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The most striking about Bastille’s first Metro Manila gig is this: The band has so many young Filipino fans, who didn’t mind squeezing themselves up if it meant getting thisclose to the stage.
Which gave everybody else so much room to dance in, the cleaners to do their jobs (and catch a free show for it!), the less die-hard to sit relaxed on the floor, and for vocalist Dan Smith to go running around the floor as though it was a playground.
It’s not that the turnout was bad, though tickets certainly weren’t sold out; it’s that the young kids, who dominated the audience, stood squished as near as they can to the stage.
Even Dan noticed this. At one point during the 19-song set, he told the crowd, “I hate to be the dad here, but you guys look all crammed in front. Would you please take one step back?”
Bastille, which hails from the UK, popped their Metro Manila cherry Monday night. The four-man band performed at the World Trade Center to a crowd of mostly young teenage girls with an impressive spending power; tickets weren’t cheap at PHP4,970 (Earlybird rates were at PHP3,920).
The crowd starting lining up just before 4pm but the band didn’t take to the stage at 9:15pm — an hour and 15 minutes late.
Like the delayed start of the show, the energy of the concert picked up late, as well. It started strong — you could see Bastille really trying to work the crowd during the opener “Bad Blood.” Even the blinding lights seemed to be urging the crowd to feel it, feel it.
But they used their aces — like saying mabuhay and salamat — sparingly, preferring “thank you so much” instead. It’s too bad that somewhere between “Poet” and “These Streets,” Dan had to exit the stage due to an injured finger, leaving his bandmates to improvize and fill in the dead air.
In an interview before the show, the band mentioned how Dan has grown as a front man. “When we first started, Dan would rather be anywhere but the stage,” drummer Chris ‘Woody’ Wood said. This became evident during “Flaws,” when he went down the stage and ran around the floor area, letting them teenage girls chase him. It was all very cute.
Another thumbs up: the quality of Dan’s voice live is almost the same as the quality of his voice on record. You could hear him panting but that’s about it. He was in tune through and through, his voice big, round and mighty.
Bastille played a super new song from their upcoming second album that sounded promising sure, but it was more thrilling when the band played covers off their Mixtape series. “No Scrubs” surely had a different effect on the young ones and the titas, who coyly danced through the TLC hit. But their updated version of DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night” had the entire audience — young, old, boy, girl — jumping and dancing and just having a good time.
It’s easy to see that Bastille is still a young band. They’ve much to learn, like how to really go on a charm offensive or how to fill in for dead silences (Shout out to Woody for that drum solo while Dan was treating his injury). They’ve yet to master their pacing, too, as they often launched into slow songs before they could work the crowd into high energy. Dan couldn’t fool the crowd when he said goodnight after 16 songs, which didn’t include their biggest hit, “Pompeii.”
At the interview hours prior to the show, the band said a good show “completely depends on the crowd and how they respond and how loud they are. However big or small the crowd is, we all kind of know immediately, as soon as we step off the stage, if it was a good one, if we played well, if the crowd had been fun and responsive, if they had a good time” said Dan.
Which makes us wonder if the Manila show makes it to Bastille’s list of great concerts.
On their last song — of course it’s “Pompeii” — Dan repeatedly requested everyone to put down their phones and have a good time. In the selfie capital of the world, that meant the opposite. GoPros awkwardly stood out, as did raised, mobile phone-toting limbs to capture this golden moment with a selfie or a groupfie, Bastille in the background. The crowd didn’t listen to Dan but amid confetti and cheers and jeers and smiles and selfies, it certainly looked and felt like they had a good time.
