From The Sunday Times, August 12th article by Robert Sandall 'He’s so last millennium, The former Dome plays host to Prince: a fitting venue to reflect on past glories"

http://entertainment.time...223620.ece

The live-music scene in this country may be in rude health, but at the top end of the market, the new venues that host the biggest gigs are turning out to be even less music-friendly than the ancient sports fields and curtained-off exhibition centres that preceded them. Both the rebuilt Wembley Stadium and its west London counterpart, Twickenham, have been stacked so high and steep as to be uncontrollably reverberant. For the music fan standing on the pitch at either, it’s more or less impossible to distinguish a performance from its echo.

Meanwhile, back indoors, we now have to contend with the O2, or Millennium Dome as was. Recently opened by Bon Jovi and soon to house the A Bigger Bang show the Rolling Stones brought to Twickenham last year, it looks likely ? by virtue of its central location, just south of the Thames at Greenwich ? to take over from Wembley Arena as the capital’s premier covered rock venue.

Twenty-first-century mall rats will love it. The O2 takes the commercially hectic concourse of a modern airport and clamps it around a hangar-sized concert space. With an outer ring of restaurants, bars and shops as long as New Bond Street, surrounding an auditorium taller than Nelson’s Column and 13 times the size of the Albert Hall, the O2 is not a place you come to listen. No matter where you happen to be sitting, its acoustics are boomingly, seat-shakingly, tin-can bad. Worse than Wembley’s.
But then again, it’s an ideal spot for up to 20,000 presold devotees to engage in communal celebrations of the sort Prince has laid on for 21 nights in August. Having had a difficult time for most of the 1990s ? almost disappearing from view after changing his name, falling out with one record company then releasing a bafflingly boring triple album with another ? Prince is currently resurgent. Part of this is due to pop’s 20-year rule, which finds fading superstars making up with their original teenage audience once it has finished growing up and has started to feel nostalgic about the icons of its youth. Like the middle-aged Wham! fans who thronged Wembley Stadium for George Michael in June, Prince’s O2 crowd last week were mostly the thirty-somethings who first flocked to him at his creative peak in the late 1980s.

They could hardly have been disappointed by what they saw. For better or worse, Prince hasn’t aged a bit. In terms of spectacle, this in-the-round show is as impressive as any the little fella has staged since the Lovesexy tour of 1988. Musically, it confirms that he has been mainly treading water ever since.

Anybody attending the second of his O2 concert series without prior understanding of the man ? and in particular his almost religious worship of the late James Brown and his large-scale “soul revue” lineups ? would have been baffled by the opening 15 minutes of the concert. Upholding the traditions and respecting the history of black American music comes as naturally to Prince as ordering us all to get funky. As the band grouped in the centre of his squiggly-symbol-shaped stage, a brass quartet stepped forward, sideways and back to rip through a New Orleans arrangement of Down by the Riverside.

Any expectation that the appearance of the boss in a yellow frock coat would yield one of the greatest hits ? being performed on this tour, allegedly, for the last time ? had to wait while Prince toyed with a slow jazz blues. Cream and U Got the Look had 40,000 arms punching the air, but then we were back in tribute mode for a scrappy romp through Sly Stone’s Play That Funky Music, for which various members of the audience were invited up to dance, sing and party around. This was followed by James Brown’s old sax player Maceo Parker jamming What a Wonderful World. It was definitely unusual ? and quite refreshing amid the regimented, corporate ethos of the O2 ? to sense that Prince was making the set up as he went along: he has apparently rehearsed 130 songs for this tour and plays a different selection every night. But it also gave the show a stop-start quality that saw a fair bit of traffic up and down the aisles as audience members nipped out to visit the arena’s many bars or 548 toilets.

Things picked up momentum around the one-hour mark with Anotherloverholenyohead, not long after which the concert juddered to a temporary halt after a sexlessly thundering version of the erotic micro-funk anthem Kiss. This, the arena’s worst acoustic moment of the night so far, was almost cancelled out by the first encore, Purple Rain, whose magisterial guitar histrionics ? Prince’s epic nod to his other musical hero, Jimi Hendrix ? suggested that giant rock ballads survive better in these testing conditions than lithe R&B workouts. As if to prove the point, Prince and the band returned once more with a completely unexpected and slightly pointless cover version of the Gnarls Bark-ley hit Crazy, sung by one of his backing singers.

As the crowd began to leak away, the concert felt a bit like Prince’s career in microcosm, a strange jumble of the fabulous and the unfocused; the work of a man with talent to burn who, at various points, went straight ahead and burnt it. It left you in awe of the superb performer he still is at 49, and nostalgic for the sublime songwriter who apparently conked out at 33.
[Edited 9/5/07 6:12am]

Re the sound - i have to disagree. Wherever i have sat or stood the sound has been pretty damn good. Miles better than both Wembley Arena and Earls Court for sure.

Though to be fair the sound IS probably a little clearer when the stage is at the end - as was the case for Snow Patrol.

wrong.
[Edited 9/5/07 6:20am]

interesting. have to say that after all the pre-opening hype about how great the sound was going to be even compared to the albert hall, I agree it has been a let down sound-wise. It does not suit his band either and made them sound very average.

At the end of the day,the place is just too big to have any decent sound. Give me Brixton academy anyday.

I've found the sound pretty terrible every night.

It was best in 106/107, worst in D1/2. I've sat in 106, 107, 111, 102, 110, 103, D1, D2 and B2 and it was average at best.

