Snow Patrol at the O2

Thursday (last night) was Snow Patrol at the new O2 arena - interesting gig that one...

I'm a BIG fan of Snow Patrol - their last two cds have been on pretty high rotate on my iPod, and I've seen them a couple of times (once at Somerset House, once at V-Festival). So I was very excited about the gig - plus the O2 is brand new, so was also curious about what it would be like.

What it was like was incredibly sterile... Going into it (it's in the old Millennium Dome) it was like walking into an American shopping mall. Very very strange. The actual arena was good - great sound, and we got quite close to the stage as well. But the atmosphere just seemed really constrained. We had some very drunk girls dancing next to us for a while but they were behaving too leerily so the 'Customer Team' came and moved them out... At another point, some girls climbed up on their boyfriend's shoulders to get a better view. Cue more security guards into the audience to get them off again. And what was really weird was that there were no ticket touts - anywhere. I don't think I've ever been to a gig in London that hasn't had touts either outside the venue or outside the station - just added to the whole strangeness of the evening...

And then to cap it all off the transport was really skewed up so it took 1.5 hours to get back to Waterloo - a journey that should take 10 minutes... Not happy - and been very tired all day today :-(.