This summer has seen quite a few bands making a comeback, so to speak. No Doubt being one of them. My beef is with bands / artists making comebacks is that they don’t come full force with all they have, instead banking on their name. I’ve seen quite a few concerts where acts were making a comeback and it basically sucked. This was definitely not the case with No Doubt. On Saturday July 18th, they rocked GM Place in Vancouver.
Rewind to moments before they stepped onto the stage. I was chilling beside the stage waiting to get into the photo pit, when us photographers all spotted Gwen’s sons, Kingston, and little brother, Zuma. Cute as can be with their hearing protectors. All of a sudden the lights went out and a curtain was in place, the fans were cheering pretty loud at this point. The curtain drops and the madness ensues.
No Doubt starts the night off with the uptempo “Spiderwebs” and continued it with “Hella Good” before slowing it down a bit with, my personal favourite, “Underneath It All”. The whole time Gwen Stefani’s voice was strong and captured everyone’s ears, reminding us why we all loved No Doubt, in case we had forgotten over the years.
Aside from stating the obvious, that the concert was awesome. The details throughout the show were well thought out and resulted in a well produced show. An example of this was the background video, people generally don’t pay attention to this and with good reason, usually they suck or aren’t relevant. But No Doubt’s background video went with every song, for example, during “It’s My Life”, the video in the background to me looked like an updated version of the music video. The video opens in a dramatic sequence where Gwen Stefani gets up from a table with all the band members and is seen running off. Only to be seen later in a car driving around with tears. The other band members jump into a car to try and find her. All the while this song is being performed. It all synced up beautifully and made sense and this happened pretty much with every song.
With such a huge catalog of great songs, it was pretty hard to be disappointed with anything the band played. Name a song and they probably played it. In total their set was about 90 minutes long with 3 – 4 songs as their encore. The encore itself was pretty special as well, during one of the songs the two opening bands, Bedouin Soundclash and Paramore, came out and joined No Doubt on stage for a collective performance of “Stand and Deliver”. Overall the night felt like one big ass party and the band entertained all that was in their house that night.
To find tickets for the rest of their tour visit Livenation.com.
Setlist:
Spiderwebs
Hella Good
Underneath It All
Excuse Me Mr.
Ex-Girlfriend
End It On This
Simple Kind of Life
Bathwater
Guns of Navarone
New
Hey Baby
Running
Different People
Don’t Speak
It’s My Life
Just A Girl
Encore:
Rock Steady
Stand and Deliver
Sunday Morning
August 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
wow, did gwen go commando on that show or what?
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:25 pm
I saw No Doubt in the summer, and it was great to hear some of their old songs like Spiderwebs, I’m Just a Girl and Don’t Speak. I was never really into their new stuff after the Tragic Kingdom album. Anyways, I thought the show was really well put together, and it was almost a nostalgia show of what No Doubt used to be.