Tube
WHEN they first started out on YouTube, Sam Tsui and Kurt Hugo Schneider used pantyhose and a bent wire hanger to form their first microphone pop filter.
Five years later, the duo found themselves performing half-way around the world, including in Malaysia last Saturday, their first ever show here.
Propped between several hundred thousand ringgits’ worth of equipment and a hall full of screaming fans, you could tell that they were just as psyched as we were that they were here.
Jin Lim from JinnyBoyTV, Malaysia’s own YouTube star, played his part as host brilliantly, tossing signed posters into the crowd, cracking jokes, and getting the crowd excited for the opening act, Elizabeth Tan, another local YouTube star. they opened with Make It Up, the title track from their debut album of originals. It was a punchy, irresistibly cheerful, summer kind of anthem that had Tsui dashing from one end of the stage to the other with hardly a second’s pause, and our photographer shooting me a look that oddly resembled exasperation.
Throughout the concert, Tsui and Schneider alternated between both covers and originals with a brilliant balance of showmanship and youthful earnestness. At one point, Tsui said: “Where have you been my whole life, KL?” to an exploding crowd. He continued to gush about how pleasantly shocked he and Schneider were with the amount of support and enthusiasm they were getting in Malaysia.
Tsui and Schneider also played a soulful rendition of Bring Me The Night, another impressive original from their new album. But as the night wore on, it became more and more apparent that the crowd wasn’t as into the originals as they were the covers, like Pompeii from Bastille and Frozen’s Let It Go, which had the crowd screaming themselves into a wild frenzy.
The ending was nice and drawn out with Tsui saying he “loved playing in Kuala Lumpur” and “wished they could stay longer”, before launching into a montage of all the songs they had uploaded during their early days, starting with their career-launching Michael Jackson medley. It was an oddly poignant moment with Tsui running across the stage, narrating the events between each song, all the way up to their latest album. It would have been a killer closer for the performance.
But then just half a minute after exiting the stage, Tsui and Schneider ran back out to a deafening chant of “We want Sam. We want Kurt.”
“It’s not that hard to convince us. We LOVE doing this,” Tsui joked as he and Schneider stepped back out from behind the curtains. They then walked straight up to the edge of the stage and sat down. With no other instruments this time but Schneider and his guitar and Tsui on vocals, they sang Don’t Want An Ending and showed the crowd exactly why they loved them and would continue to love them, covers or originals.