Oh what a day
Yesterday was such a long day! In fact, it was a day that lasted two, from the moment I got up for work at 7am Friday morning and lasting through to past Saturday midnight when I finally collapsed into bed.
After knocking off work at 7pm on Friday, I rushed home for a quick shower before heading out again. (In F1 parlance, they call it a "splash and dash", which actually refers to a very quick refuelling pit-stop when there're just a few more laps to go.) It was Friday night mahjong again! Normally we would just play 3 rounds, but this time we made it to 4 rounds, till almost 9am Saturday morning.
The plan after that was to head home and sleep for like 5-6 hours, before getting up and ready for the concert. But I forgot to tell Le Boss the plan. Just when I was about to drop dead in bed, he called me at 10am to do some tasks. It's suffice to say that I wasn't a happy cow when I dragged my heavy arse out of bed and tried to set up VPN and remote desktop access to my office network. Tamade, that didn't work, so there was no choice but to head down to office. Now, I couldn't possibly reject him and say that I hadn't slept the whole night because I was out having fun, could I? Urgh!!
He even wanted me to stick around in office the whole day in case some stupid developer in the US has some new fixes up, but I wasn't having any of that nonsense. I'm not going to burn my weekend just because someone else screwed up his work. Two hours was all I could offer, before I went home at 1pm. Finally I could get some bloody sleep. I'm not joining the Subaru Impreza challenge, so I really don't need this sleep deprivation training! But I didn't exactly sleep well neither, because Le Boss called again to check on the work and there were a few other SMSes. And I was up before 4 to check my company email, wash up and get ready to go to the concert.
So on to the concert. That was when the plan got foiled for the second time in a day. We had arranged to meet at the Leisure Drome for dinner. That was straightforward enough, except the place doesn't exist anymore! It wasn't exactly our favourite haunt, so we didn't know until we got there. In the end, the Zeeless Zombie, that is moi, round head and Javelin found ourselves in a place littered with expensive restaurants, and chose a packed Taiwan porridge restaurant which was probably the cheapest. The rest of the motley gang hasn't arrived: chiakhong was stuck in City Hall waiting for the next bus that wasn't jam-packed, Mr Nice Guy got caught up with work and would be late, and zx has just landed and was rushing over.
Fortunately, all's well that ends well and we finally assembled before the concert was slated to start at 8 o'clock. :)
Talk about the concert. Yeah, Beyond rocks - there's no doubt about that, non? But the performance seemed subdued. I guess it was inevitable with a Singaporean audience. It was ironic that those who paid for the most expensive seats didn't want to sit on them, and stood throughout, which was great. The others with cheaper seats had their heavy arses glued to them. It was only until the final one or two songs when they've warmed the seats long enough to melt the glue that they finally stood up. Maybe they were all zeeless like moi?
Notwithstanding that, we were treated to all their classic hits like Amani, 长城，情人，遥望，海阔天空，光辉岁月, 真的爱你, 遥远的Paradise and a whole host of other songs. Even without their former lead singer, Beyond proved that each one of them could sing better than those stupid boybands with 4D number names. The audience seemed especially appreciative when the drummer 叶世荣 sang solo in a few songs like 遥望 and I-can't-remember-what. Awesome is how you'll describe them.
As they say, all good things come to an end. How do you pack more than 2 decades of music into that 2 plus hours? The concert ended at around 10.40pm. At the start, they had told us that there wouldn't be an encore, because they would sing every song. True to their word, they disppeared behind the stage after the last song, leaving the audience standing there and screaming for 10-15 minutes before they realized that there really wouldn't be any encore. It was the end - the end of the legacy, the end of an era. Period.
Unless they go broke and decide to reunite in future, of course. But that's another story altogether.
Being a rock fan myself, I was naturally gutted. Beyond was like the Nirvana of Chinese/Canto rock, with the death of a lead singer hauntingly coincidental. No other bands even come close. Would we ever see another band that rocks like them? I really don't know. But rock was the genre of the 90s. Now the in thing is R&B and the likes of Jay Chou. So we can sadly conclude that, once Beyond is no more, Chinese/Canto rock music is officially dead.
Time to bring out the tissue and cry our hearts out. Don't go, Beyond! Don't go! As one of my favourite songs go, 冷雨夜我不想归家. Hey you forgot to sing that! :'(
After knocking off work at 7pm on Friday, I rushed home for a quick shower before heading out again. (In F1 parlance, they call it a "splash and dash", which actually refers to a very quick refuelling pit-stop when there're just a few more laps to go.) It was Friday night mahjong again! Normally we would just play 3 rounds, but this time we made it to 4 rounds, till almost 9am Saturday morning.
