A Rocking Good Time -- Torino, Italy Final Review

Turin/Torino


This city was the first of four Italian cities hosting Tokio Hotel’s performances. Each of us will share our perspective of the concert. Annette has the platform for the final part of review:

Concert, cont'd

Before the acoustic set begins, Bill starts talking and his voice is all husky and low kinda like the World Behind My Wall video intro. It is AWESOMELY sexy and I faint a little bit. He clears his throat and his normal speaking voice returns. This man is BEYOND amazing. Even him clearing his throat is sexy. Tom says Grazie mille, crowd goes wild, and then Georg says something. I have no clue what he says, but Bill chuckles. It was beyond cute. I faint several times in a row during Shadow as Bill sits on the steps and spreads his legs open. GOOD GOD!!!!! This song is accompanied by split screen pictures of Bill and Tom on the side screens. It is so beautiful to see these images while Bill is singing. My heart is full of love for KSquared as I watch this.

Throughout the entire show Tom is seriously on fire. He is rocking out as hard as I am girlie dancing, if not harder. He doesn’t stop for a second. He jams on his guitar as if his life were on the line. It is truly impressive and results in me spending a large amount of time watching him. His face contorts into a variety of expressions that make him look as if he were in immense pain. He is not wearing blue tape so I assume that is just him feeling the music. The Italian crowd really loves him because they burst into screams whenever he talks or does something special.

Monsoon and then Forever Now and the show is over. Confetti comes down and I watch as the boys disappear from my view. All that I have waited for and pined over for the past month is complete. But I get to do it all over again tomorrow at Padova, so I am happy.

After Concert

We hit the official merchandise stand which is CROWDED and make our purchases. I run back inside to try to get some confetti off the floor, but the stage is already being torn down and the black gates are up so I can’t get my hands on any. We make our way thru the gypsy non-official merchandise, which is crappy quality by the way, and out to the front.

Hope you enjoyed a touch of what we'd experienced!

A Rocking Good Time -- Torino, Italy (#3)

Turin/Torino

This city was the first of four Italian cities hosting Tokio Hotel’s performances. Each of us will share our perspective of the concert. Annette has the platform for Part 3 of her 4 Part review:

Concert (cont’d)
By the time the guys get to Pain of Love there is a fangirl who has wedged her way between myself and Patricia. The pit at a Tokio Hotel concert is like being a soldier on the battlefield. You have to take control of your space in order to secure your area. I obviously FAILED at that endeavor. Anyway, fangirl was fist pumping to Pain of Love like she was a rejected Jersey Shore candidate. She was also jumping all around her secure area and seriously impinging on mine. I quickly decided I was way too old for this and didn’t want to spend the entire concert moving around her to get back to my spot next to Patricia. Plus, I was missing the rest of my crew. So I tapped Patricia on the shoulder, told her I was done with the pit and was going to the 2nd level. Pain of Love was over and the sexy Bill voice-over intro to World Behind My Wall was playing. I had 2-3 minutes to haul ass from the pit to where I needed to be.

I turn around and proceed thru the crowd. The hyped fans won’t let me out. PEOPLE, if somebody is trying to remove themselves from the pit, you let them go because that means YOU GET CLOSER. Hello??? I get frustrated and rely on my college day abilities to lead a crowd of girls from the front door of a frat hour to the beer, and just start pushing people aside. Once I clear the crowd, I seriously book it thru the venue, up the stairs to the 2nd level where I put my arms around Michelle and Maria and completely freaked them out because they weren’t expecting me. We keep the group hug going thru the 1st few notes of World Behind My Wall.

The rest of the concert goes by quickly. I felt like if I blinked I would miss something. The view from the 2nd level is a lot different. I can’t see anything up close. I end up focusing on the two side screens a lot to see the facial expressions of the guys. I do have an awesome view of the span of the stage, with the open egg, which is impressive. The show started with the egg open, forgot to mention that earlier. I can also clearly see the background screen with the cool graphics. These change as the songs change and are AMAZING.

My eyes take in the whole scene and my ears the songs. I focus on each of the guys. Bill’s singing is BEAUTIFUL and I love his dancing. He flails his long arms and insanely long legs. His legs are seriously 5 miles long and skinny. So sexy hexy. He moves with the beat and I move along with him. Where we are standing is only one fan deep. The rest of the fans are sitting in seats behind us and hardly move. Odd??? A couple of girls dance, but the rest of the people, possibly parents, sit there. How could this be when I am jumping up and down and dancing like a freakin’ maniac?? I was just way into the whole show. I sang at the absolute top of my lungs with my mouth open as wide as it could get. I girlie danced, moving my arms and legs as wildly as I could. I jump up and down to several songs as the music takes over my soul.

Come back for the final episode of Rocking in Tornio with Tokio Hotel.


Feel free to ask questions about the concert or the Torino leg of the trip.

