Hey, sorry this took a while but since English is not my first language I asked some of my friends to look at it for me so it wouldn't have any embarrassing mistakes
So I met up with one of my friends who was going to see the documentary with me and we walked around a bit and did more shopping. We then decided to try and find the venue before the sun went down and that was a very good call. We almost got lost 3 times xD. When we arrived at the venue there were several large queues but we couldn’t see any people who looked like X fans. We did discover that the IDAF entrance was more of a side entrance and decided to have an early dinner so we could get in line on time. When we came back to meet up with the rest of our friends and my parents the queue still wasn’t very big (my dad is a big X fan and my mom was interested to know what this crazy Japanese band was about), only a hand full of people were outside . We were let in pretty early and then the wait for the fan meeting started… If it ended up happening I don’t know because eventually my friends and I decided that we’d rather have a good spot to watch the movie and performance so we went downstairs to wait in line for the chairs closest to the stage.
And good seats we got! Well, good seats for watching Yoshiki perform, not for watching the movie
We were in the second row, right in the middle! The documentary was great, I loved the music and the visuals were stunning. I’m not sure how understandable the story is to people who don’t know the band because they kept changing back and forth between old footage, new footage and interviews but for me as a fan I loved it. Seeing everything together in the documentary I thought we are very, very lucky to have X Japan back and performing!
After the movie there was a surprise, Stephen Kijak was there as well! And he did a small Q&A. I don’t remember any of the questions or answers but it was generally things we have already been told in the press junkets etc.
Next was finally Yoshiki’s performance! There was a string quartet and the show started with the clip of the interview thingy at the start of his Yoshiki Classical tour and of course Miracle.
The first song was Forever Love, after Yoshiki had a small MC where he talked with the audience about where everyone came from and he mentioned the show in Utrecht 5 years ago. Up next were Without You, Art of Life and of course it ended with Endless Rain. The pitch was kind of high so it was hard to sing along but we tried our best! Listening to recordings I’ve seen on YouTube etc. it sounded quite beautiful. When the performance was done there was another Q&A with both Stephen and Yoshiki, it was very short and again mostly things we already know.
With the Q&A done it was announced that the people who wanted to could come to the front of the stage to meet Yoshiki. My friend and I at first thought that only a few people would get a chance to do so and we dislike crowds so we waited and watched. However it became apparent that Yoshiki was trying to meet everyone and we took our chance. My friend got to give him a hug and got interviewed by the camera team that follows him around, I managed to get a selfie with him
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Just when we were going to go to the train station I saw that Stephen was still standing around on the stage as well and we decided we wanted to try and thank him for coming. I impulsively shouted his name (I’d normally never do this) and he came over. He was surprised we wanted to talk to him and we talked a bit about the documentary, being a fan of X and the X Japan podcast. He also asked to take a selfie with us! Then we had to leave because my parents were getting worried about missing the last train home. It was a great evening and like I said before I am super, super grateful that I got to experience this.
I uploaded a few video clips to my YouTube channel (they’re not very long because I kept shaking too much from excitement :’) ) and a few pictures to my Instagram if you want to see those
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_PDsxuUOIOy27ObSpAYGI7rBBTiQYCq4https://www.instagram.com/eve_gem/