At this concert, I find myself staring at Adam's wayward tuft of hair and it reflects his wild energy. He's on fire and frisky for Fever, where he brings the mic right up to the sloppy kiss and spanks Taylor. There's plenty of crotch grabbing, finger-sucking and fingering the crowd. He gets down on his knees for a brilliant Sleepwalker then sings along to the intro for Soaked. He gets audience to scream out in Aftermath. For Strut, he starts with a bandy-legged dance and I start to realise something is very wrong as he sounds low — way off-key and seems unable to correct it. It must be the worst I've ever heard him sound. In the middle of the performance, he struts off stage while the dancers continue and the crowd sings in Adam's place. He comes back to apologise at the end and explains that he was choking. The conspiracy theorist in me doesn't believe he was choking, only that he wanted to avoid criticising the sound engineering. I have to feel for him as he must've had a horrid time to abandon the performance like that. It doesn't affect the energy and I think Adam puts even more into performing to make up for it. There are a lot of small melodic differences in this set which I think are a result of sound issues. IIHY has him spanking Tommy and leaping into the air and it finishes with a crotch-grabbing TCB encore.
I agree with you LO, there is a new video on YT of the Strut performance in Berlin, where Adam, being in front of Monte shouts "guitar" to the sound engineer. I've notice that when he feels he may be out of key he turns to Monte, so I guess the guitar is the leading instrument. Tommy does that too. He should have felt really bad not being able to listen to the sound of the guitar to find the right key. One can notice that he tried to stay on stage but it was too risky. I think that he made his best move, given the circumstances.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, you're right, I've noticed that everyone looks to Monte for cues so I guess it's part of his job as musical director. I think a restart could've been an option, he felt able to do this at the Red Robinson concert and restarted FYE due to 'technical difficulties'. The main difference I can think of between the performances is the presence of dancers, so maybe he felt it would've been too demanding on the dancers to immediately repeat it. He dealt with the problem with grace and I admire him for that.
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