Expectations

If I was to tell you Movie X was brilliant and then you heard a similar review from another friend you would expect that film to be very good. If you then read spectacular reviews about the movie you would enter the theatre expecting everything to be perfect. But we all know what would happen once the movie was over and you left the theatre. Disappointment.

Your expectations were so high that there's no way the movie would ever measure up. That's what happened to me last night when I saw Peter Gabriel at the Molson Canadian Amphitheatre. And I wasn't alone.

I was so pumped to see Peter Gabriel. I'd seen him before at the SkyDome in 1993 during his Secret World Tour and his performance was powerful, fun and jammed with amazing vocals. Nothing about the performer on stage last night resembled the one 18 years ago.

Peter Gabriel and the Blood Red Orchestra sounded like a winning combination when I purchased the tickets in April. But when Gabriel walked on stage you could hardly hear him. He spoke softly and sang softly. The orchestra and audience drowned him out at certain points of the performance.

He'd stripped down his show, took out the drums, guitars and theatricality that had become his trademark earlier in his career. The only time he moved on stage was to walk off while the orchestra played and he did that numerous times.

The clincher for me that I wasn't the only one caught off guard by this performance was the people around me. They were not engaged at all with what was (or wasn't) happening on stage. They were looking around the amphitheatre, leaving their seats in the middle of a song to get a beer and looking out at the poor people in the 400 level as the rain came down. When Biko was performed Peter had to tell the audience to stand up at the end of the song. He would NEVER have had to do that if the song was performed the way it was originally recorded. The last time I saw Gabriel sing Biko everyone was on their feet because the performance compelled the audience to stand. There was nothing compelling about last night's stripped down rendition of Biko.

People directly behind and beside me lamented he was not the Peter Gabriel of old, that he looked fat and had lost his spark. Not everyone felt that way. A review in the Toronto Star heaped praise on the concert (http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/1013624--peter-gabriel-s-new-blood-tour-a-masterful-reinvention). But the large group of people who left the concert an hour before it ended with us felt differently. We were expecting something different, something that resembled the Peter Gabriel of old. We came to the concert ready to rock with one of the greatest and left without any ringing in our ears at all.

I built this concert up into something it was not. Expectations, they're rarely what you expect them to be.