#encore!encore!
Recently, I went to see them live…
The Rose at indigo at The O2, June ‘25
I’m a debut fan since 2017 - call me a fossil.
The tune of “Like We Used To” (좋았는데) still teleports me back to my university days and long, snowy nights when I was drowning in my insecurities. It’s not even on the setlist anymore but I can’t even complain because the lead singer, Woosung, keeps sounding impossibly better and better in the 8 years I’ve listened to him. More raw and human, more than he used to.
Logistics wise, the staff at the O2 are still ill-equipped to handle K-Pop events, which I’ve already written about in a Note.
The floor ticket holders get told to stand in one line until we ask someone else and they say no, you’re not supposed to be here. Go around the back. And we get to the back and there are three more line-ends and we have to ask multiple fans along the line to confirm which one we are supposed to be in. No signage, no organisation, pure vibes and mutual aid between concert-goers. It gets worse when there are different kinds of floor tickets at other idol shows: GA, GA with a VIP Package, Platinum GA without the VIP Package. No one in the 5 mile radius is bothered to learn the K-Pop ticketing system and everyone is fully ready to mislead exhausted fans around the venue, like monkeys on chains, before shouting at you for being in the wrong place. I’ve never had a 100% smooth-sailing K-Pop concert experience in the Euroamerican venues and I doubt I ever will.
The band’s sonic diversity is severely underappreciated. I think they’re one of the rare groups from Korea to have balanced personal flair and agility well, to have kept their signature sounds as they experimented with new elements. It is a joy to witness their growth. The setlist is curated with careful thought and a real heart, covering a stunning breadth of musical styles, and we are on our feet most of the time, feeling hyped and fulfilled.
They’re decidedly non-idols. They want to set themselves apart from the majority of the industry and the signs are subtle but everywhere. The venue is an intimate live music club with a capacity of less than 3K, which is a group decision, and it makes them look like theatre kids in a school production. It makes them touchable. There are no outfit changes, minimum makeup, no music videos playing on a screen, no conceptual films between sets.
There are minimum talking and fan service, but when they do, they sound like a Western mellow rock band than a K-Pop group. Woosung is Korean-American and crowd-controls like one, his laid-back Californian accent peeking through as he banters and quips. The other lead singer, Dojoon, to my surprise, also speaks fluently, albeit with more formalities and less ease. He enunciates like a soundbite in an English listening exam. It’s endearing. While the talking segments in idol concerts often sound scripted, rehearsed and repetitive, theirs were organic. The flow of the programme feels less regimented. There are hecklers but they would not hesitate to respond with humour and grace.
They encourage fans to take photos and videos, although I barely see anyone holding up their phones. Barely anyone has light sticks (still severely overpriced), no photo cards are traded anywhere. I haven’t been to a gig so comfortingly simple in a long while.
The demographic is largely white and older than your average K-Pop crowd. Lots of queer fans, to my delight. The British lady to my left is possibly in her late forties and does not know a single lyric, but she dances just as hard as everyone else.
I befriend two girls in the queue and 2 minutes into our chit-chat, one of them asks: “are you into any other K-Pop groups?” And a bond is built from there. Now, we exist to each other. Isn’t that beautiful?
The stage is decorated with bouquets of fresh roses and at the end of the show, the members throw them into the crowd. A sea of hands shoot up to grab them and I briefly wonder if the flowers are de-thorned. Either way it encapsulates what it means to be a fan: to hold on tight to a rose even if it makes you bleed, and to feel loved when it doesn’t. To want.
SMTown Live at the O2, June ‘25
A bittersweet rollercoaster of a night, marvelling at just how old I am compared to every other fan in the venue, but feeling lucky because I’ve seen it all come to this moment with my eyes.
Just way too loud. So loud. Like I mentioned before, the venue is not equipped to blast this kind of music at this volume, especially the songs of the newer generation of K-Pop groups with a lot of beats and no melodies. Most of them are just catchy noises at an unsafe decibel.
The pre-debut male trainees, SMTR25, whip out some of the most synchronised, aesthetically satisfying and powerful performances I’ve seen. The steps are sharp and the formation changes clean, and more importantly, everyone dances with a fierceness and a hunger I haven’t seen since 2015. They perform in survival mode and that’s why survival shows gather the most fans. A sink-or-swim situation makes their eyes burn and a matter of life-or-death brings out the most vitality in their strides.
