Sheffield Arena: 29th November 2001 (Still singing!) (Stereophonics live)

Member Name: missbrowneyedgirl

Product:	Stereophonics live
Date:	30/11/01 (113 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing sound quality, all my favourite songs, the beautiful Mr Kelly Jones

Disadvantages: being seated

I'm what I would call a passive Stereophonics fan. I like their music, I buy their albums but I'm not a fanatic. I don't run around proclaiming my love for Kelly Jones, wearing the band merchandise or even follow them around the country. For those reasons I'm not going to try and tell you about the band themselves, their history or success stories. I am however, going to let you in on how, at the beginning of the week, I had a stroke of luck.

Thanks to a lucrative deal at work, we are given complimentary tickets to events at Sheffield Arena every now and again. As you have probably guessed by now, five Stereophonics tickets landed in my possession on Monday.

Now this gave me a bit of a dilemma, as missblueyedbestfriend REALLY loves the Stereophonics. I mean REALLY! So much so in fact, she had decided to go to that very gig and come and stay with me. Unfortunately, the tickets sold out almost straight away (which is no mean feat considering the Arena's capacity of 12,500). Obviously I wanted to go, after all I had earned my free ticket through my work, but really I had to offer it to missblueyedbestfriend. To cut a long story short it all worked out nicely in my favour...;)

You see, missblueyedbestfriend couldn't make it on that evening, plus I have earned lost of brownie points by offering the ticket! So at around 8:45pm on Thursday, I found myself standing outside Sheffield Arena. Well, I didn't so much find myself there as I had spent the last 45 minutes dashing about picking my colleagues up and trying to find somewhere to park, thus missing the support band, Feeder.

Never mind though. We were there now. That's one of the good things about complimentary tickets. You don't need to get your money's worth by seeing the whole event! Now apparently Feeder performed a blinding set. This was the general consensus of the people that had managed to get there in time to see them anyway!


So, back to the story, we walked in to the Arena all happily laughing that we had never been there before. This seemed a little odd considering that between the 5 of us we have lived in Sheffield for an accumulated 60 years! The Arena itself is a pretty impressive venue. It reminded me of a huge indoor amphitheatre, on a similar size to the one in the latest BT adverts! Everywhere you looked there were people!

Shortly after we took our seats (a bone of contention, but I'll explain later). The Stereophonics took to the stage. Stuart Cable (Drums), Kelly Jones (Vocals, Guitars), Richard Jones (Bass) and two out (temporary?) members on guitar and piano respectively. I do apologise

Performance excellent - 12th out of the 14 dates they have crammed into the latter part of November (only just spilling into December). Particularly when you consider they have only just completed their European tour! This is certainly a hardworking band. Lead singer Kelly Jones also reminisced to the crown about the days before they had made the big time, and the smaller venues that they had played in Sheffield. The mere mention of the Leadmill clearly warmed the hearts of the crown although I think he was preaching to the converted!

One of my worries about the gig was which songs they would play. I have been a little slack in my CD purchasing of late and the Stereophonics newest offering (Just Enough Education to Perform) is sadly missing from my collection. I have been to see a few bands where their tour has consisted of a major plug for their latest album, which is all well and good if you have it. However, if you were hoping for a set of familiar tunes to jump and sing along to, not so good!

Luckily the Stereophonics were happy to pander to my needs, and played a wide selection of songs from all three of their albums! This was brilliant as it allowed me to get to know the new album, but maintain my happiness with interspersed old favourites.


The sound quality was phenomenal, particularly the bass, and even more so when you consider the size of the venue. I did think a couple of the songs were a little too slow at times, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment. I wont attempt a full set list as I will undoubtedly omit songs but for those of you who are interested here's a brief recount of some of the outstanding tracks.

Roll Up and Shine, The Bartender and the Thief, Pick A Part That's New, Just looking, I wouldn't Believe Your Radio, Yesterday Tomorrow Today, Local Boy in Photograph, Same Size Feet, Mr Writer, Step On My Old Size Nines, Have a Nice Day, Every Day I Think Of Money and finally A Thousand Trees, my favourite song and third into the set, which really got the crown going!

The stage backdrop consisted of several tall thin video screens giving a kind of skyscraper effect behind the band. The visuals, more often than not, reminded me of i-tunes but that could just be because of my current obsession with the software! In brief, the visuals were all patterns of some description with the occasional colour-altered shot of Kelly Jones singing. Somewhat disappointingly, particularly when they played Pick A Part That's New, no videos were shown.

The band themselves on a whole didn't really do much. Admittedly it's difficult for a drummer to do much but drum, although Stuart did pull a lot of faces which were shown on the large screens at the sides of the stage. Richard did seem to be giving it some but in the main none of the band members moved from their spots. I was a little disappointed that Kelly Jones stayed over to the left of the stage, but that's probably because we were sitting to the right! After saying that they did get the crowd going and I would have rather not been seated.

This is where the bone of contention comes in, I wanted standing tickets, another colleague wanted a box, so we compromised by taking seats close to the
stage. In the standing area, the atmosphere was electric whereas the seating was full of people half sitting, half standing and generally not quite knowing what to do with themselves. Also some of the standing people were seriously obscuring views of those seated behind.

Even though that sounds quite negative, I don't want to give you the wrong impression of either the band or the venue. Myself and my colleagues thoroughly enjoyed the performance. It's just that I'm a little more used to being in the thick of thing so to speak! The set itself was continuous from 9pm until just before 11pm with only a short teasing pause before the four song long encore! As I said earlier, these guys are really a hard working band!

However, all good things come to an end and we soon joined the 45 minute queue to leave the Arena car park! I would thoroughly recommend seeing this band if you can. As I said I wasn't a particularly big fan but I would definitely pay to see them again. There are only two dates left on the current tour: London's Docklands tonight (30th November) and Manchester's Evening News Arena on Sunday 2nd December. However look out for them on a date near you soon!

Useful links:
http://www.stereophonics.com/
http://www.sheffield-arena.co.uk/

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