Manic Street Preachers Live In Singapore

Who: Manic Street Preachers

What: Send Away The Tigers Tour

When: 24 November 2008

Where: Fort Canning Park, Singapore

Setlist:

1. Motorcycle Emptiness

2. Autumnsong

3. La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh)

4. Faster

5. You Stole The Sun From My Heart

6. Everything Must Go

7. Ocean Spray

8. The Masses Against The Classes

9. You Love Us

10. Pennyroyal Tea (Nirvana cover)

11. Send Away The Tigers

12. A Design For Life

13. Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky (solo acoustic)

14. The Everlasting (solo acoustic)

15. Your Love Alone Is Not Enough

16. Umbrella (Rihanna cover)

17. 1985

18. Little Baby Nothing

19. Motown Junk

20. If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

This will be a quick review as it's rather late now, and there's work tomorrow (ooh, gonna be an exciting day tomorrow!).

The Manic Street Preachers brought their Send Away The Tigers Tour to Singapore, performing here for the first time. Judging by the size of the crowd, about 4,000 odd people, this MSP show is long overdue.

The first half of the concert was better in terms of energy and the familiarity of the songs. Taking the stage at 9pm sharp, MSP launched straight into Motorcycle Emptiness, rousing the crowd off to an energetic start. 

They followed this with Autumnsong, taken off their latest album, Send Away The Tigers. Another crowd favourite followed this, and MSP carried on the pattern of alternating the older songs with the newer ones.

MSP's songs sound better live than the studio recording. The energy is more apparent, and so is lead singer/guitarist James Bradfield's guitar skills. He did quite a few solo licks and they sounded really good. 

I am not a hardcore MSP fan, but I recently bought their Forever Delayed greatest hits album and I've been listening to it quite a bit in the past 2 weeks. The highlights of the concert are the evergreens - A Design For Life, Everything Must Go and If You Tolerate This...

I particularly loved You Stole The Sun From My Heart. But my favourite performance of the night was their cover of Nirvana's Pennyroyal Tea, simply because it was unexpected. And they did the song justice, but pity most people in the crowd didn't recognise it.

Where Pennyroyal Tea was the highlight, their cover of Umbrella was definitely the lowlight for me. It's a nice hip-hop song and it was the biggest song of 2007, but we really didn't need another version of it. And it felt like they were bringing themselves down to the level of say, a Hall jam band. Even more saddening was the sight of many people bobbing their heads to this, when they should have been digging Pennyroyal Tea. Well...

I also liked the lighting. The lighting person did a good job by synching with what the band was playing, and did special effects during the drum fill-ins or during the band's music breaks. The timing of those effects were precise and you could tell he/she has been with the band for long.

MSP closed their concert with their first UK #1 hit, If You Tolerate This... It was a good song, but perhaps A Design For Life would have been a better closing song. It would have ended the concert on a bigger high than If You Tolerate This...

There was no encore and MSP left the stage at 10:30pm. The audience cheered and milled around for a full 5 minutes before being convinced that MSP were not coming back, as the stage crew began dismantling the setup.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable show. The crowd lapped it up and MSP were on fine form too. The weather here is probably too hot for Bradfield, who joked that they should have been sent here for conditioning earlier, like Olympics athletes. He added that he felt like he was doing a marathon.

It's been a long time coming, but I'm glad it isn't forever delayed. Better late than never.