One of coolest things my wife and I did over the past month was attending the Mayday concert at Genting on 19th April. This was the second time that we’ve been to the Arena of Stars for a concert, the first time being a Jonathan Lee concert during my holidays last year. As with last year, our main consideration was finding any concert that was being held during the one month that we’d planned we would be in Malaysia. If we’d known that we would be in Malaysia longer, we would probably have opted for the Emil Chau concert later in May. As thirtysomethings, Emil Chau’s songs are a lot more familiar from our school days than us than those of Mayday, about whom we barely know anything.

As it turned out, we’re both glad we went to the Mayday concert instead. Both of us had never been to a real rock concert before this, and the electrifying energy of the performance, combined with the wildly enthusiastic response of the audience, turned it into a truly eye-opening experience. It’s a testament to how out of touch I am with the music scene that I didn’t realize that Mayday is probably the biggest rock act in the Chinese-speaking world today, though the many Mayday songs chosen by my nieces when my wife and I took them to a karaoke earlier that month gave me a clue as to how popular they. And yeah, you know that these guys are popular alright when every little gesture made by a band member is greeted by a earsplitting uproar.

The performance started with a short video presentation that apparently ties in to one their music videos and once the band made their appearance, they immediately launched into a non-stop stream of some of their newest songs. This confused me at first since it seemed like the band just wanted to perform their songs without any interaction with the audience at all. I was wrong since it turned out to be a calculated ploy to rev the audience up so much that when they finally stopped to talk to the audience directly, the result was like setting off an explosion. As my wife related to me afterwards, the initial onslaught of music felt like a pressure that ratcheted up inexorably such that when they finally stopped, the relief was like stepping off a treadmill. It’s fair to say that with Genting being the last stop of their tour, these guys fine-tuned their crowd pleasing skills to a high level indeed.

I’m no expert in music, but it sounded pretty good to me, even if the vocals did seem like they were shouted more than sung and each band member was given a chance to show up their individual skills. There were some pretty awesome special effects too, including a cheap, but effective, shot at making the lead singer look like he has a huge pair of wings by positioning him precisely in front of a video. Still, the most exhilarating part of the experience is being in the middle of it all, while the crowd rocked, swayed and danced to the music. Some of the antics felt a little cheesy to me, such as asking the audience to spell L-O-V-E with their arms over and over again, but chalk that down to a middle-aged grognard being a spoilsport. I also felt that the reference to Che Guevara was plain stupid. How many people in the audience has really read up on the life history of the Latin American revolutionary? As a socialist, I doubt he would have approved of his image and name being exploited in a crassly commercial concert.

Taking photos of the concert technically wasn’t allowed, but then standing up wasn’t technically allowed either, and the ushers spent most of the time walking up and down the aisles waving no photography and no standing up signs as appropriate. They either gave up by the end of the concert or else had specific instructions because just about everyone was standing at one point or another near the end. All in all, the concert lasted about 3 hours, which is really remarkable given how much energy the band members seemed to be expending up on stage, shouting, leaping around and frenetically playing their instruments. They didn’t even have any guest performers to give them a mid-concert break.

Rather playfully, there were a lot of fake endings that were inevitably followed by the audience calling for encores and shouting the band’s name over and over again until they popped up again. They even packed up their instruments and other stuff and exited the stage with a theatrical flourish once as a fake ending. It was all obviously pre-planned to give the audience some fun, but by the end, my wife and I were feeling sorry for the band members. Give these guys a break! They’ve been on stage for 3 hours already. Enough with the encores!

I don’t know that we’ll be going to another rock concert any time soon. My wife complained that if the music had been just a decibel louder, it would probably have burst her eardrums. But we wouldn’t have missed out for this once in a lifetime experience for anything in the world.