Muse, Wembley, 11/9/10
Posted: Sun 12 September, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Music, Reviews(ish) 3 Comments »Last night, we saw Muse at Wembley Stadium.
I’ve got to be honest, I’m not a fan of Wembley Stadium – for me it’s just too big for gigs, and you end up watching the band on big video screens rather than seeing them in action. Sure, if you can get standing tickets you might have a better chance – but I haven’t managed that with Wembley yet.
The shows are huge – they have to be – but (in my opinion) I find them quite soulless, that they really are a big marketing exercise.
In the case of Muse, this was the third time I’ve seen them – the last time was back in December 2003 and the shows have grown immensely since then. The set itself last night was stunning – and even more so when it came to life for the gig itself – with huge forced perspective buildings that turned out to be enormouse videoscreens, along with weird balloons around the back of the stage, and a lightshow that probably could’ve powered a small to mid-sized town. Oh, and the now-essential moving sections of stage. Of course.
On that technical / effects side, the entire gig was stunning – well, except for the smaller videoscreens having a lag of about two seconds, so that the sound was coming through before the video – decidedly weird, and not what you expect at a gig that size. But the lighting rig was awesome, the sound set up was spot-on, and technically it was great.
Muse were good too – but in my opinion they’re too small for Wembley. Yes, they music fills the place and is stunning, but performance wise, you just can’t see three people on a stage that size. Any theatrics that were done (including Matt Bellamy’s Glowing LED suit) were just too damn small. Even the moving sector of stage, moving, lifting and rotating was well, just too small. In the O2 it would’ve been excellent. In Wembley it was all just dwarved by the size of the Stadium.
So all told, a tad underwhelmed. Muse blasted the stage and sound system, but I just came out feeling that Wembley was too big – they could’ve done the same gig at the O2 and it would’ve been stunning, but with less people and a smaller scale to fill.
That “sound ahead of the video” phenomenon (do-do-dee-do-do) is deliberate. If you were further away, due to the speed of sound being slower than the speed of light, they would sync up.
If you go to a gig in Slane Castle in Ireland, there’s video screens and speakers 1/3 of a mile from the stage, and the video is delayed by about 2 seconds.
That would be fine, except we were just about at the far end of the stadium.
Oops.
Oh, and it was sound getting to us before light, which didn’t seem to make much sense.
Oh. Well, that means the sound engineer was shit. Not necessarily Muse’s engineer, more likely the venue/sound hire one.