Hotel California

The Eagles are playing several nights at Co-op Live in Manchester on their “The Long Goodbye” final tour. This is a totally new venue to me, allegedly the biggest and best music venue in the U.K.
Well, it’s certainly the biggest I’ve been in and the acoustics are excellent, but I’m going to withhold judgement as to whether it’s the “best” until I’ve maybe attended another event there.
There were well publicised teething troubles when it first opened, though these seem to have been resolved now. To encourage you to use public transport (it’s a couple of miles out of the city centre) you could use your concert ticket for free travel on the tram network. Getting there was very crowded and we only caught the last tram back to where the car was parked by the skin of our teeth, so it did take the edge off the concert, worrying about whether or not we’d actually be able to get back home again!
However, we did make it and I can report that the concert - with that hindsight - was excellent. The support act was The Doobie Brothers who, whilst playing very well, did not engage with the audience and just rattled through their hits in the hour available to them.
The Eagles were superb though. Definitely going out on a high and treating us to the highlights of their 52 year career. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Joe Walsh play as well as he did tonight.
We were promised two hours of entertainment - and they delivered. But we had to wait for the encores before the familiar opening chords of Hotel California rang out in the darkness.
It was worth the wait.