Not one for the big stadium gig but last night was one of those gigs to make me rethink. The Killers at the revamped Wembley arena.
Lots of interesting stuff (top viewer-operated fountains), top performance from a band with a monosyllabic frontman but great choons. But most interesting of all was the audience and their interaction with each other - how the waves of euphoria swept around the room (helped of course by musical and ah-hem other stimulants), from one person to the next.
A lot of the body language (raised arms etc) clearly both an echo of ecstatic religious practices (it helps you approach trance like states by opening up your lungs more...) and by copying each other...
Enthusiasmos again: individuals "posessed by the deity" and losing their sense of self in a euphoric state...
(NB the shaven headed fella on the left of the picture behaved like a real holy roller...and after an initial scepticism we all joined in...)
We werent made to do this by the band (they created the environment); no, we chose to copy each other (and all the others we'd seen doing this kinda stuff before). Again and again.
Quite extraordinary. And made me think of what my chums who had made it down to the Millenium Stadium for the Carling Cup final would have gone through yesterday afternoon - be they Gooners or The Other Lot. Football seems to work the same way for the crowds anyway...
Neat, too to bump into Flood who co-produced the Sam's Town album. I like that he seemed just as excited as the rest of us even tho' he'd been partly at least responsible for shaping the sound at the heart of it all.
Too excited to sleep much after that...