Bring Me The Horizon, I-Days

On July 7th 2024 I went to see the Bring Me The Horizon concert at I-Days in Milan, together with my friends Alex, Alessandro and Giulia. The show was part of the world tour BMTH were doing for their new album Post Human: Nex Gen.

Links:

Logistics

The show took place at the Ippodromo Snai San Siro. Here’s the map of the venue:

Schedule

16:00 Doors open
18:15 Imminence
19:45 Yungblud
21:30 Bring Me The Horizon

The Drive

For the trip we decided to take Ale’s legendary CNG-powered Panda, picking up the other two hitchhikers along the way: Giulia in Rimini, and Alex in Cesena.

San Marino to Milan is just under 4 hours via the A14 and the A1, traffic permitting. Since doors opened at 16:00, we decided to leave fairly early. I left home around 11:00 and, after wasting some time because a lady had decided — for absolutely no reason — to park right in front of my garage, I finally got going. A quick stop at the supermarket to grab something for a packed lunch and a couple of Monsters, then I met up with Ale at the WTC, on the San Marino border. From there we set off in his rocket ship.

Since Google Maps was reporting traffic with several queues on the motorway, we decided to stay off it until Bologna. So we picked Giulia up in Rimini, then took the state road and some back roads. In Cesena we made a quick stop to pick up Alex, and with that we were all aboard.

Naturally, we spent the drive with the most aristocratic of soundtracks, such as A wanna Be-tlemme and Silos di Sperma by Spaventapassere.

Once at the Ippodromo, we managed to find a parking spot almost immediately on Via Achille (Google Maps 📍), about a 10 minute walk from the entrance and, above all, free. Right next to it there was a “““guarded””” car park charging 30€ 🤡🎪.

We got out, chilled for a few minutes, and then headed towards the Ippodromo. At the entrance Alex and I had to split off from the others, because Ale and Giulia had PIT tickets while we had the regular ones. We found each other again inside at the merch area anyway, where we all got a gorgeous shirt from the new album:

The Pit

As you can see in the map below, the area in front of the stage (highlighted in blue) was reserved for those with PIT tickets.

When I bought the tickets, having got them at separate times, I hadn’t given it the slightest thought and picked the parterre area. So by default we’d have watched the show separated from Ale and Giulia, and pretty far back. But that day the magical god of I-Days had different plans for us.

Before Yungblud’s band started playing, Alex noticed that among the various stands there was also the TicketMaster Italia one. At this stand you could enter a lucky draw: by following their Instagram page and sending a couple of messages to the account, there was a chance to win a ✨pass for the PIT area✨. In 28 years I don’t think I’ve ever won anything at tombola, bingo or any other “game of chance”. Anyway, we entered without too many expectations, and I sent my message:

Immediately a clash of emotions: on the one hand I was happy to have won it; on the other, I was already prepared to give it away, in case Alex hadn’t won one too.

We evidently cashed in 20 years’ worth of luck, because Alex managed to win one as well!

At that point we were absolutely BUZZING for a show we already knew was going to be insanely good 🤘🎸.

The Show

A couple of months earlier, unfortunately, Bad Omens had announced they were cancelling all the summer tour dates, because of health problems of their singer Noah Sebastian. I was pretty gutted because, even though I didn’t listen to them, I would have really liked to hear them. In their place came Imminence, a Swedish metalcore band.

Despite this unfortunate turn of events, the concert was incredibly good. When we got into the Ippodromo, Imminence were already playing, and we took the chance to eat something and go to the toilet. Then Yungblud’s band started playing with superdeadfriends, and we went into the PIT area.

Yungblud is a bomb of rock punk energy and he’s devastating on stage. He doesn’t stand still for a second, he sang Fleabag with a fan on guitar, then he played that masterpiece that is Parents, and did a cover of I Think I’m OKAY.

Once Yungblud’s set was over, the already grey sky that had been promising a downpour washed the crowd, save for those few who had an umbrella. Luckily it then eased off, just in time for Bring Me The Horizon to come on stage, and the clouds stayed to darken the sky, as if they were part of the set design.

Bring Me The Horizon

After a few minutes of waiting, at 21:30, when the sun had already set and the sky had gone dark, a video game menu appeared on the screens.

intro

“Continue game” was selected, with “Extreme” as the difficulty level.

Then E.V.E. showed up, introducing herself as a state of the art search engine, entrusted with the most important mission in the history of humanity: the salvation of the human race.

E.V.E. stood for Evolutionary Virtual Experiment, but on the screen the text could be seen changing for a few instants into Extreme Violent Entity, something I only noticed while rewatching the video.

eve

Her task for the evening was to observe our bio-psychosocial activity, collecting data to deepen the research on the Nex Gen: the next phase of human evolution. After that, she moved on to the “mosh pit scan”