Today’s the 28th of November 2013- over a year since this Snow Patrol show happened.

I actually wrote this on Boxing Day last year but for some reason never published it.  Anyway, here it is…

SO- this gig was three months ago. It’s Boxing Day right now- I’m the first up at my parents place in Brisbane- so figured I’d get on the blog.

This was an interesting gig. Not bad, not great, but just ok. I went to this one with Pete, a good mate who’s birthday it happened to be that day.

It was a fairly ugly time in a lot of respects, and maybe that’s why it’s taken me a while to write about it. Only a week prior, a young lady named Jill Meagher was raped and murdered around the corner from our house in Brunswick. If you don’t know the story, you can Google it . I imagine after the trial in January there’ll be a wikipedia page about it. The story had gripped the neighbourhood, and was still very fresh in our minds. She went missing on the Friday night, with the killer being arrested the following Thursday and her body found the next day, two days before this gig. We’d been at the pub before the show for Pete’s birthday, and it was the main talking point. How could this type of thing happen? Apparently the killer had raped before- why in God’s name had he ever been let out? When it became clear that this was just an opportunistic attack, and was not a crime of passion or anything like that, it made it that much worse. This could have been any one of our wives, friends, sisters or workmates. I know this had nothing to do with the show I’m supposed to be writing about, but it was what was going on the time.

I remember at the show thinking “These guys are Irish.  Jill Meagher was Irish. I wonder if she’d planned to be at the show?”  That’s not to say that all Irish ex-pats are going to run and see any Irish bands that play, but I guess my thought pattern was in the way that Aussie ex-pats in the UK would go and see Powderfinger.  That thought seemed even weirder by the fact that there were two empty seats next to us.  Anyway- I once again digress…

The support was a bloke named Steve Smyth, who I’m pretty sure I liked quite a bit.

Snow Patrol came out and did their thing. The set wasn’t wonderous, and I must say this ‘acoustic’ gig was just a bit more computer generated beats to fill in for the lack of drums. No idea on the politics of why two of the guys weren’t there, as they’d been on the rest of the world tour either side of these gigs. Maybe they just really didn’t like Australia?

I’ve not listened to that much Snow Patrol for a few years, so I’m not really familiar with too much of their work after Final Straw (which is one of the finest albums ever recorded in my opinion). This set comprised a fair few songs I knew well, as well as quite a bit I didn’t.

Like I said, the ‘acousticness’ of the show wasn’t really acoustic. It wasn’t even really that stripped back. I’ve seen Snow Patrol a few times before, and must say I prefer the full show. Having said that, I guess it was interesting to see them in a different mode.

They did do an excellent AC/DC cover which I filmed a little of.