Fall Out Boy - Rock City - Nottingham - 28/1/06.

The air of anticipation in the room is ridiculous as the crowd wait for tonight’s headliners to take the stage. For the support acts, Nightmare of You and Gym Class Hero’s I imagine it to be quite a scary prospect, to have to come out on stage and play in front of a packed room of angst ridden teens screaming for Pete Wentz. Both bands handle it quite well. Nightmare of You getting a slightly better reception that Gym Class Hero’s. This is probably because the former stick to a type of so called ‘emo’ that is popular among the boys with floppy fringes at the moment.

In reality the bands lyrics and performance make them sound part like The Smiths, and a tiny bit like The Killers. Gym Class Hero’s are an awesome hip-hop talent, that go down about as well as a fart in a spacesuit to begin with. They do win the crowd over in time, which is nice. The downside to it all is that the biggest cheer of their set is reserved for when Patrick Stump makes a guest appearance to sing one word. 

Anyway. Onwards. Fall Out Boy take to the stage a little after nine, and the screams are deafening to the extent that passers by question why Take That would be playing Rock City, and why didn’t they know about it. From the very first chords of the very first song it is clear that this band have amassed an army of fiercely loyal and incredibly devoted fans.

Everyone in this room knows the words to every song this band play. Something that is rarely seen at gigs these days. It would be easy to say that stand out songs of the night are ‘Sugar, We’re Going Down’ and ‘Dance, Dance’ but they only serve to make the crowd dance harder, and sing louder than before, as if to reinforce their loyalty to the band. The band reciprocate the fierce loyalty, they play brilliantly, with an impressive energy that the crowd seem to feed off, and in turn the band off the crowd. The music is perfect, the vocals amazing. Stump is as brilliant live, when you can hear him that is, for he is frequently drowned out by the singing of the crowd.

The real front man of this band has to be bass player and apparent heart throb Patrick Stump. He talks to the crowd between songs, adding a friendly personal touch. He tells the crowd about the time “someone” went on tour and his girlfriend “slept with not one, but two of his friends and then lied to him about it” so he wrote a song about it. We all know that its his girlfriend that cheated, and that he wrote the song, and we love him all the more for it. His advice such as “call in sick to university and spend the entire day in bed with someone else” and when he tells the crowd “ this song is about the greatest sex I had in my whole entire life…. Sex with myself”, when he’s talking about ‘Sugar, …’ give this gig, as large and as packed as it is a more intimate feeling and the crowd leave feeling as if they’ve just watched their new best friends play, rather than some guys from Chicago who are about to become the biggest band in the world.

It’s difficult to capture a gig in words, go see Fall Out Boy, I can promise you, you will fall in love with this band, you just can’t help it. They deserve it.

By Laura

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Review Comments/Feedback

That gig was awesome, and i think u captured it quite well, but the bass player is called 'pete wentz', 'patrick stump' is the rhythm guitarist. by - rowan

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