On Sunday, January 25th, Johnnie Guilbert finally had a show in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This was the first time he did a show here and with the Oude Zaal of the Melkweg almost fully sold-out, it surely was long overdue. Earlier in the day Guilbert already posted to his Instagram story that he was feeling sick and needed help from the fans with singing along.
While not having a support act coming along for the whole tour, he decided to bring along local talent Wendy Moore at his Amsterdam show. For this show Moore brought along her band, consisting of guitarist Geosy Kleefman, drummer Mark Koning and bassist Jamie de Groot, who also played the keyboard and provided backing vocals. She started her set with ‘Hooked’ and ‘TRIGGER’. Dressed in black and red, matching her hair, and playing her pop-punk songs she perfectly fit in with the likes of the crowd. To get the crowd singing along, she had added ‘Heathens’ by Twenty One Pilots into her setlist. It seemed to work well, as excited screams could be heard after the opening notes of the song. For ‘Corner Ghost’ the crowd also had to participate, as Moore taught the crowd part of the song so they could sing along. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, so with one more song, ‘Tangled Wiring’, the crowd clapped and jumped along happily with her one last time.
The excitement was growing by the minute in the small venue. The venue was down to its last tickets, which showed as it was filled with plenty of people. While some people might only know Guilbert from his music, surely there were also lots of fans attending that knew him from his early YouTube days. Back in 2014 he and six friends started the channel named My Digital Escape. While the channel eventually quit, mainly because of Bryan Stars, a fan decided to give Guilbert an old photo of Stars, which he found pretty scary but still gave it a place on the drum kit. For this tour Guilbert was joined on stage by bassist Noah Christian and drummer Charlie Tilton. With this being his first show in The Netherlands, fans were, of course, very excited to finally see him in real life and get the chance to interact with him. After almost every song Guilbert had to sign stuff given by the fans, for which he was already prepared, since he had a marker ready in his pocket. The constant interruptions might have been annoying some people in the audience, this surely was a great time killer for Guilbert while he was feeling unwell. He told the crowd that he didn’t know if he even should be performing, but wanted to “show his stupid face”. Between ‘Wrong For Me’ and ‘Zombie’, Guilbert showed his funny personality after making the crowd scream their names all at the same time and making a joke about the sound of the jumbled screams.
Fans also brought along some flags to show Guilbert, first a rainbow flag with “we are proud of you” written on it and later an American flag with him and his friend Jake Webber printed on. While taking a moment with the flags, he did give them back to their owners. After ‘Fake Positivity’ and ‘Violent Dream’ the objects to get signed were getting more unhinged, now signing a condom and someone’s ID card. His voice was starting to wear out and Guilbert joked how he started to sound like “a 12-year old boy”. A cover of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ also made its way onto the shortened setlist. The last two songs he could give were ‘Right Girl Wrong Time’ and ‘Vampire’. Near the end of the latter he jumped into the crowd, getting even closer to his dedicated fans. He did apologize to the fans if they got a cold after attending this show and promised he would come back to make up for his lower than usual energy.
Despite his sickness, Johnnie Guilbert still gave all his energy to the Amsterdam crowd, trying to make the best of the situation. After the show had ended Guilbert unfortunately had to cancel his Paris and Milan shows, since Amsterdam took his last energy while feeling unwell.
