Epica's concert

Ciao everyone :)

A special post goes to the concert I went to on Saturday night, after the Open Day. 

Background: weeks ago, as I had mentioned in a previous post, Isabela and I were looking for concerts by artists we both like or that we thought we could both like and we stumbled upon the tour dates of Epica. Epica is a symphonic metal band I have liked for a couple of years, thanks to a friend of mine, especially because their singer (Simone Simons) has one of my favourite voices ever! Anyway, Isabela didn’t really know the band, but she agreed to give them a try after listening to a couple of songs and we bought the tickets :) Like for Elisa’s concert, though, I wasn’t really prepared and I had barely heard a couple of songs from the most recent album by this band!

Before the concert: since the door of the venue were going to open at 6.30pm, we had planned to be there by 5.30, but we ended up arriving at 6.15! when we got to the front of the building, the Forum, it looked like there wasn’t any queue at all... until we turned the corner and we started walking along a looooong line to reach the end :P It went past a whole block hahaha So we stood there for about half an hour, having a sandwich for dinner and listening to the few recent Epica songs I had on my phone! Someone really didn’t want us to learn the new cd, because neither Isabela nor I could find it on our mobiles... and we both were meant to have it since I have the physical cd and I had copied it to my pc and then to our phones!

Concert: this concert was a lot more than I expected! I thought it was going to be Epica’s concert, with a band that I didn’t know (Dragonforce) opening for them. Instead, when we entered there was another band playing, called Neonfly, and it turned out that they were the actual opening band, whereas Dragonforce and Epica were going to share the concert itself! That was unexpected and at first I wasn’t really pleased, but it worked out very well ;)

Neonfly – they are a heavy metal band, a genre I normally don’t listen to. However, I ended up really liking them! They were very enthusiastic and entertaining, their music was good and one of the band members (a buy who was playing the bass, I think) had an awesome hair *_* 

Dragonforce – again, an heavy metal band even though not as heavy as Neonfly. They were AMAZING!! A couple of the band members were sooo funny with the faces they made while playing to entertain the audience and their songs were absolutely great! I am definitely going to check them out soon :) They played for about 1h20 and I didn’t even get bored for a moment, despite not having gone there for them. However, I have to admit that I was looking at the watch a few times because I wanted Epica to come out on the stage so much...
Oooooh yes, an important things to say: Isabela and I were exactly in the middle of the floor... and at some stage some guys started moshing just next to us and pushing us to the sides! I was so worried they would hit us and hurt us, but apart from a couple of minor hits we were always fine! Actually, they even did us a favour because they pushed us towards the front and we got very close to the stage.

 

 

Epica – finally, at 9.45pm, it was their turn to walk on the stage. From the moment Dragonforce had stepped away, I had been anxious for Simone to come out because I really wanted to see her live, since I have loved her hair soooo much for two years and I wanted to see if it looked as good in persona s it does in pictures. It does. She is beautiful and her hair is absolutely gorgeous!! Hair aside, though, she was amazing for the whole concert! She made a couple of little mistakes, but compared to the rest of her performance they were so insignificant to me. Come one, she has to go so high in most of her songs that I can sort of understand her making mistakes sometimes! Her voice was so sweet and incredible and I love her so much :) And she was just a  few metres from me... Epica as a whole struck me less than the previous two bands, but that’s n new for me as for me Epica always meant Simone’s voice, and she was great, so that’s all that mattered to me! The things is, they are not good as entertainers as the others are, Simone especially. She is a singer, not a performer, but that’s all that counts for as far as I am concerned – I love her for her voice!

 

 

The venue: the Forum wasn’t as nice as Koko, but it was still beautiful! I am sued to the big stadiums were I normally see concerts in Italy... so these places look amazing to me! The Forum looked like a theatre pretty much and I loved it! 

 

After the concert: by the time the concert ended, we were dead! It had been a four-hours long concert and we had been standing for about five hours, counting the queue...