The band themselves seem to have weathered reasonably well. so much room, in fact, that during the band's set, roadies found it easier to walk through the crowd clutching spare guitars than they did to scoot across the back of the stage. There was next to no one on the balcony upstairs, and there was plenty of room for manouevre on the main floor. I think it's fair to say that Rock City was perhaps half full when we arrived. REO Speedwagon are not, after all, a very cool band.

It wasn't until a couple of weeks before the show that I began to get a trickle of light-hearted abuse from colleagues looking to book me up for meetings and seeing the gig there, that I realised both that the gig was coming up and that it might be seen in some quarters to be mildly embarassing. I have a memory like a sieve for dates, so as with all the gigs I attend, after the tickets were booked, I put the date in my diary at work and forgot all about it. asked me to turn it off and put something else on. Maybe I wasn't doing it any favours by listening to it over my laptop speakers whilst cooking in the kitchen, but it didn't seem to have aged very well. I do like to know what I'm letting myself in for though, and so in preparation for the gig, I forced myself to listen to their Greatest Hits album to remind myself of their material beyond 'Keep on Loving You', 'Can't Fight This Feeling' and 'Take it on the Run' (which I think everyone in the whole world probably knows). I didn't even know off the top of my head how many original band members were still in the band, nevermind how good they were now (answer: there's one original band member left - the keyboardist, although the singer and the bassist have been in the band, on and off, since the 1970s. The band formed in 1971, but their heyday, of course, was in the very early 1980s. Everyone loves an old band pointlessly trying to flog new material. So how else could I possibly want to spend the first anniversary of that happy day except by leaving my wife and home and going out to watch one of the cheesiest MOR bands in the world perform some of the greatest power ballads ever written?Īnd they've got a relatively new album out that they want to plug? Perfect. It was a truly fantastic day, and one that I want to remember fondly for the rest of my life.

Exactly one year to the day since I got married to my lovely wife in beautiful, sunny Vienna.

Reo speedwagon greatest hits rar