SM Tour and Rookies Concert

Memorise these tiny, adolescent faces.

Because in a few years' time, if EXO are anything to go by, and the fact they already have a lot of hardcore fans before they've even debuted, they'll be all you hear about for a long time.

We went to the COEX mall again, because SM were holding a few concerts for their "Rookies". If you're not particularly down with your kpop info, most of the big record labels still live in the 90s golden era of manufactured pop stars. And, despite all the jokes we made (and still make) about it, I think in the case of a lot of these artists, they're a lot better off for it.

They hold auditions to pluck willing and highly-talented (and beautiful) tributes barely out of nappies (okay, slight exaggeration, but they're usually primary school age when they get taken in) from the public sphere and basically put them into Pop Music Hogwarts. Or maybe Fame Academy. Whatever. They live in dormitories, usually with their future group members-to-be, and get trained daily by the best vocal coaches, choreographers, public speakers, models, personal trainers, drama teachers, musicians, etc, to be the perfect pop star.

And to be honest, it pays off. I'll get more into that later, but basically they school these kids until they're "ready" and then pop out a group of ready-made celebrities every few years or so. One of the things that's impressive is how prepared they are for hoards of screaming fans. I suppose it's because they gradually expose them to this most terrifying part of fame throughout their training. We'd seen some of the older Rookies during the SM Town concert as backing dancers and occasionally given a brief set to sing or dance. Presumably, this series of shows was also to get them used to a concert environment as well as gauge popularity, what works, what doesn't, and to generate hype.

SO. Being rather into kpop (in case you couldn't tell), we fought our way to some tickets and headed over to the COEX. We popped into the merchandise shop just to see if there was anything interesting or new, but mostly I was amused by the fact they'll brand ANYTHING. Here's a multipack of snack nuts (called Super Nuts, presumably linked to Super Foods) and someone presumably went "omg, you know what else starts with Super? Super Junior. Slap some faces on it. Boom. Done."

SM Town Live 2014

This is VERY overdue. About a month ago now, we went to SM Town Live. After staying up late and freaking out over the user-unfriendly and foreigner-antagonistic GMarket, we had tickets and the event had actually arrived. I don't think it's ever come to London. I think the closest we got was Paris, so we were determined to go.

For those that don't know, SM is a music label in South Korea, home to some of the biggest stars in K-Pop, including Super Junior, Girls Generation, and the ever-ubiquitous EXO. SM Live, is basically a huge gig where their entire roster performs, as individual groups or artists, as well as some inter-band collaborations. It's also an exciting chance to see the SM 'Rookies' (future K-pop stars in training) in their element before they've even debuted.

Me, trying (and failing) to take a photo with the World Cup Stadium sign.

It was pretty easy to get to the stadium, as you'd expect, and even more impressive was the efficiency of the queuing systems. There were THOUSANDS of people there already, but it didn't feel particularly scary or stressful. Or maybe that was just because they were all 5ft tall teenage girls. (No, they can be pretty scary. I'm looking at you 사생 kids.)

We milled around for a while and went to buy some merch. I was hoping for a nice t-shirt or something but sadly, for a huge company with a ton of money and creative power, they don't actually have much that I would wear. There were plenty of people there wearing merch from previous SM Town shows though, and it all looked great, so maybe this is just a dry spell.

We settled for a book, which turned out to be just 140ish pages of painfully beautiful Korean faces.

Singin' In The Rain

This is just a quick post about the fact Nick and I managed to get tickets to see Singin' in the Rain live a week or so ago, and went on a night where both Sunny (Girls Gen) and Baekhyun (EXO) were performing! Too exciting.

[Sadly (but understandably) there was a strict "no cameras" rule in place, so I couldn't take any photos of the show. Large blocks of text are generally dull, especially with my writing, so I've nabbed some photos from google. In my rush, I've forgotten to take down any photo credits, so if a photo is yours and you want me to take it down or add credit, let me know!]

I'd never actually seen the original, and we weren't sure how much of it would have been translated into Korean (watching some clips of Wicked in Japan, it was a really interesting mix of English and Japanese), so the night before we just stayed up to watch the film, so that if there was a lot of Korean I wouldn't be totally lost.

Can I just say, I want to watch the film over and over. It's just so wonderful. All the dances and songs make me so happy, I'm really glad I've found it, haha.

Anyway, it's a good thing we did that, because it turns out that other than the character names, and vital lines in songs like "I'm singin' in the rain", and "Good morning", pretty much all of it was in Korean. Even Moses Supposes got translated into a Korean equivalent, which was fun to see. It was so nice to watch though, and because it's a very visual format I wasn't too lost anyway. I guess if people can watch Italian opera and get what's going on, there's no reason why this shouldn't work either!


We had a very cute encounter with a Korean boy in front of us in the queue, who seemed very excited to find foreign fans there, and was eager to talk to us about Baekhyun.

Some highlights for me were moments like when Sunny runs out into the audience near the end, and pretty much everyone gasped and sat up SO straight to see her better. I'm not sure what they thought she was going to do, but the excitement in the room was adorable.