumpet and also singing songs about a random member at the beginning to warm up.

It was great how kind the cast were and how happy they were to stop and give you their autograph and have a good ol’ chat about whatever seemed appropriate. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet all of them as some of them rushed off carrying all of their equipment but they were all great guys.