Bass was overpowing, but weak in kick. Most of all, it was terribly muffled at the high end. And the delays was bad too. In I Feel for you, the voice and music was so bad it was almost out of sinc.

I also think it wasn't loud enough.

I think the acoustics at Wembley aren't great, but a lot better than the O2. The O2 is up there with the worst of Earls Court set ups.

I sat up in the gods for one in 411. I think the sound engineer must have been in the box below me as the sound was the best I've had there that was 18th Aug

I tend to agree with squirrel. I think the sound leads a lot to be desired which is often a problem with playing in the round.

You only really get great sound in a relatively small venue (like the Indigo or brixton academy) where everyone is in and around the mixing desk.

irishwolfhound said:

The point in 1995 was probably my favourite prince gig. I was down the front, and when "Now" was played, I'm suprised the floor didn't give way from the jumping!

SquirrelMeat said:

thats wicked....those gigs were legend....did ya go 2 the pod niteclub 4 the aftershows back then....they were AWESOME.....prince and the band jammed with bono and they did the cross....i was in front row with mrs wolfy....she had her hand down my pants at the same time....just one of those memories!!!!!

WOLFY
[Edited 9/5/07 8:30am]

irishwolfhound said:

irishwolfhound said:

Yep, I was at the Pod too. Unfortunately, no one had their hand in my pants that night!

irishwolfhound said:

SquirrelMeat said:

heh heh,
sorry 2 hear that m8 but theres plenty sexy irish lassies just waitin 4 ya.....once ya got ££££ and a good body u have it made in ireland...of course the charm and the sexy accent goes a long way 2 .....

WOLFY

irishwolfhound said:

Great to know Irish girls are not too shallow! lol

FunkyAphrodite said:

mmmm....if U want a great irish girl U gotta show her the goodlife....thats what wolfy is all about....

WOLFY

Boys, boys, boys, hahahahahahhahha

yeah, the gigs in 1995 at the point were foookin amazing, dunno which you saw, i assume both, they were my first up in the stands gigs, met this south african girl on my way to the point and she did not want to go to the front of the crowd, but the point depot is a perfect arena in that sense, from the stand/tier i had a perfect view and could watch the mayhem going on below me, ended up in the pod the first night, where Prince and Bono had a secret get together, how you feckers got in the second night is a mystery to me, but i have a boot of that at home, and it did not sound so good, too many pretty people there who did not know who Bono was, let alone Prince, i also have a boot of the first night, unfortunately the place that was making them burnt down the night of the second gig, but what a show that was, they turned the lights on mid waythru and told those in the balcony to sit down, before the place caved in, absofuckinlutely brilliant concert.....and the best was virtually no hits were played, hehehhehehehehe

only place i know of that size with similiar acoustics is the townhall (stadthalle) in Vienna, saw U2 there in 2001, but that is another story for when we are old, and yer missus does NOT have her hand.....

SquirrelMeat said:

Bowie was class at the Point but I'm afraid I never got to see Prince there.
[Edited 9/5/07 17:10pm]

Ok I don't often reply to these but I gotta say Wolfy you got it all wrong,The Point in Dublin is one of the worst venues for sound on the planet!!!,it's a joke,an old train station for God's sake!!I'm a full time professional musician who has toured around the world and I know when a venue has a bad sound.Most of the top artists stopped playing the Point because of it,including Whitney Houston.Prince gig in '95 was brilliant there though.But again,crap sound.Jillis is right,O2 sound is appalling too,it's impossible to get a good sound in a huge cavernous arena with a high roof like that.I have to say though that I am very happy for the folks who haven't noticed the bad sound at the O2 and just enjoyed the show.Thank heavens for the aftershows though!!!!
[Edited 9/5/07 17:12pm]

319aprilsnow said:

well the point is deffo better then the 02....when on the floor seats at 02 u feel like u were better off in the lower tier or in the nosebleeds 4 the better sound.....ur welcome 2 ur views however,,,,the worlds top stars still play the point,,,i saw beyonce there recently and it was a great gig...got 2 meet her backstage as i work 4 MCD and aiken promotions doing security....shes lovely in person,,,,not a diva at all...unlike whitney...lol

WOLFY

Re the acoustics...what do you expect, it's a dome, one of the worst structures you could have for acoustics.

The thing I noticed when I stood on the floor for the Keane gig there was that a) it sounded better than Wembley Arena and b) it sounded nowhere near as good as the NEC in Birmingham (or even Manchesters MEN arena or Colognes Kolnarena - the latter 2 are more similar to the O2 than Wembley or the NEC).

I sat in the bottom tier for the Prince concert I attended just below the mixing desk and I personally thought the sound was dreadful. There was no clarity, it was very muddy and I believe in this day and age, there should be no excuse.

I would hate to be in that upper tier.

Mong said:

My sentiments exactly,it doesn't matter where you sit in the O2,the sound cannot be good,it's impossible because of the structure.If it wasn't for the aftershow,I would have gone home very disappointed,just because of the sound.Wolfy I'll give you that,the Point is better for sound but only just,it's incredibly bad too,no seperation or clarity.Some top stars do still reluctantly play there but they hate the sound.They just don't have a choice.I really hope that when it's rebuilt that they pay some attention to the acoustics this time,although I doubt it,we're in Ireland,it'll probably be,"ah sure it's grand"!!!