Dream Theater @ AdelaideShowgrounds (23/01/2008)

Tue 5th Feb, 2008 in Gig Reviews

This January, after many, many years of asking, cajoling, and pleading, Australia witnessed a great thing: the coming of progressive metal legends Dream Theater to our shores. Since the early 1990s, fans had been trying to get Dream Theater booked for an Australian tour; the support of key media people added strength to this voice, to no avail. Until this year. After twenty years, and a lot of energy and effort, the band finally graced our shores. Better yet, they had promised to bring with them their huge lighting and stage effects, so that Australians could finally see the real Dream Theater experience.

And so it was that on Monday 28 January, the late afternoon saw throngs of fans lining up at the gates of the Adelaide Showgrounds. The streets surrounding the venue were filled with parked cars, and people of nearly all ages were standing around, sitting around, lounging around in the sun. Some enterprising young blokes had got there early, opened up the back of their hatchback and sat around listening to metal and drinking beer. Seeing this, we looked around and thought hungrily of those stouts we’d bypassed in our hurry to get to the show.

As it got towards 6.30 pm the crowd started to get restless: the gates were supposed to have been open at 6.30 pm, with the show due to start at around 7 pm. Even when the gates were finally opened, it took an age to get anywhere near the entrance. Punters got progressively more excited-looking as they got closer to the gates: checking their tickets, looking at how much cash they had on them, talking loudly. Once inside it was a bit of a walk around to the right pavilion, where another line presented itself. Punters were being frisked and bags were being checked just outside the pavilion area.

It turned out that by far the majority of those who went to this show had gold tickets, and were in the front area of the enormous shed, right up at the front of the stage. We were in the silver section which, whilst great for seeing the show and seeing everything that was going on, still left one with that feeling that the show would have been just that much better right at the front – or at least closer to the stage.

Dream Theater were as good as their promise. The speakers, though they looked small, were stacked eight high. The stage was high enough for us to get a real sense of how amazing it was to finally see this band in Australia. The lighting was great: spiralling spotlights, magnificently timed lighting changes, playing lights. This was where the venue started to come into its own, because it gave so much more scope, made the show seem that much bigger because of the ways in which the lights could play over the inside of the venue and through the crowd. Up behind the band was a huge screen that played animations, snatches of film, and live video projections of what was going on on the stage below. These video projections were great, not just because it brought the stage ‘closer’ for those of us up the back, but because the overplay of cameras, the close-ups, the fun spirit in which they were used by the band on stage, all added to the experience of the show. Although this was quite good, just the fact that the gig started so early was faintly odd. It seemed weird somehow to have this brilliant light show with a great screen playing visual displays up there with the late afternoon summer sunlight glowing over the tops of the walls of the pavilion. Ah well – you can’t have your cake and eat it too, I suppose!

The theme and the artwork running on the screen followed the band’s latest release, Systematic Chaos, itself adorned with ants. So we had ants across the screen, ants on the speaker stacks. If you hadn’t seen it, you might think it odd, but it wasn’t – it was great.

As for the set… I am full of respect for this band. It is hard to play a long set at the best of times, but three and a half hours was just phenomenal. There were no encores, but do you need them when you’ve been treated to a show that really is just dedicated to the best that a band of this calibre can bring, for a whole chunk of hours at a time? Hell no! The set list material from their 1992 album Images and Words, the 1997 album Falling into Infinity, from 2003’s Train of Thought, from 2005’s Octavarium, from 2007’s Systematic Chaos... I could go on and on. There was so much material, so many great tracks, so many brilliant instrumentals. Dream Theater truly ran the gamut of their albums (as well they might after 20 years!!), played everything from ballads to classic and progressive metal.

And didn’t the punters dig it! Dream Theater has a huge and diverse fan base, and this show was no exception. Everyone aged maybe eight and upwards (way upwards!) was there: families, mums, dad, kids, youth, granddads, the whole bloody lot. They danced, they sang, they yelled, they applauded madly. At the intermission at about 8.20 pm they poured out, bought beers and food and downed smokes, and then headed back in and went into it again until after ten o’clock. Drummer Portnoy and guitarist Petrucci were clearly the stars of the show, and they seemed to enjoy the whole spectacle rather more than the rest of the band.

For a while I thought that the crowd might not let them go; but they did. Three and a half hours standing up is a long time on a hard concrete floor, and Dream Theater really did deliver what they promised, and then some. Let’s hope they come back again before we (and they!) are too old; within, at least, 20 years, which is something that vocalist LaBrie joked about: ‘we hope to come back again… in 20 years!’