Muse

went off to the NEC arena last night to see Muse on their first of two nights there. I reckon its 16 years (nearly 1/2 a lifetime!) since I was last there, and that was to see Iron Maiden (that involved driving after School to Northampton, then train and then the return journey with dropping people off in various villages).
Anyway, back to the present. The lighting/video and sound production was absolutely fantastic. As I'd expect it was earshatteringly loud, but with no loss of hearing in the morning. The stage and lighting had an asymmetric design to it, with the drummer at stage right. Above him was a array of leds that could be raised/lowered to hide him! Stage left had a huge display screen, behind which were a set of big colour changing spots, that were also height adjustable.
The asymmetry of the stage was rather spoilt for me, from where I was sat/stood, because there was an architectural vertical piece of scaffold that restricted my view of the stage rear, and the drummer/visuals :( On paper it was probably a fantastic design.
Muse is a strange 3 some because they never refer to the synth player who I assume is a session musician. Anyway, he was tucked away at the back of stage left, and never came out from behind his instruments.
The set list consisted of quite a lot of their current album, and rightly so as it is full of anthemic songs, and Knights of Cydonia is a stomping end of concert piece, only spoilt by not having a live trumpet. The rest of the set was most of their truly awesome other anthems (Plug in Baby, Bliss etc).
One thing I've noticed about gigs nowadays is the plague of mobile phone cameras. During black outs on stage you can see a field of view finders as people photograph the stage.