At a press conference at The Park on Tuesday afternoon, the lead singer of Poets of the Fall, Marko Saaresto, said that they wanted to see what the audience in Calcutta had to give them. Hours later, at a super-charged Nazrul Mancha, Calcutta showed them exactly what they had in store.

Starved of international acts, thousands of Calcuttans descended on the Southern Avenue auditorium to watch and cheer and singalong to the Finnish new-age rock band — Marko (vocals), Olli Tukiainen (lead guitar) and Markus ‘Captain’ Kaarlonen (keyboard) with Jani Snellman (bass guitar), Jaska Makinen (rhythm guitar) and Jari Salminen (drums, percussion) — determined to make their Calcutta experience a special one.

Presented by Seagram’s Royal Stag and partnered by t2, the POTF concert, part of the band’s Temple of Thought India Tour 2012, saw 3,000 fans screaming and shouting themselves hoarse, even before the band took the stage. The audience was on its feet with a resounding roar as POTF took the stage at 6.45pm, one by one. The screams were deafening when lead singer Marko Saaresto made his entrance.

What followed was an almost two-hour-long musical frenzy that kept the crowd ‘on’ their chairs, as opposed to ‘in’ them! The audience’s energetic singing even had Marko relinquishing the mike in favour of the audience as they sang choruses of songs like Late Goodbye, Roses, Cradled in Love and Carnival of Rust.

And if the audience response had Marko’s “hair stand on the end” the band’s awe-inspiring, perfectly choreographed stage-act and unending energy gave their fans — some of whom, according to producers E365 Media Solutions, had queued up as early as 5.15am on Tuesday morning to get their tickets — every paisa’s worth.

Some milled in front of the stage head-banging and jumping with abandon, others stood on their chairs, clapped their hands, waved their mobile phones in the darkened stadium and sometimes even drowned Marko out with their singing.

The Nazrul Mancha army went home happy, not just because they had seen one of their favourite bands playing live in the city but also because they believe that this kind of audience response would make other international bands sit up and take notice and not bypass the city like before.

Text by Chandreyee Chatterjee and Brinda Sarkar

Pictures by Rashbehari Das