Rubenerd

So I broke away from my jazz and champagne concert comfort zone and went to day 1 of SingFest 2007 yesterday, and my ears are still ringing from it!

I really wanted to take good photos, but given it was just a stage behind metal gates on Fort Canning Hill I was worried my prosumer might get damaged, so I bit the bullet and just took pictures with my camera phone. As you can expect from a camera the quality was horrendous, but it was still fun :)

The lineup was amazing, firstly they had the Sasha Bach Band from MySpace which to tell the truth I had never heard of before and had never heard any of their music but they were very good. Not too loud, the melodies were interesting and the drummer really had it going on!

That clearly isn't the right picture.

Of course the real stars came after, first Shaggy came on and did all the hip busting moves to the songs we all know. I still can't get over his voice, I wish I could do that!

The band which really put everyone in their place were The Stranglers, I really thought they were going to all have aneurisms, they really got into it! I have to admit I'm not much of a fan of hard rock and metal, but when they played the ballads I really got into it. Nobody can do ballads like hard rock bands I've come to realise ;).

Cyndi Lauper is even smaller in person than I could have imagined! When she came on stage and had guitar problems she talked to the sound engineers from the stage and had a few false starts but took it all in her stride, and she was hilarious! A couple of the local Singaporean girls next to us in the front row kept saying "She's so cute!". She really got into it, even walked down amongst the crowd and even walked up to us on the right hand side. I couldn't reach her but we made eye contact… hehe.

At one point Shaggy even came up with her during Girls. I never would have thought they'd make a wicked singing duo! You can read more about their collaboration here.

I actually really enjoyed Sugar Ray which I'm sure if I talked to myself in the past I'd surprise me. I've got a few of their songs but I just thought of them more as another generic pop group but they were all natural entertainers. The lead singer (who my sister has the hots for!) really engaged with the audience and kept saying what an honour it was to be sharing the stage with all these other singers and to be celebrating Singapore national day here. The crowd loved that ;).

I've still got more photos to process (and by process I mean "make look half decent") and I want to give the Pet Shop Boys their own post, so stay tuned for part 2.

Wondering why I'm not using Zooomr for these images as I said I would be? Because I've tried uploading them more than four times with spotty success and in the process of creating "smart" galleries ended up creating nothing but error 404 pages. I don't have time to mess around with it, so I've just put them on my own server for now!