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Still Gigging At Sixty
Everyone I know has got into going to gigs at different stages of their lives and through different methods, or different influences. Some get dragged along by school friends to their first ever gig, some have to go watch their parents play plodding pub rock in spit and sawdust pubs in front of five men and the landlords dog. However you get into going though, if it’s a relatively good performance and you’ve got a musical pulse in your body somewhere, then it can be an experience that has a profound effect on your life for a number of years.
From a personal point of view up until the age of sixteen I couldn’t really see the point in going to see a band or artist live if you’ve got the records. It seems stupid to be even typing this now but it felt right at the time. Lets look at my teenage reasoning behind this error of judgement. It would have cost me a fair bit of money (especially when it’s funded by a paper round or milk round for far less than the current minimum wage).
The sound from live recordings I’d heard either on record, on the radio or on TV didn’t seem to be as good as the studio version. It has to be said at this point though that The Stone Roses Blackpool Live video was probably the biggest influence on not wanting to see a band live, a video that I’d found painful to watch. The final reason though was the mosh pit, it looked scary as hell on TV and I didn’t fancy getting crushed underfoot while trying to watch my heroes (ok so watching Leeds in the old kop was a similar experience but that was football and football was far too important for near death experiences to get in the way of attending).
So what changed? Well I was a massive James fan at the time and I got offered some free tickets to see them at Leeds Town & Country Club. The chance to be within yards of Tim Booth and Co was too good a thing to turn down being as it wasn’t going to cost me anything. So off this little ligger went to get his first live musical experience.
I walked out of the venue that night a changed man (ok, boy), mesmerised by the power of seeing the instruments played in the flesh and the chemistry between all the band members. The lighting and the way it went dark before the band came on, the feeling of togetherness within the crowd and the whole atmosphere, it was magical and left me mesmerised. In short I wanted more.
I didn’t have long to wait, Blur my favourite band were in West Yorkshire and off I went to see them, this time I was a little braver and found myself joining the melting pot of bodies in the pit at the front. I was another step closer to an addiction sneaking up on me. Within the next three or four months I probably saw another five or six gigs. Within a year I was travelling a hundred and odd miles to dash back from Birmingham to see Suede. The addiction was fully formed, I was an addict, I was proud of it and I had no intention of taking part in any twelve step programme to curb it.
Around this time I started going to the Duchess of York pub in Leeds to watch bands on a regular basis, then a venue for all the up and coming bands to play (everyone from Nirvana to Oasis have played it). Every so often I kept seeing a bloke in the pub who would have on a t-shirt sporting the image of the current band or artist that was in vogue at the time. Not so strange at a gig I hear you cry.
True and nor was the fact that he must have been about fifty. He was very much into his music obviously, jumping up and down to the likes of Cast and Supergrass, yet still I couldn’t shake the thought that here was a guy thirty odd years older than me watching a ‘young persons band’ it just didn’t seem right. I vowed to myself at that point that I’d never be like that, when I got to a respectable age that was considered ready for rock & roll retirement I was going to quit, at the time I considered that to be your early thirties.
So wind on another thirteen years or so and yours truly has probably now been to hundreds and hundreds of gigs, spent thousands of pounds on them and seen the best and worst of my generations musical output, I’ve been to festivals, arena gigs, pub gigs and everything in between, I’ve travelled abroad to see a band, nearly blacked out with the heat in a mosh pit, bought tickets off a tout and roped in a countless number of people to accompany me to fuel my addiction but I’m heading towards that self imposed retirement age in the next couple of years, so you know what that means.
Yep that’s right, it means I’m going to disagree with myself and keep on keeping on, I just can’t see me reaching a point where; I don’t want to see a live gig, where I no longer enjoy it as a night out in it’s own right, where I don’t get a buzz from discovering the next big thing third on the bill in some grotty venue, where I don’t feel in tune with the next wave of bands that are coming through. If the truth be known I’m gonna be that bloke at fifty years old jumping up and down to the next big thing. Ok I might not be venturing into the very front anymore ( I do that less frequently now anyway), but you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be leaning against the bar nodding along or tapping my foot.
The worrying thing is that I can’t ever see where it will stop. Am I going to be marching up to the doors at The Cockpit with my ticket to see TVHead, Massive Defence or whatever bands in thirty years time are gonna be called? A sixty odd year old guy with a pair of green slacks and golf jumper on thinking I still fit in with the students and twenty something’s that tend to make up the large proportion of the audience. Surely the whole essence of Rock & Roll is that it’s a sport for the young?
Well sorry but sod that, as long as I’m still enjoying going, age is not going to be something that stops me from maintaining a nigh on fifty year healthy habit of live music.
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Comment Permalink | Kat said:
You tell ‘em Kev!
Not surprising though that you had a bit of a disagreement in there somewhere, you must be ill though to be disagreeing with yourself!!!
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We waffle on enough without letting you lot do it too. Comments are limited to 300 characters.
Try and keep on topic if you can and no insulting the contributors. All hate mail can be addressed to Kev.