Keane is Keen

My Saturday night was great for two reasons:

1. Keane is awesome

*and*

2. Despite there existing a vast number of things to go wrong, nothing actually did go wrong.

We drove to Berkeley in plenty of time with very little trouble, I didn’t get lost (thank you, excellent navigators), parking was a piece of cake, and there were no giant scary hills. We found the theater, despite the street changing names three times on the way, and we already had our tickets (and even though Lekan did almost leave them in the restaurant, Catherine saw them on the floor and saved the day with style and panache). Basically, it was a flawlessly executed evening.

Although, upon further reflection, we didn’t quiiite get the most socially optimal seating arrangement (we handily sat Lekan’s roommate Alex as far as possible from Lekan, the only one of us he actually knew*. Whoopsie. On the other hand, he was next to me, which is a position full of honor and glory, as you are all certainly aware…), since everybody likes everybody, it was non-traumatic (I think…yes? Non traumatic? Anyone feeling traumatized?).

*This statement was later revealed to be untrue when I was informed, much to my immense shock, that actually, Alex and Chris already knew each other and CHRIS DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING, allowing me to carry the conversation in the car ALL BY MYSELF because he is SOCIALLY MERCILESS. And also, this, not unlike Jessica’s theories about shot taking, will never be allowed to die. Cause dude. He didn’t TELL ME. There I was, babbling my head off about…I dunno, like, the weather or something, when he had a WHOLE BUNCH of relevant things to say. (Not that talking to Alex is bad. It was actually lovely, and I learned, for example, that he comes from a town with only one stoplight, which I think is pretty cool. Also, apparently people from Michigan like to show you where they live by making a little Michigan with their hands and pointing it out to you, which is impossible to do with Arizona and thereby leaves me jealous of his hand pointing skillz. (This whole “people actually reading my blog” thing is freaking me out. Next thing I know I’m going to piss people off without actually ever talking to them, and then I will have reached a whole new creative level of pissing people off, which is bad, and not even a marketable skill.) )

Anyhow.

So we got to the concert, and we organized oursleves, and we sat through the opening band, which was something that sounds like Rococo but isn’t actually rococo (”sat through” might be unnecessarily harsh here. They had a couple of songs I would voluntarily listen to again, and anyhow, some of us didn’t sit, we slept. Nikhil actually managed to FALL ASLEEP in the middle of a rock concert, I kid you not. It was pretty impressive, and unlike pissing people off, is probably a marketable skill.) And then Keane came on.

If you’re familiar with rock star gossip (which I admit, I wasn’t), you might have heard that Tom Chaplin, the lead singer has recently spent some time in rehab. I’m not sure it totally worked, cause the dude has got to be on something to have that much energy on stage. Maybe his power lies in the super tight black pants. All three central members of Keane wore surprisingly skintight black pants while prancing across the stage in their rock and roll glory, which wasn’t a look I’d really associated with their super-mellow sound. I can’t bring myself to hold the pants against them though, because even now, four days later, I can see the show when I hear their music, and it makes it better.

Although their classics (”Somewhere Only We Know,” “Bend and Break,” “Walnut Tree,” “Everybody’s Changing,” “Can’t Stop Now,” etc.) were memorable live, I think the two standout songs of the evening were “A Bad Dream” and “Bedshaped,” neither of which I’d spent much time with before the concert. “A Bad Dream” was impressive mostly because of the staging, complete with a poetry reading and movies of people bombing things in WWI and lots of dancing across the stage, but “Bedshaped” was incredible. It was the last song they played that I remember, and the crowd was incredibly into it. Everyone, even the people who didn’t know the words, was singing along, and even now I can’t lose the picture in my head of a brilliantly yellow light bursting out over the crowd as they screamed out “You’ll follow me back / with the sun in your eyes…” followed by a switch to bright white on the words “in white light, I don’t think so.” It was probably hokey and obvious, but it was nonetheless incredibly cool.

The last standout moment for me happened during a song I can’t remember towards the end of the set. Now, to really get this, you have to know that one of my favorite things about irresponsibly loud music is that you can feel the bass vibrating your own chest  like a musical heartbeat. It’s a totally cool physical demonstration that what you’re doing is probably killing off the hair cells in your ears, and I find that fascinting. Anyhow, in one of the last songs there was a bass note so low and so powerful that the whole crowd could feel it ripple across like a physical force. You could hear everyone go “whoa” in unison after it hit. I don’t know how they did that, but I want them to do it again. SO COOL.

Overall grade on the night: A+

Room for improvement: Had I not been driving and the concert not been held in what was actually the largest high school auditorium I’ve ever seen, a couple of beers with the show would’ve been nice…