Iron Maiden Melbourne

Melbourne

We had been following a guide to record stores while on holiday in Melbourne called Diggin’ Melbourne located at http://digginmelbourne.wordpress.com

This led us to a shop called Metal Mosh, so we started the morning of the show with an hour train ride out to Frankston.
Interesting store that appeared to cater more to the fashion side of metal but did have a selection of CDs and a small selection of LPs, Terry and I both found items we were after but no Maiden.
We headed back to the train in crazy rain storm which dropped a quarter of the monthly average rain fall for Melbourne in an hour. An hour later we were back in South Yarra and had some lunch and a beer.
The sun was now out so we walked to the arena as I wanted a hoodie and I had missed out at the last two Iron Maiden shows. They said sales were going to start around 4:30, so we walked back to South Yarra.

We had both decided to wear the New Zealand tour shirts after much discussion around wearing the same shirt, the current tour shirt and on top of it all band shirt for the band you are seeing, this was concluded with it’s Iron Maiden and these rules don’t count.

We caught a train to Flinders Street and walked along to the Transport Bar.
There was meant to be a fan club meeting here but with no signs and it being the day of the show there was more than one group in Iron Maiden shirts. We decided to keep to ourselves and ordered a Red by White Rabbit, this turned out to be in the style of a flanders red. We were warned it was sour and people found it extreme. It was a very mild sour but tasty enough.

We then walked back to the arena and the merch tents were now open.
Wearing the NZ shirt started to pay off as it just opened up a lot of conversations with people.
I finally managed to pick up a hoodie, the Aussie tour shirts were not on sale yet and were only available with the inside vendors so we headed back to the bar.

After a few more rounds, food and some random conversations with other fans we worked out we would head back shortly before Raven Age were due on stage, this would give us time to buy the Aussie shirts and some beers.

We ended up catching a bike taxi to the stadium, which was great fun.

We made it back to the stadium to the merch stand inside and brought the Aussie shirts, a hoodie for Vicky and then a third flag each as they had more selections.

Another conversion started by the NZ tour shirts pointed us to the bar selling the Trooper, third time lucky for both the hoodie and the Trooper.

The Show

We were told we had to collect a green wrist band to gain entry to the floor, this wasn’t unusual but they then took our ticket and said we could collect another one on the way out. The guy was really rude about this and the conversation boiled down to basically we have done this forever and go away.

Fantastic show, Terry and I both mowed through more beers than planned but had a great night, we had a Irish guy talk to us during the set and kept telling us the set list had changed, this was until I brought up a picture I had taken in Christchurch of the set list on a foldback speaker.

He was good fun though and Terry and I jumped around and screamed out lyrics along with this guy.

Fantastic night and great to see all three shows in different ways.

After the show we followed the crowd out into the street and we were halfway down the road before remembering we needed to collect tickets.
We headed for the nearest gate which they were trying to close, we explained what we were trying to get and he tried to explain where we needed to go then just handed us three random tickets for a different gate.

We walked back to South Yarra listening to Iron Maiden on Terry’s phone and had a few more beers once we made it back to the apartment.