Hello peeps! Hope you all had an amazing Christmas holiday last week! I had a week’s break and practically did nothing (didn’t blog too!) too exciting, well, except spending an entire Christmas Eve preparing for a dinner party. And then the rest of the time was spent watching movies, eating and just being lazy. Being a couch potato for a few days can be quite therapeutic after some crazy moments, lol.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ve been a good girl this year because Santa has been extremely kind to me this festive season. Because I got the chance to go catch Opus 2 Jay 2014 World Tour concert at the new Singapore Sports Hub. Woohoo! If not for the postponement of the original date (from Nov 8 to Dec 27), I wouldn’t have gotten tickets and best of all, it was the exact section (almost centre to stage) that I wanted.
Following the success of the Opus Jay 2013 World Tour in June last year, Asia’s King of Mandopop, Jay Chou decided to come back with a sequel, Opus 2 Jay 2014 World Tour that was held at our National Stadium aka Singapore Sports Hub which made it his first outdoor concert performance in Singapore.
Just before the concert started, I headed down early to tour the vicinity of the Sports Hub as well as to check out the new Kallang Wave Mall. The area is pretty scenic now, so different from the older days when the former National Stadium was still around.
A peek into the stadium:
Food kiosks like these are located all around the stadium so you can grab snacks and drinks anytime.
The fans definitely came in handy as this was an outdoor venue. It was cooling at the beginning when the stadium wasn’t filled up yet (and it had been raining) but it got quite warm and stuffy afterwards.
See how the stadium transformed from being empty to a pool of bright pink lights:
Are you ready for the show?
When Jay appeared on stage with his song 驚嘆號 (‘Exclamation Mark’), for a moment I really wondered if this concert was going to be a continuation of the first or a repeat of it because it was the exact same opening song as Opus 1.
The entire sequence of the concert was less of a surprise element this time as I thought some parts were predictable (and seemingly a reflection of the previous concert) such as performing a few numbers from his 2013 musical film The Rooftop with his bunch of friends like Cindy Yen, 南拳妈妈’s 弹头, Gary Yang and Darren Chiu which didn’t quite fit in as the performance was all over the place. I overheard 2 ladies seated at my section saying out loud that they paid money to see Jay Chou, not these unknown people, lol. Obviously the atmosphere wasn’t as high when these people were singing. I probably will appreciate a mid-to-heavy-weight guest performer more (like Landy Wen who will definitely sing 屋顶 in a much better note) or maybe it’s best to just have none.
Nonetheless, I did enjoy the segment where Jay Chou performed duets respectively with 3 fans from the audience (kudos to the last guy who picked the song 擱淺 cos’ Jay didn’t perform this at the last concert!) which ultimately became more like a mass karaoke session. It was a shame we couldn’t hear the 2nd fan properly as she was handed a faulty mic that wasn’t working.
And of course Jay never failed to mesmerise the audience when he played his grand piano and guitar and sang some of his evergreen hits.
He also belted out several of his new hits from his latest album and this is now one of my favourites at the moment:
Just love that catchy tune 🙂
The dazzling display of pyrotechnics and state-of-the-art visuals were aptly used like previously but the sound system at the venue was obviously not up to scratch. Echoes were prominent within the stadium probably because the space was so huge and many times, Jay’s singing was muffled every now and then too.
The stage was really low and very far away from where I was seated even though I had the same category tickets as last time and I could see the stage way more clearly at the Singapore Indoor Stadium.
Probably the worst part was when a downpour came and then the roof started leaking in some areas. The retractable roof wasn’t completely down so on the left hand side there was a huge gap where the rain could come in. People seated near that area had their umbrellas up o_O not nice…
Overall, I just thought Singapore Indoor Stadium would be a more ideal venue for such a concert. Putting that aside, I must say the show was still an exhilarating experience and I really had an awesome time singing my heart out to familiar tunes that I’d been listening to for more than a decade.
And signing off is this encore finale piece which I recorded in full. To all Jay Chou fans out there, enjoy! 🙂