Birmingham 10.04.03 - By Emmie

It was a last minute decision for me to go to the NEC Birmingham last week to see Ronan and I’m very glad I did.

You will all know what songs he performed by now, what he was wearing and how good the whole thing was, so I’ll just give you some of my thoughts on it.

I felt that we had a totally new tour here, not the second part of last year’s performances. Some of the songs might be the same but there was a new Ronan singing them.

I have never seen him more confident, never seen him more manly either. The set wasn’t fancy, no back drop with swirling waves.

It was just the band and Ronan on stage giving us their all.  Ronan burst on the stage and got everyone rocking with his up tempo numbers. He was telling us all he was back again, loud and clear.

Very loud, his voice was stronger than ever, his energy seemed endless and no one would have believed he had been touring for the best part of a year.

It’s difficult to improve on perfection but he looked the best I had seen him too. He kept to the stage while performing The Way You Make Me Feel but walked around shaking hands with the crowd during Addicted. WOW!

Ronan has been described as the next Cliff Richard by Louis Walsh and Capital radio commented that his new single, The Long Goodbye, was a middle of the road ballad typical of his style.

Well, I think some of these people should have been watching Ronan bouncing around to Pump It Up on an elevated stage at the back of the arena, pouring his heart into a beautiful song he had written with Calum then almost bursting the microphone with his potent performance of Drops of Jupiter looking extremely sexy!

Cliff Richard??????

One of the highlights of the night for me was when Ronan, after telling the audience how he was taking part in a walk across Ireland to raise money for the charity set up in the name of his mother, moved to the centre of the stage and sang a beautifully arranged version of This Is Your Song.

He sat on the steps in front of Liam’s drum kit with the band sitting around him. The added accordion and whistle gave it a very haunting vibe and it was an emotional time for many of the fans as well as undoubtedly for Ronan.

He went straight into When You Say Nothing At All after that and put a slightly different slant on it. He sang it in a much more reflective manner, as the beautiful love song that it is rather than simply as the ‘now this is your favourite, the one you all know’. He still had us all singing back to him though during the last chorus.

The lack of any Boyzone songs was a sign in its self. As much as I love many of them and had great fun at the Boyzone concerts, I think the fact that he left them out this time was a message to all Ronan’s fans that Boyzone is in the past for him.

I will never stop listening to their old albums and singing along to them but Ronan is well and truly on his own now. This was all Ronan, a taste of what is to come.   For those who say Ronan sings only covers, I counted just 4 in a concert lasting more than 1 ½ hours.

When he played the guitar during In This Life you could almost feel his concentration. When the song finished he turned to Calum who gave him a nod of reassurance.

There were some laughs too. He couldn’t resist playing around just a little with Janet while singing We’ve Got Tonight and when he introduced I’m On My Way, he mentioned that it had been finished just hours before the concert.

Then Calum laughed and Ro realised he had said exactly the same the night before. He scratched his head and said “ah, I mean last night’s concert”, then added “this is a recording, you see”.

There was no lacking in sexy moves, eye rolling and eyebrow raising. He seemed to be showing us what he wants to be …. Simply, himself.

Many of the songs had different and better musical arrangements, Calum has done a great job there. Ronan also changed some of the lyrics to Time For Love and the song fitted perfectly with his speech about peace.

My only disappointment is that this tour was not the one used for filming. It’s something needed to be seen, Ronan at his strongest, his rawest, his most honest, his sexiest and his most grown up!