A Rocking Good Time -- Torino, Italy (#2)

Turin/Torino

This city was the first of four Italian cities hosting Tokio Hotel’s performances. Each of us will share our perspective of the concert. Annette has the platform for Part 2 of her 4 Part review:

Concert
A lot of the concert is a blur. I remember hearing a robotic voice and the first notes of "Noise" and all of a sudden there was Tom standing in front of me. I have no recollection of the curtain dropping at all. I recall just being frozen in time, standing in the middle of a pack of screaming fans, staring at Tom. He was HUGE. Much bigger in real life than I had imagined. I'm used to tall guys, but for some reason the angle at which I was looking up at him made me feel like he was super tall. And much bulkier than I had thought. Not sure if this is really him or his oversized pants and puffy vest that made me feel this way.

As I try to take this all in, I am struck by the fact that all I can see between my eyes and the stage are fan arms with cameras. I don't want to date myself here, but my past concert experiences are way before all this technology came to be commonplace. I tried moving my head around and standing on my tippy toes to get a better view. I am 5' 7" so I had a slight advantage over shorter fans, but at the time I wished I could have been 5' 10" or something. As I am thinking this, all of a sudden I see Bill.

The sight of Bill makes my heart beat much faster. I swear to God he is 8' tall and not 6' 3" as the fan data indicates. I am BLOWN AWAY by how lean and tall he is. Like Godzilla knocking over big buildings tall. And his hair is HUGE. That combed back pompadour part is much bigger in person than from my computer screen. And the eye makeup is PEFECTION and super dark. Natalie must have used some kind of crazy liquid black over or under black shadow because it was the blackest jet black I have ever laid my eyes on.

After these initial impressions I just try to meld with the music and dance as much as I can. It is hard to see what is going on because all I can see is fan cameras. I feel as if I am watching the show thru their camera screens. Did I really just fly over 4,000 miles to see Tokio Hotel thru a camera lens? NOT. I try to adjust to this by constantly moving my head to get a better view as I sing along with the music.

Come back for Part 3 of the 4 Part review.

Feel free to ask questions about the concert or the Torino leg of the trip.

A Rocking Good Time -- Torino, Italy (#1)

Turin/Torino
This city was the first of four Italian cities hosting Tokio Hotel’s performances. Each of us will share our perspective of the concert. Annette has the platform for Part 1 of her 4 Part review:

Pre-Show In The Line
The NTO posse got to PalaTorino about 5:30pm. This is after a HARROWING drive from Milan and all over Turin. As soon as we arrived at the venue, we understood why the Italian Fanclub had advised a warning. It wasn't really in the best area and the gypsies selling non-official Tokio Hotel merchandise have commandeered the entryway up to the back of the line. Fans were already lined up all the way from the front of the venue to the back of the wall where the gypsies were stationed. We found the end of the line and stood and waited for 2 hours in the rain. Not just spritzing rain, constant coming down rain.

Luckily I had purchased ponchos for us all to wear. Other fans had umbrellas, which due to the sardine-like quality of the line, a couple of us got caught under the cover. This was both good and bad. Good because you got some extra rain protection. Bad because if you weren't standing in the right place, you found yourself a runoff deposit for the rain coming down the umbrella, so in essence you got double the rain. Great, huh? It was cold and we only had on shirts and sweaters, so we got drenched. We did the Tokio Hotel line dance, as we now call it. Fans screamed as the group in front of them gets let it; and then you shuffle shuffle forward a few feet, jammed up to the person next to, in front of, and in back of you; and then you stop. This occurred until we got towards the front of the venue, climbed over heaps of garbage, and finally got in.

Pre-Show Inside Venue
The venue is larger than it appears from the outside. A big floor with seats at the back and then a 2nd level with a ton more seats. We had seated tickets which put us in this 2nd level. We were on the floor on Tom’s side pretty close to the barrier but decided to go to the seats, since at Padova we had just general admission tickets. BAD, BAD, BAD idea. This is what an agonizing drive from Milan on concert day will do to your brain. Result is stupid decision making. We should have just stayed where we were and seated ourselves on the floor like other fans were doing.

Instead we made our way to the 2nd level and got seats in the 1st row so we could grab hold of the barrier at our level. We got some food, water, one beer to share, tons of free makeup and some flashing Tokio Hotel light thingy, waited, and tried to find the official Italian Fanclub booth. After about 1 hour and seeing the venue not really fill up, Patricia and I decided to go for the floor. We went downstairs and got 11 heads from the barrier on Tom’s side about 1/2 way between center stage and the stands. The fans around us were nice. Some Italian girls had a "we love Georg" poster. Other fans had backpacks which they used in a defensive way to jockey for position. The fans were mostly college age girls, not very many young teenagers or boys, and a couple of other Italian NTO's.

Every time anything remotely indicating that the show was about to start happened, the crowd screamed. Curtain moved, equipment testing, light guys (4 of them) take their places, etc. Pre-show music played and there was some singing. World Behind My Wall Remix was INCREDIBLE. Why hadn't I heard this before? I had World Behind My Wall German, English, video, acoustic. Patricia and I sang along to the music and bopped as much as we could in the sea of squished together fans.

Come back for Part 2 of the 4 Part review.

Feel free to ask questions about the concert or the Torino leg of the trip.