One of my earliest posts on this blog was dedicated to The 1975.
It was early 2015.
I was a struggling high school teacher, fresh out of the university.
I couldn’t quite fit in my new environment – not with my more seasoned teaching colleagues, and certainly not with my students despite the relatively small age gap.
Which is partly why The 1975’s music appealed to me.
They sang about love, sex (I mean literally, it’s their actual song title), drugs (and called it Chocolate).
Meanwhile, I was single, was never even remotely close to experiencing ‘first base’ and of course, squeaky clean: no drugs, not even a cigarette.
Despite the total lack of commonalities with their lifestyle and mine, I was still drawn to their music.
I felt things when I just put on my earphones and let myself drift away from the humdrum of my own lackluster, conventional existence, while they laughed in the face of societal norms.
That, and their music is just so damn catchy.
So much so that I purchased a ticket to their first big concert at the Mall of Asia Arena without blinking.
Never mind that it was a good 1-hour plane ride away from Cebu and that I had to rely on the charity of my high school friend.
It was impulsive, reckless and totally kickass.
I had never felt so ALIVE!
The live performance lasted about an hour and a half, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, feeling it, and reliving it.
Inspiration nagged me to write about it and so I did, typing away in a class full of high schoolers taking their final exams of the year.
Fast forward 4 years later, a thousand miles away from home, 1:14 on a Saturday morning, I’m still up, writing a blog about my second The 1975 live experience.
It was surreal.
The first one was almost like an out-of-body experience, where I said to myself, “I’ll remember this moment ‘til the day I die!”
The second one was, “I never thought I’d live to see the day this would happen to me again!”
And for good reason.
The 1975 is provocative, whereas Dubai is… traditional.
Dubai frowns on anything that goes against religion and society (which are practically one and the same).
The 1975 constantly challenges them, going so far as to write a song about the “Antichrist” (raising a lot of Christian and Non-Christian eyebrows alike) among other controversial, sometimes subversive topics.
So when my agency colleague told me that tickets to their concert were going on sale at 5:00 p.m. last June 12, my first thought was…
But there was an actual countdown to when the ticket sales would go live.
Once again, my old impulsiveness, recklessness and kick-assery resurfaced.
5 o’clock on the dot, I booked two front-row, left-side-of-the-stage tickets to the greatest, most underrated band of this generation.
From June to August, I pored over the song lyrics of “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships”.
Source: Wikimedia
Studied each song, stanza and line, going so far as to read their analyses.
A quick look at their 2019 setlist showed that they were also playing some of the best songs from their previous albums, so I reviewed those too.
Source: Setlist.fm
There was clearly an artistic evolution from their “Chocolate” days to today’s “Love It If We Made It”.
Like many artists these days, they’re now using their platform to raise awareness on issues we are all guilty of just scrolling past our social media news feeds.
Much as I admire the maturity they’re bringing into their music, I also can’t help but feel their older songs were ‘catchier’.
Despite that, The 1975 will always be my favorite band, and having seen them perform live (and sounding as good as their studio records), I was counting the days ‘til the concert on August 14.
It was a Wednesday.
We had only just gotten back in office after a 5-day Eid weekend.
I turned to caffeine to shake off the holiday hangover and knock off one job after another with the goal of leaving the office at 6:30 p.m. sharp.
After changing to a flashy outfit of matching rainbow sequin top and headband and shiny pink track pants and bomber jacket, my colleague and I left at 6:30, dropped off our bags in her car and hailed a cab to the Coca-Cola Arena.
We reached 5 minutes before 7 and waited in line for more than half an hour before the gates opened a little past 7:30.
By then, we had endured mindless discussions of tweenagers at our backs, ‘blaspheming’ the good name of The 1975 by comparing them to a Justin Bieber concert they apparently attended.
In front of us were two heavily made up Filipino girls, one of whom was practically only wearing a bra.
It was a motley crowd, not a huge turn up, but a lot more than I had expected.
I was especially amused at one elderly Saudi man in full kandura, accompanying his teenage daughters in niqab.
Kudos to the loving supportive father, whoever you may be!
After 7:30, the line started to move.
We had to be inspected for anything that should not be brought inside the venue, selfie sticks included.
I had just the one, a black foldable one that fit in real nice with my fanny pack, so that when the security lady asked me to open my bag, she just took one not-very-good look at the inner contents and let me through.
One neon orange wristband and escalator flight later, we were standing in front of the concessionaire stand and the official merch pop-up store.
While waiting in line to get our hands on some merch, my colleague and I discussed which shirt we should get and ultimately decided on the black tee with The 1975’s first album artwork in front and a list of the 2019 tour dates and venues at the back.
Each one cost AED 130.
I had always regretted not getting one in Manila (I think they were priced at PHP 1,500 then), so this time around, I just swiped my card without a second thought.
Woot woot
Then we made a beeline for the concessionaire stand to get Cokes and chicken tenders (which were surprisingly good and not outrageously overpriced at AED 30 – with fries on the side).
And off we went to the main arena to find our seats.
It was huuuge.
Said to accommodate 17,000 people at one time, 5,000 of which can fit in the bowl floor area.
The bowl floor area was mainly divided into 2 by metal barricades (and Herculean security guards): the Golden Circle Standing and Regular Standing.
I passed the time munching on my deep-fried dinner, setting up my phone and soaking up the general excitement.
A few minutes after 9 o’clock, the band emerged from backstage and kicked off the show with “Give Yourself A Try”.
That’s Matty jumping off the platform where George was playing the drums
Note to fans: This is Matty’s #1 favorite The 1975 song to date (followed by “fallingforyou” and “Paris”).
Very early on into the show, Matty made it clear that he had earphones on with people on the other side (concert organizers) telling him what not to do like cuss or discuss region-sensitive topics.
Nevertheless, some of his songs really did call for a bit of cussing, and he still touched on his LGBTQ advocacy.
“Sometimes I just try to help more than I have the power to actually help and sometimes it gets me in trouble,” he said, tearing up in the process.
“I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I just want us to identify as humans and not as groups of individual, different people.”
Closely followed by a tearful apology of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know it seems indulgent for me to cry like this” and using his shirt to wipe away his tears.
“I’m just doing this out of love and I’m sorry if I ever said anything.”
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Towards the latter half of the concert, Matty gets off the stage to give an unidentified fan a hug.
It took sometime for the camera to focus and project what’s happening on the screen.
Enough time for me to think, “Is it even going to be a woman?”
Well, it wasn’t.
It was a male fan and it wasn’t a hug but a kiss on the lips.
Needless to say, we were all left as SHOOK as he was.
Some of my favorite concert moments were “She’s American”, “fallingforyou” (of course), “It’s Not Living If It’s Not With You”.
During the first of the 3-song encore, around the end of “Chocolate”, I saw the security guys opening the barricade to the Golden Circle area.
My eyes nearly fell out of my sockets.
I nudged at my colleague and told her to take the lead.
We went down before anyone else in our row did, very nearly got into trouble with security because of my smuggled selfie stick, got stopped for a good 30 seconds before we were allowed in the Golden Circle while “Sex” played on.
Thanks to my colleague’s persistence, we got an incredibly close view of the band and were there for “The Sound”, jumping up and down at Matty’s command.
Pure adrenaline rush.
Absolutely magnificent.
Un-effing-believable.
Now the question on everyone’s mind, “Will they be allowed back in after Matty’s act of defiance?”
Even Matty’s asking…
