Operation Misery: Month 8, Week 2, Day 4.

Despite me behaving like a coked up d*ckhead Rihanna has performed what was by all (genuine) accounts a really strong concert in Cape Town, South Africa.

However that was not to say that the concert without problems because the local promoter (Big Concerts) hasn't exactly covered itself in glory. Apart from complaints about the quality of the sound system the big problem was the scheduling which should have seen Rihanna start her performance at 20:00 (local). As I said during the concerts in London, UK is far too early in the evening for this sort of thing. Therefore Rihanna didn't actually take to the stage until 21:00 (local) which to be honest was the time I was expecting her.

Apart from the fact this hour deviation from the published schedule would annoy those people who didn't realise the schedule was going to be ignored this creates the risk that the concert will over-run incurring fines and that people will be forced to leave before the end in order to catch public transport home. That obviously annoys the people that would have missed the end of the performance and make it appear as the concert has been a failure with people walking out in apparent disgust.

However Rihanna carefully planned for this by trimming the set-list. I'm not sure what the full track-list was but the whole intro section and "Presh off the Runway" definitely went. Rihanna also dispensed with the costume changes in an effort to save time. Some people are claiming that Rihanna actually wore three outfits but I've only seen evidence of one so it's likely they got confused. That outfit consisted of a leopard print play-suit with thankfully very short shorts and a black jacket with leopard print sleeves which was later removed.  There seems to be absolutely no political significance to this outfit whatsoever. It did though look very good on and seemed to suit the general style of South Africa.

I should point out though that there are a lot of people on Twitter expressing their outrage at Rihanna's lip-syncing and generally poor performance. Many of these started to appear before Rihanna even started her performance meaning that the vast majority of them are fake written by people who weren't even at the concert. The problem started on Monday (14/10/13) when the Johannesburg Star newspaper ran the front-page headline "Ri-Ri-Rip Off" and proceeded to totally trash Rihanna's performance at the concert the previous night. Rather then being an accurate review of Rihanna's Johannesburg performance this seemed to be more a case of certain South Africans registering their complaint about Rihanna's detour to Sydney which even I'm tired of complaining about now. Therefore the people complaining on Twitter have simply read the newspaper article and decided to join in.

There are of course a few political issues surrounding the tour such as Melissa Forde's trip to London, UK and the small riot that broke out in Johannesburg on Tuesday (15/10/13). However it would actually be better if I left those until tomorrow and besides I'd much rather have a glass of wine and sit around feeling really proud of Rihanna.

22:05 on 16/10/13 (UK date).