Rainbow tour - one night only!
Yesterday Mariah started her Rainbow World Tour in Antwerp, Belgium. In a sold out Sportpaleis, I guess 10.000 spectators, we saw Mariah in a whirling show. She never looked more beautiful and confident. In the beginning Mariah was a little nervous, after all it was her opening show, but in time she felt more relaxed.
The show started with a thunderstorm, followed by rain and a rainbow. The first song she sang was "Emotions", like she did so many times before. After this song Bianca appeared on a giant videoscreen, introducing her own World Tour. She was corrected by the director and reluctantly she introduced Mariah. Bianca was the Solar Beauty Queen of 1999 and now it was time to choose a new queen for the year 2000.
Half a dozen beauty queens appeared on stage and Mariah was Miss Understood. She sang Dreamlover and unsurprisingly was crowned as the new Solar Beauty Queen. Bianca came on stage and started to fight with Mariah while they sang X-Girlfriend.
This tour is called the Rainbow tour and therefore Mariah sang no less than 9 songs from her new album. She didn't sing How Much and After Tonight, so rumours that these two songs will be featured as a double A-side on her new single are most likely not true. My guess is that Agains All Odds will be released as single, at least in Europe. When Mariah sang this song, the whole crowd sang with her and she got a standing ovation. Someone told me there is already a promo CD-Single of Against All Odds.
Together with Trey Lorenz she sang Thank God I Found You and Trey said this was her 15th Number One hit and everybody applauded. Mariah, humble as ever, felt a little uncomfartable with it. But she had some good news for all the Trey Lorenz fans: soon Trey will release his new album and Mariah did backing vocals on two songs! Later this evening Trey sang Make You Happy.
Mariah changed her outfits about ten times, but this time the audience did not have to wait or listen to some unknown singers. No, this time they showed short videos of Mariah and Bianca. Besides these two, there were also some famous celebrities in these videos. Pamela Anderson, David Hasselhof, Don King, Jerry Springer, just to name a few. We saw Mariah and Bianca fighting in a plane, Bianca at Buckingham Palace and Mariah and Bianca at a signing session in Fame, Amsterdam. This last clip was very special, because I was there the day they shot this video.
The highlight of this evening was the boxing match between Mariah and Bianca, announced by boxing promotor Don King on videoscreen. Mariah walked to the ring through the audience in golden boxing shorts and wearing golden boxing gloves. The fight was soon over, because Mariah knocked down Bianca with a single punch. Bianca dissapeared beneath the stage and Mariah sang Heartbreaker.
But that was not the end of the show, she came back for an encore. After Rainbow (Interlude), unfortunately not the whole song, she climbed down the stage to reach out for the fans and sing the song Hero. The falling-down of thousands of pieces silver paper meant the final end of the show.
Before and after the concert you could buy 5 different T-shirts, but the tourbooks were not ready yet. Mariah explained that she wanted to use pictures from her show for the tourbook, so we won't see tourbooks before a few weeks. That means that the fans who will go to concerts in Milan, Cologne, Paris, London and Madrid can't buy the tourbooks either. Too bad.
I've searched all day on the Internet for pictures of this concert, but couldn't find them. But I've seen that many fans were able to get their camera past security and they took many pictures. The security only checked the bags for weapons and bottles. So if you plan to go to a concert, do not hide your camera in a bag.
Final conclusion. The concert was great, I have no other words for it. But Mariah kept us waiting far too long. At 8.30 PM supporting act Voice Male, thank God not Macy Gray or else the audience would have teared down the Sportpaleis, sang for about half an hour and then we had to wait until 10.15 PM before Mariah began her show. Some fans even started to whistle out of displeasure. I hope Mariah will keep this in mind and won't let her fans wait for so long at the other concerts. Soon everybody forget about this when Mariah appeared on stage. The show lasted until 00.30 AM, over 2 hours!
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