Depeche Mode concert

Last night I attended the Depeche Mode concert on Sofia. Tickets for Depeche Mode went on sale in January and sold out 35,000 tickets in two days. I guess Bulgarians really like Depeche Mode. The concert took place at Lokomotiv Stadium, a football (soccer) stadium for a local team. It’s basically a run-down concrete structure like more other buildings in Sofia. One half of the stadium looked like it had modern aspirations in mind with such items as partial roof you might see at the top of many modern baseball stadiums in the US – then they decided to skimp on the other (the visitors?) side and put in some grandstand bleachers.

We arrived at the stadium in the middle of the (mediocre) opening band. To get into our section, we followed a sign with an arrow showing out section number. The arrow was pointing up which I assumed meant go straight. As I found out, I really meant go right. Very intuitive. All this basically meant we went in the wrong entrance and were separated from our section. We finally had to be escorted through some barriers to get to our section.

We bought tickets to the VIP section, not because we wanted them, but because they were the only tickets left on the second day of sales back in January. In Bulgaria ticket sales go backwards – cheapest to most expensive. Our tickets were 50 BGN (about $30), but we found out from a Macedonian sitting next to us that the tickets were 50 Euro outside Bulgaria. Sitting in the VIP section meant we had seats in the stadium seating rather than standing on the lawn. Of course everyone stood anyway so it didn’t really matter. So, we were supposed to have seats, but by the time we got there all the seats had been taken and so had most of the standing space in the aisles. We managed to find some space near the fence separating the VIP section from all the heathens on the lawn. The VIP section also theoretically got us free drinks. However, when I saw the line to the bathroom, I thought it would be best to keep my bladder empty lest I miss half the show waiting in line. On our way out I took a peek in the bathroom. There were not separate men’s and women’s bathrooms – it was all one with four separate stall. What I saw in the bathroom cannot be adequately described in words. Let’s just say there were some makeshift rafts made out of boxes, plastic grates and whatever else was nearby to keep the visitors from wading in … well, you know what. You’d think that Turkish (squat) toilets wouldn’t have this problem, but it sure was a problem last night.

The actual concert was very good. The crowd was very energetic (they had been waiting since January for the concert, after all). Apparently this was one of the first (if not THE first) concert to make use of large scale lighting special effects, video screens and such. Most of the stuff was new (i.e. post-Violator, the last album of theirs I bought), but they did crank into a few of their older songs near the end of the show. The crowd seemed to know the words to most of the songs – probably in the same way I know the words to La Bamba without knowing a lick of Spanish.

We strategically poised ourselves near one of the exits for a quick escape as the show was ending. It was to our favor because we were able to quickly catch a cab and be home in time to watch the end of the Argentina-Netherlands game.

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