Two days ago, on July 5, my family and I made our first trip down to the new Singapore Sports Hub.
I didn’t have many memories of the old National Stadium as a kid. There were only a few times I went down to the ‘grand old dame’, as they like to call it. Once when I was in Primary 5 for the National Education show, and once when I was in secondary 3, when I had NDP rehearsal tickets. (That was in 2006 – the last time the NDP was held in the National Stadium) I remember running past it once before it was demolished (I somehow remember it to be the Nike+ 10k run in 2008 but that somehow seems unlikely), and walking past it with my family during the Big Walk years ago.
Still, the scale and size of the National Stadium awed me.
This time round, after years of delays and construction, it is even more impressive.
Of course, I got to enter the National Stadium because my dad decided to splurge a little and indulge my family with tickets to the first ‘pop’ concert ever held in the new National Stadium, and it is by our local songbird Sun Yanzi (孙燕姿).
Our family has had quite an interesting musical relationship with Sun Yanzi. Back in my upper primary school/lower secondary school days, we used to listen to her songs a lot, through a bootleg VCD my dad always played in our old MPV (with a then-super cool TV screen). After a while, it died down. I still have some of her songs in my phone in the past years, as I start to appreciate how beautiful Chinese lyrics are.
So when the opportunity came, I’m glad we seized it. And it was great.
Sun Yanzi was down with some flu during the concert, but it is still 2 and a half hours of hard work and effort. It made The Script’s 90 minute performance puny by comparison. The venue feels quite big, but still somehow like an indoor stadium, thanks to the retractable roof and the place’s cooling system.
The cooling system is probably the best part of the stadium. They say every seat is cooled, and the sceptical me believes in it (at least for night situations). I didn’t sweat a bit during the concert, and given my propensity to sweat buckets, it speaks volumes of how incredible the cooling system is. I never knew blowing cold air at one’s legs can be so effective.
I enjoyed the concert tremendously. My family roughly knows all her popular old songs, so when the old songs were belted out by her (somehow effortlessly even though she was quite ill), we knew them by heart. In fact, when we ‘restarted’ listening to her songs after buying the tickets months ago, everything felt as though it was yesterday.
The sentimental part of me just loves Sun Yanzi because her songs – both lyrically and memorably – remind me of my childhood and times spent with my family. Some tunes, like 天黑黑 & 我不难过 – I clearly remember listening them over and over again when I was in primary school (just for the melody of course). It’s not to say that her new album Kepler is not good – in fact I think it’s great. It’s just the sentimental bit.
And sentimentality was brought to a peak when she sang the National Day songs she performed more than a decade ago – We Will Get There and One United People before she closed her set. It was so nice because the first time I was in the (old) National Stadium, I heard her sing the former one (it could be lip-sync SAF-style but I was naive then) live. And it happened again the first I’m in the new one. It was very apt too.
What a night it was.
Swee Life 