The plan after that was to head home and sleep for like 5-6 hours, before getting up and ready for the concert. But I forgot to tell Le Boss the plan. Just when I was about to drop dead in bed, he called me at 10am to do some tasks. It's suffice to say that I wasn't a happy cow when I dragged my heavy arse out of bed and tried to set up VPN and remote desktop access to my office network. Tamade, that didn't work, so there was no choice but to head down to office. Now, I couldn't possibly reject him and say that I hadn't slept the whole night because I was out having fun, could I? Urgh!!
He even wanted me to stick around in office the whole day in case some stupid developer in the US has some new fixes up, but I wasn't having any of that nonsense. I'm not going to burn my weekend just because someone else screwed up his work. Two hours was all I could offer, before I went home at 1pm. Finally I could get some bloody sleep. I'm not joining the Subaru Impreza challenge, so I really don't need this sleep deprivation training! But I didn't exactly sleep well neither, because Le Boss called again to check on the work and there were a few other SMSes. And I was up before 4 to check my company email, wash up and get ready to go to the concert.
So on to the concert. That was when the plan got foiled for the second time in a day. We had arranged to meet at the Leisure Drome for dinner. That was straightforward enough, except the place doesn't exist anymore! It wasn't exactly our favourite haunt, so we didn't know until we got there. In the end, the Zeeless Zombie, that is moi, round head and Javelin found ourselves in a place littered with expensive restaurants, and chose a packed Taiwan porridge restaurant which was probably the cheapest. The rest of the motley gang hasn't arrived: chiakhong was stuck in City Hall waiting for the next bus that wasn't jam-packed, Mr Nice Guy got caught up with work and would be late, and zx has just landed and was rushing over.
Fortunately, all's well that ends well and we finally assembled before the concert was slated to start at 8 o'clock. :)
Talk about the concert. Yeah, Beyond rocks - there's no doubt about that, non? But the performance seemed subdued. I guess it was inevitable with a Singaporean audience. It was ironic that those who paid for the most expensive seats didn't want to sit on them, and stood throughout, which was great. The others with cheaper seats had their heavy arses glued to them. It was only until the final one or two songs when they've warmed the seats long enough to melt the glue that they finally stood up. Maybe they were all zeeless like moi?
Notwithstanding that, we were treated to all their classic hits like Amani, 长城，情人，遥望，海阔天空，光辉岁月, 真的爱你, 遥远的Paradise and a whole host of other songs. Even without their former lead singer, Beyond proved that each one of them could sing better than those stupid boybands with 4D number names. The audience seemed especially appreciative when the drummer 叶世荣 sang solo in a few songs like 遥望 and I-can't-remember-what. Awesome is how you'll describe them.
As they say, all good things come to an end. How do you pack more than 2 decades of music into that 2 plus hours? The concert ended at around 10.40pm. At the start, they had told us that there wouldn't be an encore, because they would sing every song. True to their word, they disppeared behind the stage after the last song, leaving the audience standing there and screaming for 10-15 minutes before they realized that there really wouldn't be any encore. It was the end - the end of the legacy, the end of an era. Period.
Unless they go broke and decide to reunite in future, of course. But that's another story altogether.
Being a rock fan myself, I was naturally gutted. Beyond was like the Nirvana of Chinese/Canto rock, with the death of a lead singer hauntingly coincidental. No other bands even come close. Would we ever see another band that rocks like them? I really don't know. But rock was the genre of the 90s. Now the in thing is R&B and the likes of Jay Chou. So we can sadly conclude that, once Beyond is no more, Chinese/Canto rock music is officially dead.
Time to bring out the tissue and cry our hearts out. Don't go, Beyond! Don't go! As one of my favourite songs go, 冷雨夜我不想归家. Hey you forgot to sing that! :'(
在雨中漫步 蓝色街灯渐露
相对望 无声紧拥抱着
为了找往日 寻温馨的往日
消失了
任雨湿我面 难分水点泪痕
心更乱 愁丝绕千百段
骤变的态度 无心伤她说话
收不了
冷雨夜我在你身边
盼望你会知
可知道我的心
比当初已改变
只牵强地相处
冷雨夜我不想归家
怕望你背影
只苦笑望雨点
须知要说清楚
可惜我没胆试
-- Beyond, 冷雨夜
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1 Comments:
I was reading your comment halfway to the Michael Hutchence part when I thought of having Rockstar: Beyond. And you mentioned the same thing right after that, ha! :D
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