Wanted Wednesday: Sydney, December 18, 2010

Please rise, for the singing of our national anthem...

Yes, it's a recent one. Very recent. Ripped from jovigirlfm's YouTube posting. Thank you, JGFM for posting this. One of the most beautiful versions I've heard in a while.

The audience sings the first verse, then right around 1:58 Jon looks at Richie and says (what looks like) "you wanna go up?" and Richie takes the mic.

Let me say that again.

Richie takes the mic.

That hasn't happened in AGES! Of course, this show was one for the record books. The story from Backstage (shared with me by someone who'll remain anonymous unless she comes forward) is that a FAN'S setlist was passed to Jon during the Q&A. He spent some time with it, made some adjustments and boom! Well, read for yourself. As a note, I apologize in advance if this irks any Backstagers -- but this is a great story, and should be heard by the rest of the fandom, especially those of us -- myself front and center and loud and proud -- who bitch about the set lists.

Hi all. Let me tell you the story about the wish set list that got turned into tonights awesome set list.

Last week after the Etihad show, flutes, Helly, Helly's other half CJ and myself were drinking at Crown Casino. We were feeling a bit deflated after a vanilla show at Etihad following the amazing show we had the night before at Rod Laver. We were a little drunk (just a little) and decided to compile our dream, wish, but realistic set list. This process started on post it notes at about 1:30am Sunday morning and was completed later that afternoon - after more drinking. I decided to type it up nicely and try and make it look as close as possible to a real set list. I printed several copies and flutes bought some duct tape, so if we got the opportunity to present it to Jon during the Q&A, we could say "we have enough copies for the band and here is some duct tape for the stage as well".

And boy, did we get a chance to present it to Jon during the Q&A. I can't remember excactly what flutes said - I'm sure many videos will follow - but the gist was "You've been known to change the set list up, we'd like you to do that tonight, and here is our suggestions."

He came over and took the list from flutes and then spent a couple of minutes studying it and commenting on it. Side note: CJ renamed "No Apologies" to "No Wasabi Peas" for some reason, I'm sure it had nothing to do with the drinking at the time. ;-)

Back to the wish set list, Jon asked "Is this in order?" and we said "Yes". He said there are a couple of songs they don't do, but as he examined the list further you could see him thinking about it. He then asked for a pen to "work on it".

But that's not the end of it. Towards the end of the Q&A someone requested a song so he picked our wish list back up, pen in hand and started going through it. He asked the room for our pick of ballad - we selected "Living in Sin" - and you could see him making a lot of notes on it.

After the Q&A and before the concert, we had feedback that the real show set list had been changed considerably to cater for the wish set list songs....so you can imagine our excitement to hear how just how many and what ones.

In the end? 12 out of our songs were played, six of them were what we considered "special" requests.

Uh, wow. Jon, this was wonderful. Should be precedent-setting, actually. Just sayin'.

Well, enough yammerin.

Let's Ride!









You can download the mp3 here.

~ Hath