Nightwish Concert, Antwerp, November 2022

Nightwish is my absolute favourite band, but this was the first time I was at one of their concerts (until this point, I’d only experienced them live through their live DVDs and the Islanders Arms stream from 2021).

We bought tickets for this concert with my friend Minh at the end of 2021, after hearing that the concert in Düsseldorf (for which we had tickets) was cancelled (for the second time) due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This also meant that we’d be seeing Nightwish again in just a couple of weeks.

Since the concert was on a Sunday evening, we stayed in Antwerp the whole weekend so that we can also explore the city a little bit.

Antwerp

This was actually my first time in Antwerp as well, and I have to say I really love the place - I found it to be a very cozy city, the people were also very friendly and fun in a weird way, and the food was quite good. We also had a tour by a funny (and very knowledgeable) tour guide, and visited the Plantin-Moretus museum (I think this might be my favourite museum - I loved all the little details about how printing was done, and seeing printing presses was quite cool).

Here are various photos taken during the visit.

Concert

Beast in Black

Beast in Black was the supporting band at the concert (Turmion Kätilöt was actually the first supporting band, but they were almost done by the time we made it to the venue). They are very entertaining live performers, so this was a really nice and energetic warm-up for Nightwish.

Nightwish

The Nightwish concert was extremely good. The setlist was a great combination of old and new songs, and the performance was, as always with Nightwish, fantastic (I believe this was also the first live performance after Floor’s surgery, which makes it even more extraordinary).

Below are (quite a few) photos of the stage at various points during the concert.