Gig Review: Sugababes – Newcastle Arena, 11/04/07

ukevents.net · Joined: 15 Dec 2003 Posts: 2439

Sugababes – Newcastle Arena, 11/04/07

Toddling off to this Sugababes gig tonight was definitely a strange event on so many levels. For a start it took seconds to go over to the bar and get ripped off for the watered down beer they sell in horrible plastic cups. Always helps that about 80% of the audience tonight were under the legal age of consent for drinking. However on a plus side of things, you didn’t have some drunken moron randomly shouting stupid things between songs. Yes, you might think you’re hilarious but the other 10,000 people around you secretly want to physically restrain you.

Billed as a greatest hits tour, it certainly lived up to its name. From the beginning, songs you secretly know but won’t admit to liking were played all night. Red Dress began the show, but sadly the novelty of them wearing red dresses didn’t happen. Instead it was some kind of weird-looking silver space suit-style number.

The whole night was literally full of pretty much all the eighteen singles they’ve released over their five album career. From Round Round to Push The Button it was all there. Thankfully, the collaboration they performed with not really classical Brit artist but kind of anyway Sting did not get an airing. He was probably in one of his seven houses. Sadly, the girls did perform their utterly dire cover of Walk This Way. Never has a classic song been butchered so brutally. If any of Aerosmith were dead they’d be turning in their grave. Instead, Steven Tyler probably got some plastic surgery to block out the horrible noise we had to endure for months. Yes the single was for charity, but they could have picked something better!

There were two moments which made the night memorable for different reasons. Firstly, the Sugababes are known for happy and danceable music. However, during the track Stronger the entire fun of the night was zapped away with the lovely images of dying children being projected on the wall. Hmm, this was going somewhere and, of course, then came the speech about fighting poverty. Remember the infamous finger clicking video? That got shown and even Bono came on screen and preached on about things. He really gets everywhere unfortunately. Expect the Sugababes to hop on the bandwagon of bands pretending to give a toss about the environment at the upcoming climate change gig. Of course it's not free promotion to sell their own records.

The second memorable moment gave us some cheap laughs. One of the band's covers included Rocks Off by Primal Scream. During the chorus the Sugababes made a desperate attempt to get the crowd to sing the chorus back to them. Problem being that most of the crowd had never heard of it, with them being so young, and they didn’t know the words. It fell flat on its backside to slight amusement of some people.

Overall, it was a safe gig with no real outstanding moments, though Keisha did say 's***' twice to the shock of many parents! Safe music to keep the girlfriend happy really. She gets to enjoy herself while you can laugh at her out of tune singing, thinking she’s the fourth Sugababe. Everyone kind of wins.

Written by Matthew for UKEvents.net