Aloha !

Monday evening. I’m in de subway listening to Holland – Italy on my mobile phone and I’m missing the first Dutch goal because I’m underground. While my mum drives me to the bus station where I parked my bike (bus drivers are on strike here) I hear about a second goal. I have to turn up the volume because, according to my mum “she doesn’t care and they’ll lose anyway”, and she isn’t listening. When I’m on my bike cycling home I listen to the radio and there’s the third goal. Holland wins the match and Seb starts to think about going to Amsterdam because this just might become a very interesting show. He just doesn’t have the money yet, but I still got a big tax refund that could be transferred to my bank account any day, so who knows…

The next morning I wake up and I find out that all money has been transferred and all of a sudden Seb is a filthy rich bastard again. For a short while, because some bills need to be paid, but he starts to look on auction sites for tickets under face value. A day later he finds one, buys it and hopes it arrives on time. And it did.

With bus drivers still being on strike he needed to find a way to get there. None of my friends live close to me so I had to find another way of getting there. The only solution was to go cycling 8 kilometers to the bus station where our beloved Thunderstrucker would pick me up and drive me to Rotterdam. From there it was 15 minutes with the subway to Rotterdam Central Station, and 1 hour with the train to get myself to Amsterdam. Keep in mind that when going to Amsterdam by car it’s a 1,5 hour drive. When going there by public transportation it would take me at least 2,5 hours.

Anyway, I got there pretty much on time, started queuing for the General Admission entrance and met one of my old friends I hadn’t seen for some time now, which was nice. While queuing I got a text message from Seem, the woman who went with me and Thierry to Gelsenkirchen, saying that Backstage was ****ing up the tickets and told people to leave with a certain ticket saying “Entrance B”. Now this Gold Circle had two entrances. Entrance A (on the left), and, you guessed it, entrance B (on the right). Backstage was letting people in at Entrance A, so every Backstager with a ticket saying Entrance B was told to leave. Many people tried again later on when the general admission was let in and succeeded though. Well done guys, you again made it obvious that you can’t organize shit.

This Dutch audience was one big party of Seb recognizing familiar faces he once knew, he liked, loved and hated. I met Carli and Yvonne for the first time which was nice. She recognized me while talking to Thierry and shook hands with me while saying “you must be Seb” after I thought “oh well, 2 British girls with a beer in their hands must be Carli and Yvonne.” Seriously though, I did recognize her, had a brief chat, talked to Thierry again and he pointed out that my ex girlfriend was here too. I asked him how he knew this, and he gave me a look like “it’s a bit obvious, look over there” and she passed me by without saying hello at all. Some of you again will know who I’m talking about, the one the song in the music forum is about. Not really a great start for great evening and I felt a bit shit for a short while but went off to meet my friends, talked about it for a short while and soon the feeling went away and the great evening finally took off.

But first, we had to hear a rubbish DJ from the Dutch radio station Veronica doing a lot of banter about “are you ready for a party?”… “I said, are you ready for a party?”…”Are you ready for Bon Jovi?”…”Are you ready for Bon Jovi?”. Embarrassing, really, and it reminded me again why I do not listen to that radio station at all anymore. Bunch of talentless ****ers. The idiot tried to start a wave but couldn’t even do that. “You, the guy with the orange shirt, you start, and then everybody follows”. Now when a wave in a stadium, it’s the seated area’s first, and then the standing area. No, this brilliant DJ thought it had to go criss cross through the stadium, and we misunderstood, according to him. For ****’s sake what a moron it was. And when he finally went off, he came back again after 15 minutes to ask exactly the same questions. “Are we ready for a party?”… “I said, are you ready for a party?”… Well yeah, I’m ready for a party so go **** yourself and **** off. But no, they had to give away 4 on stage tickets, for which you had to send a text message that would cost you 60 Eurocents again. And again, after he explained the whole story, there was the question of the evening again. “Were we ready for a party???” Yeah I’m ****ing ready for a party. Some of us had been waiting in the cold and in the rain outside, some of us were already there at 10 in the morning you ****head. There’s a stadium filled with people waiting for a match and a gig, and you’re wondering if we’re ready for a party? **** off. And he finally did.

Van Velzen came on. To be honest, I didn’t really expect much of him. He’s been given the award for best Dutch live act but I think all his songs are shit and overplayed. But he was nice. The first song sounded an awful lot like Wild In The Streets which got me and my friends singing the verses of Wild In The Streets over the original melody. Some people picked it up, others wondered if Van Velzen was covering Wild In The Streets. And then there were those who were wondering who those clowns were who were singing the wrong song. Van Velzen had quite a lot of crowd interaction, even involved the fans from Germany and whatever country into a sing along fest, and when the last song came on he got most of the stadium singing with him.


This is him. Anybody else who recognizes a certain Bon Jovi song in this?

Anyway, he went off, and guess who came back? Exactly, that brilliant DJ again. A bunch of well known questions followed and when he went off the match was about to start. It was great fun singing and hearing a stadium singing the Dutch anthem because of a match that was shown on the big screens. When the match started, most people eventually stood up anyway and when Holland scored it’s first goal the tone was set for most of the evening. At first I thought that watching soccer would be shit (I’m not a soccer fan at all, don’t hate it either though) but this was a Dutch audience that was actually really ready to make a party of it. During the match the audience was loud, and when Holland made 2-0 it was actually just as loud as the audience in Frankfurt was during the Bon Jovi show. When the match was over (4-1) the show finally started.

And that’s it. Hope you enjoyed it. I’m off to have some diner. More on this later.

So, it’s 15 minutes past 8, I’ve just eaten my home cooked meal of Thai Curry with white rise and will now finally start finishing my review of Amsterdam. Sorry for the delays, but school became first priority after the weekend. I didn’t really expect that many people to look forward to my review, if I would’ve known I would’ve posted the review before the show.

Anyway. The match was done and the intro music started. This time there was no building up the anticipation, no, the band just entered the stage right away and on the video screens they showed the 4 goals from Holland again while the band was waving. They put a blow up ball on stage and when Jon entered the stage he kicked it into the audience. Normally I don’t give a **** about what he wears but seeing him enter the stage with an orange shirt after the match was very, very cool and only made the crowd louder than usual. Besides that, he had his Telecaster with him so we’d get another opener. When he started strumming the chords I thought it was I Believe but couldn’t hear a single thing because of the crowd. I’ll probably mention the crowd about a thousand times again in this review so you’ll just going to have to live with the fact that this Dutch crowd once again showed that it’s the best crowd a band could have. It turned out that it wasn’t I Believe but Rockin’ All Over The World but that didn’t really matter. This was the first time I saw Bon Jovi open with a cover song and normally I don’t really like that (not even when they open with Free World or Helter Skelter) but tonight it just worked. From the first words Jon had the crowd eating out of his hands. Hearing so many people just sing the “I like it” thing showed that it wasn’t just Bon Jovi and their die hards who knew this song, but that there were many people there who were familiar with other classic rock acts as well. This wasn’t the teeny bopper audience Bon Jovi played for in 2003, this was a bunch of die hards who went to see Bon Jovi anyway, no matter if they’d just had a hit or not, which was nice for a change.

This is what the band saw when they went onstage. Brilliant.