Magnificient

Yesterday was the Fight For A Reason gig, and although it began kinda headache-y, what with all the metal performances and booming extremities of volume, every once in a while we had a band that stood out above the crowd. Marinate amazing showmanship with great musicianship, then fry it in a crowd with good response, and you get... Well, an awesome performance.

I arrived on scene with Dylan at about 4:30, and met Jon Gui, Eric Soo and the self-proclaimed "Birthday Boy"(no idea what his name is, Jon told me to call him Malay, but I don't think it's suitable to be used up here) right at the entrance. We stood around considering the ballet class for a while(the only requirement was to be aged 3+), and eventually went in.

We entered the room to find about 20 unrecognisable faces inside, with the exclusion of the organisers and a small handful others from school. We set down our instruments and took our seats on the carpeted floor, after paying for our tickets. Half an hour later, everyone had arrived and the sound check began. One by one, all the bands plugged in their instruments and tested the amplifiers and adjusted the settings.

Funnily enough, my whole band had left to go to the bathroom when suddenly:

"Initial Sound, it's your turn for the sound check now."

So I grabbed my guitar and went over to the corner with the amps, and several minutes later saw Dylan, Jeremy and Justin return from nature's call. They stood around asking "Where's Jun Shern?" for a while, and I thought that I would let them search a while, seeing as they had ditched me for a bathroom. It would have worked out, but Alison suddenly said:

"Oh, Jun Shern's over there. You can tell it's him because his shirt is so-"

It was at this exact moment that my amplifier decided to blare out loudly and prevented me from hearing exactly what my shirt was. I got the gist of it though, but talking about distinguishable clothing, I don't believe that she's one to talk, what with the luminous yellow jacket she wore yesterday. Haha!

Anyways, we finished checking our amplifiers and guitars, then at around 6:30 the emcees(Alison and Kim) walked up and announced that the show was about to begin.

Thus began the incredible lineup of heart-pounding loud music. I'm not saying that it wasn't good, but it was loud. And although some of the bands played songs that were too metal for my taste(I'm not saying which bands. Partly because it's rude, and partly because I don't know the names of the bands), some of them were absolutely awesome and great fun.

I won't go into detail about the performances. Instead, I'll put up some pictures. However, if you want more pics and videos, you can go to the FFAR blog to check it out. I daresay there'll be many more pictures there, seeing as I've just spent my whole morning uploading a whopping 114 pictures up there for Naveena. And also because of that, most of the pics you see here will also be there.




Some time during the band above's performance, I'd gotten tired of the loud music, and went out to check out the cafe outside. I had a drink there with Justin, Dylan, Jeremy, Tzer Chyuan, Ashwin, Mark and Jon. The peace of the outside world and the coolness of the 100 Plus was reviving.

Apparently, while we were outside sipping our drinks, the crowd broke out in mosh-pit fever. I wouldn't have known, but I found evidence within the camera that Naveena was taking pictures with. Ta-da.

This picture apparently shows someone kicking another person in the behind, and the victim obliging to position himself for the kick.

So anyway, I decided that we'd better go back in case we missed our turn. And in we went.

About this time, we were all feeling dead tired, and I wasn't inspired to play anymore. But the time came when we had to get ready to play, so we went backstage and tuned up our instruments.

Then came the announcement: "The next band is Initial Sound."

We trotted up to the stage and got everything ready. Dylan introduced us and made his birthday greetings to "all of you birthday people".

We started off with When You Were Young, as made famous by The Killers, and received surprisingly good response from the crowd. I never expected people to really cheer for us, because it was our first performance, and well... I didn't expect much. At all.


Afterwards we did Shattered(by OAR) and finally, Yellow. With a twist of Fix You at the end. The Fix You ending was the most amazing part. The build up was unbelievable. Everyone was clapping along, and when we started the final chorus, everyone within my sight was singing along. Thank you so much to everyone in the crowd last night. It was absolutely... Magnificient. I will never forget that moment.


So afterwards, we had Ashwin's rendition of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours. It wasn't that bad, I mean. He got everyone singing along with him. Though his song dedication was a bit of a lost cause, as his dedicatee was not there at the moment. Sad.

Towards the end, the bands seemed much better. My favourite performance afterwards was Blink 182's All The Small Things. I'm not sure which band did it, but you gotta admit. They could've rocked up hell if they'd wanted to.


Other performances worth mentioning were Holiday, performed by Kheng Yew's band,


Kim's take on Mad World and Pokerface(I never knew Kim could sing. And yes, she's good),


the solo performance of When You Say Nothing At All,


and Shadow Of the Day(Linkin Park), which was the last song I witnessed before I went home.

Okay, enough said. Remember, the videos and pictures are here.

Oh yeah! One more thing. Nav says we've collected RM1614 in total! Not bad, eh? That's about... 20 dogs? AWESOME!

Jun Shern out.

*Static*