We bought the tickets in 2010 so after a 2 year wait I was ridiculously excited. Me, Ryan and Joe left at 10am and got to Liverpool for about 12.30pm and walked about for a bit before going to get food (KFC, it was so good). We weren't planning on leaving to queue at the arena until at least 4pm but then we saw a group of girls wearing blink t-shirts and decided to go earlier than initially planned. After eating we walked through town and saw some weird sights... 2 of them being a homeless man singing Mary Poppins songs and 5 police officers surrounding a wild duck...
Anyway, we got to the Echo arena at 2.45pm and there were already about 25-30 people queuing. Being stubborn I get really annoyed if I go to a standing gig and don't get t the barrier so I started to worry that there wasn't gonna be enough room on the barrier for the three of us with another queue around the corner already having 50+ people in the queue. We queued for a total of 3 hours, 45 minutes and, surprisingly, it went quite fast. For about an hour we sat on the floor in the sun, napping and listening to blink-182 (of course). Everyone around us was singing along to the music and the atmosphere was great. A group behind us were offering everyone drinks and stuff and they were really friendly. The doors were
supposed to open at 6pm but eventually opened at 6.35pm which was kind of annoying but we'd already waited that long we didn't really mind.
About 6 or 7 lads in front of us in the queue had to get searched so, luckily, we managed to skip part of the queue and get our wrist bands on. As soon as we got into the arena we saw that the majority of the barrier was completely empty so we power walked (you weren't allowed to run because of "health and safety"...) to it and Ryan said "MARK OR TOM? MARK OR TOM?" knowing that Mark is always on the left of the stage and Tom on the right. We settled for Mark and all clung onto the barrier in excitement.
There were some really annoying fangirls behind us for the whole gig and I think they may have perforated one of my ear drums for screaming far too loud.
We waited for about 40 minutes before The Blackout came on stage:
I'd never really heard any of their songs before bar 1 or 2 so it was a little awkward when Sean Smith came right up to us and expected us to sing... Nevertheless they were really good live and quite funny. Their set was about half an hour long and then we waited another 20 minutes or so for The All American Rejects (I don't have any photos, yet). I was disappointed with them mainly because Tyson Ritter (lead) was really annoying and arrogant and was rude to the security guards for no reason. Their set was pretty boring except for their most famous songs (Dirty Little Secret, Move Along, Gives You Hell).
THEN BLINK-182.
The crew started getting the set ready for blink and someone brought out Mark's speakers, they had Nyan Cat on them! Then a curtain covered the stage before the lights went dark and everyone screamed. Then Travis started drumming the intro for Feeling This and the crowd went crazy. The curtain dropped and Mark Hoppus was literally a few feet away from us. I started crying...
I basically cried all the way through the the first song. Mainly because I was seeing one of my favourite bands of all time for the first time ever and they were so close to us. Mark could see of all us going crazy and he kept smiling and leaning right over to us.
The setlist was perfect and I caught one of Travis' stickers :-)
I think the first picture is my favourite! Mark's wife and son were at the side of the stage singing along which was really cute and Travis' daughter was listening to One Direction on her headphones the whole way through! Travis' drum solo was AMAZING and I can honestly say that it was possibly the best night of my life so far. "blink-182 life. for life."
