Eminem @ Milton Keynes Bowl

June 23rd 2003
After travelling for numerous hours to get to the Milton Keynes National Bowl, we discovered a huge problem - ALL of the official car parks were rammed to capacity and therefore there was nowhere to park at the venue. So after circling around and around, we had no other option but to park on the grass verge of a slip road onto the motorway - due to the sheer volume of traffic there was no other choice.

Once we had made the never ending walk from our car to the National Bowl, we were greeted by a sea of people, majority of which were wearing the trademark baseball cap and t-shirt, a large number of them were also trying to imitate the way Eminem walks, almost as if he has had a little accident in his underwear type of walk. Hang on a sec, now I come to think of it, maybe the audience were not trying to imitate his walk, maybe they just couldn't find a toilet in time, seeing as the queues were rather long to say the least.

We did feel a little bit cheated because the organisers had decided to use a three tier barrier system, so the crowd right at the front had a barrier round them, then there was a huge gap, then the other barrier started, which had people in, then there was a barrier around these and then the rest of the audience were behind these barriers. Now to get into those enclosed spaces you need a special wristband, which I would love to know how to obtain. If you imagine sitting at the back of a 'normal sized' indoor arena like Birmingham NEC or Sheffield Hallam Arena, you now have some idea of how far away from the stage we were, this was if you were lucky enough to have your nose pushed up against the barricades which seperated the front audience.

We waited in anticipation for the biggest selling white rap artist of our generation to appear, and after what seemed like an eternity the Eminem Show began, with the red curtain dropping to reveal Eminem on a huge ferris wheel. 'Square Dance' was the opening track for tonight's proceedings.

He had the audience eating out of the palm of his hands throughout the entire show, the crowd were hanging on every word he said, and even though he was just a little dot on stage from where I was standing, that didn't seem to bother anyone else, they were just ecstatic at being in the same vicinity as Eminem.

The audience were extremely vocal during 'The Way I Am' and 'Stan', which were definitely the highlight of a great show. Eminem performed tracks from his current album 'The Eminem Show' including 'Without Me', 'Cleanin' out my closet', 'Sing For The Moment', and 'My Dads Gone Crazy'. He even squeezed in a couple of tracks that he recorded with D12 such as 'Purple Pills', as well as finding time to fit in 'Lose Control' from the film 8 Mile.

His vitriolic lyrics and his overwhelming stage presence made it easy to see why he has become so popular, although it will be interesting to see what he will write about for his next album, considering that he now has more money than most people could dream about, maybe he will record tracks entitled 'My Butlers Cleaning Out My Closet', or 'Sing For the Money'.

In all fairness this was a great show, and he is definitely worthy of the hype, although no disrespect but he is one of those artists that I am pleased about seeing, but I would not go out of my way to see him again. Mainly because I don't appreciate having to risk my life parking on a motorway slip road to see one of my favourite artists, no matter how great he is; I value my life more than his performance. Apart from that, this show was excellent.

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