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One of the things I was looking forward to about living in Melbourne was the chance to go and see tours from all kinds of bands. As well as seeing Kiss and The Who at the last two Grands Prix at Albert Park I have also been to see Def Leppard, Pearl Jam, Fleetwood Mac and most recently, the Backstreet Boys. The list of people who I have wanted to see but missed out on is more than twice as long. Most recently this list would include Britney Spears, Faith No More and AC/DC.  The music I like is eclectic to say the least!

I never wrote about going to Pearl Jam but it was amazing. They have been my favourite band for over a decade and I have been a member of their fan club since I turned 18 and got a credit card. They allocate fan club tickets for the best locations by the stage so because this was a general admission concert I took the day off work and went down a couple of hours early. By this stage there was already hundreds of people there but once we were let inside I ended up about 4 rows from the front. I didn’t realise how amazing this was until I saw some pictures from friends who were so far back they couldn’t even make out the figures on stage.

I’m really, really not a fan of general admission areas because I’m so short but it was totally worth it.

I never got around to copying more than two photos off my memory card onto my computer. Two weeks later I went to Fleetwood Mac, had a great time, took heaps of photos, and then when I got home my memory card corrupted. All my photos from both concerts, gone.

When I was at university my flatmate Laura and I spent quite a few evenings after a few drinks dancing around our flat listening to 90s pop music, in particular the Backstreet Boys, and we always said we would go see them if we ever got the chance. The two of us came to Melbourne in March 2008 and missed their Unbreakable tour by two weeks! Two years later and unfortunately she could not manage to come to Melbourne for the This Is Us tour, and I wasn’t going to miss out just because of that! My friend Kate agreed to come but then a few weeks out from the show it turned out she wans’t going to be here for it. It was quite a struggle to find someone else willing to come to a show for a band who haven’t been cool for at least 10 years! Kait came through at the last minute, and with a bottle of wine behind us we headed along to Rod Laver Arena for the show. There were a lot more people there than I was expecting, considering all the stories in the media a few days before of slow ticket sales.

You cannot deny that the Backstreet Boys are quite possibly the cheesiest band around today. The synchronised dance moves really aren’t as acceptable as they were in the 90s, especially now that even the youngest member of the group is in his 30s.  But as Kait said to me after the show, it might be cheesy but they are extremely entertaining, they know how to put on a good show, and they know how to excite a (mostly female) crowd. At a seated gig I’ve never seen a crowd stay on their feet for a whole show before.

Their set list is also carefully thought out in that it is almost a direct replica of their Chapter One greatest hits album with a couple of up-tempo songs off the newest album mixed in, meaning that the people in the crowd who didn’t realise the band never actually broke up could still sing along with most of what they heard. I must give a special mention to the man in the row in front of me who would have been at least 50, but he was singing along to all the songs off This Is Us so he was clearly a big fan! In a role-reversal of all the other couples there, it was his wife who looked bored.

Unfortunately my camera with the good zoom had no batteries so I didn’t manage to get decent photos with my little Cybershot.

See?

Instead of taking photos I recorded parts of each song for Laura and Kate to show them what they had missed out on!

One thing I did not know before I arrived was that the Backstreet Boys no longer use a touring band. Having just the boys and a DJ on stage made it feel very karaoke at the start until I got used to it, singing along with a backing track is very American Idol! They also have four dancers who make appearances during some songs which I thought was kind of unnecessary, they really didn’t add anything to the performance and were quite distracting in parts. My only other complaint would be that they didn’t perform anything from Unbreakable because there were some quite upbeat songs on that album that would have got the crowd going. The only thing they performed from Never Gone was Incomplete which got the crowd excited a lot more than I expected, considering it is from the “new era” of their music.

They finished the show with arguably their most popular song, I Want It That Way and then came back with Straight Through My Heart as the encore. I found this a peculiar choice as the latter is a very new song which most of the crowd appeared not to know, this meant the atmosphere in the arena went straight down after it reached a peak during the earlier song. Personally, I would have swapped the order of those two to ensure that most of the audience would be dancing and singing along to end the night. All in all, it was a very entertaining night, and if Howie is true to his word and they do come back next year, I will be sure to go along. I might even cough up the extra cash for better seats.

Here’s my clip of the biggest song of the night: