L’Arc-en-Ciel TOUR 2008 L’7-Trans ASIA via PARIS concert

tl;dr: The L’Arc-en-Ciel concert was awesome. hyde was fiiineeeee as always. Ken apparently booboo’ed himself, leading to ‘technical difficulties’.

I am in a fangirling mood at the moment so the Europe trip post can wait another few days. Muahaha. I was rather fortunate to find out back in March that one of my favourite bands, L’Arc-en-Ciel, would be giving a concert in Paris. During. My. Vacation. There. Woot!

I have also swapped my standing ticket to a seating ticket, after seeing that they were being sold again. This turned out to be a curse and a blessing… no regrets… maybe =)

I asked one of my French friends, Fred, to tag along with me, as he is also a closet huge hyper big fan of the group. We arrived at the Zenith concert hall around 5:45 PM with the concert starting at 7 PM. There already was a large crowd there. I was a little bit surprised that there were so many people there already.

I think the members of the band came up on the little bridge on the right of the picture? I was hearing ooo’s and ahhh’s from the crowd, but being shorter than the average person, I could not see much. I believe Fred took that picture since he is taller than the average person. Just my luck.

As 7 PM grew nearer, so did the crowd. It was interesting to see people traveling from all over the place to watch a concert. I spotted fans from Germany, the UK, Italy, Taiwan, Japan and even Canada! *cough* Finally around 7:30 PM, staff started checking tickets. After people’s tickets were checked, they RAN to the hall. That’s real fans for you. The girl in front of me let us know that she was waiting since 3:00 PM… and we were right behind her having arrived much later ^^; I felt a little bit bad for those people.

Inside, it was all coloured a shade of red. It was smaller than expected, since I have been to the Air Canada Center for a few concerts in the past, and it seated much more. I think the capacity was 5000 people.

Even if the concert hall was small, oh boy, the fans were happy. We were lucky to get good seats and were seating in the left. Here’s a small video of a hola that people were doing a couple times prior to starting the concert.

The concert started around 8 PM after the seats filled up. Here is the track list:

1. Get out from the shell
2. Driver’s High
3. Killing Me
4. DRINK IT DOWN
5. DAYBREAK’S BELL
6. winter fall
7. Kasou
8. My Dear
9. forbidden lover
10. MY HEART DRAWS A DREAM
11. Caress of Venus
12. REVELATION
13. SEVENTH HEAVEN
14. Pretty girl
15. STAY AWAY
16. READY STEADY GO
17. NEO UNIVERSE
18. HONEY
19. Link
20. Anata

Personal favourites include HONEY (I recorded it, buuuut you can hear my singing in the background so no video), STAY AWAY (freaking camera battery died), and winter fall. You could say I’m one of the older fans…

I will let the videos speak for how GREAT and AWESOME the concert was:

Get out from the shell. I got shivers when I saw the shadows pop up!

Hyde tries to speak in French, and fails (I still love you hyde! Thanks for trying so hard!). The public was randomly clapping and yelling even though they did not understand. I didn’t understand half of it either.

First half of STAY AWAY. The band was doing member switching, with Tetsu leading the charge, then Ken second, Yukihiro third and hyde last. My cell phone recording capability is crap compared to my camera’s, and thus, the second half will not be included.

And finally, Anata, played as the last song. I apologize for the crap crap crap quality. Beautiful way of ending such a wonderful concert.

Notable moments:

• hyde jumped into the audience. I really wished I got a standing ticket at that point.
• hyde threw two water bottles at the audience.
• hyde blew kisses (you can see where this is going).
• tetsu threw two bananas.
• ken hurt himself because of an air burst (?), concert stopped for 15 minutes, and he came back saying that he needed to go to the washroom (ha ha).
• hyde was given an Italian flag, which he gave back, which the fangirl returned, which hyde gave back again (really doesn’t want it huh…).
• hyde made a few mistakes, and stuck out his tongue.
• hyde yelled out to the public to ‘Sautez!’ which we all followed.
• ken’s talk was hilarious. He talks about French cuisine and truffles. Fangirl inside regrets not having recorded it.

A booth outside was selling goodies for insane prices. They were selling the new Kiss album for €17, a wristband for €10, a poster for €10, booklet for €25, a set of badges for €10 and t-shirts for €30. I grabbed a poster and a book only… very tempted by the t-shirt though.

And pictures of the goodies I procured at the concert.

And that’s it for my concert report! For a more in depth view, check out Thierry’s post at Listen to the World.