Older groups get a lot less exposure, sometimes even through newer groups doing a nostalgic cover of them instead of performing the songs themselves. It feels like they are passing the baton onto younger bodies, and looking at EXO consisting of only three people makes me wither.
The Made-In-Britain K-Pop boy group HelloALICE is a thing I neither knew about beforehand nor feel comfortable with. I can’t figure out who’s being exploited here. The One Direction-esque members are white men in K-Pop glam, all jarringly speaking in a roadmen accent. They talk the fan service talk, obviously having undergone Korean media training, but make generic Benson Boone/JVKE-style tracks that carry a whiff of K-Pop influence. They remind me too often of white guys on Hinge who writes Japanese characters in their profiles, because it is now considered “cool” and “unique”. It’s clear that they do not know anyone from the actual SM company, do not speak the language and therefore do not interact with their coworkers. At the end of the show while all other idols are doing the send-off laps around the stage, they are huddled in a corner taking selfies. Who are they trying to appeal to, I wonder? Asian female fans who are ex-Directioners? British female fans who dabble in K-Pop? A secret third thing that’s somewhere in between, the third-culture viewers in need of something niche?
Only one “family” song is performed collectively, but there is minimum interaction between the female and male idols, which is a new thing. Everyone tries to avoid dating rumours a bit too hard, lest fans from all sides criticise their boundary-crossing. Every group pick out posters from their fandom and waves to their fans specifically. There’s seemingly no sense of unity despite all the lovey-dovey talk of camaraderie, only factions, camps, gendered cliques.
the real ones would remember this exact backdrop As they sing the family song, the camera pans over all their faces and I can’t help but lament, real boomer-ly, at this conveyor belt sushi bar of prettiness that is at once too hopeful and hopeless. I and my fellow oldie friends feel a sense of doom despite the conceptual film blabbering about “making this culture last forever” and preserving the grand legacy of K-Pop’s founding father. Somewhere along the way we’ve stopped knowing what this culture is, and these pretty faces will become equally unrecognisable.
Billie Eilish “Hit Me Hard and Soft” at the O2, Jul ‘25
Very cool. She makes me feel like I’m a teenager who’s extremely uncool, but not in an uncomfortable way. Setlist is a wild pendulum swinging from laser-psychedelic-rave-sensuality to messy-bloody-fleshy vulnerability. Her talent is unquestionable from the song production to the delivery, and I just cannot imagine the amount of new peaks she will hit in the future.
Stage design ensures that the GA is fairly evenly spread out and that all fans (regardless of height) get to see her up close, without having to queue for hours, which I strongly commend. LED screens are numerous and dispersed but the graphics are unique and in coherence with the overall aesthetic. It’s as fair as it can get despite pricing differences, and she’s also famously adamant on protecting resale tickets from bots and scalpers. I personally bought my tickets from another fan, and the transfer service opened some 24 hours ahead of the show to achieve the tightest turnaround window possible, fending off fraud and non-fan activity.
She is startlingly young in person. Billie’s speaking voice makes clear that she’s in her adolescence, and my friend and I are hit doubly hard by the rawness in her performances after this realisation. There is an immense loneliness laced in the show, and it’s not just because she sings about breakups. To be an artist is to be exposed in every sense of the word, and the more she bares open to the spotlight as a part of her art, the more her youth is consumed by its shadows. It’s hell on earth to be heavenly. Seeing “THE GREATEST” live is an immersive experience of the weight of her pain, the very thing that inspired the song but also what we’re viscerally inflicting on her by perceiving the performance.
(flash warning!)
…and I’ll be thinking (sobbing) about this for a long time.
Her fans are literal children. I get the appeal of her to teenage and pre-teen girls because she’s just so cool, but listening to these girls scream lyrics about cunnilingus word for word or sexual/emotional abuse and neglect at the top of their lungs as if they’ve been through three divorces…is interesting. I think about this Substack piece I read a while ago:
…and I think maybe Billie is indeed a better option to listen to. At least these girls will know what kind of pleasure they should be expecting in bed, and call out anyone who’s incompetent. At least they can shout “you’re so full of shit” when they’re being love-bombed, hopefully.
