Gig Bastards

I’d love to tell you about all the amazing gigs I’ve been to in the last 25 years; from standing in front of one musical idol – I am Kloot’s John Bramwell – in the Half Moon Pub in Putney, able to exchange conversation, to magical times watching so many other heroes – Dylan, Neil Young, Bowie, Floyd, Ryan Adams, Springsteen -  to eventually bowing to pressure from my wife and children in the nose-bleed section of the O2 and dancing to Madness, only to prompt my daughter to humiliate me by laughing raucously at my running-on-the-spot-ska-style-dad-dance.

I’d love to share those good times with you, but I won’t.  I don’t do “good times” in this blog.  I’d only bore you.  You have your own and shouldn’t give a casually neglected shit about mine.  So, I will stay close to form and share with you the BAD bits; because even when the concert is good, there are usually GIG BASTARDS to dribble some piss on your soul.

What prompted this grumpy reflection was watching the Stones at Glastonbury last week.  No, I didn’t go.  No, I didn’t want to go.  I saw them in 1990 and, like anyone else who has done so since the late ‘80s, did so because I thought it would be my last chance.  I looked upon that crowd of young, huddled, lost-in-the-moment festival goers and thought THANK FUCK I CAN WATCH THIS ON TELLY.  Oh, it’s not as good as being there, you say?  Well, true, I don’t have some selfish 20 year old on her boyfriend’s shoulders obscuring the view of the TV screen.  Nor a flag-waving cunt with an equally retarded sense of social circumspection.  I don’t have an over-malleable plastic container of warm beer that I queued 30 minutes and paid £7 for.  And I don’t need to cut a path of polite excuse me’s through 500 people to take a communal piss in a trough which affords the user a free unsolicited steam facial.  My sofa was better than being there.

Not always the case of course.  Being there IS usually what it’s all about.

Not when I saw Oasis at Wembley in their final year, though.  A series of external factors were at work anyway that night.  It was midweek.  I was driving and therefore sober.  I waited outside the tube for my brother-in-law and gazed with appalled disgust at a steady stream of the worst kinds of tossers you’d ever see at a gig.  Mouthy, swaggering, drug-pushing, aggressive, laddish, evolution-by-passed  arseholes.  We watched the gig from the rear of the pitch in order to avoid the worst of the beer-hurling moshiment of these fucking apes, and this meant essentially viewing the concert on TV screens, as Liam and Noel were mere pin-pricks on the horizon.  (A superfluous use of the word PIN there perhaps.)

A million miles away, on the opposite end of this spectrum of Gig Bastards, was proof that one seemingly-innocuous man has equal capacity to spoil your night as a thousand

geezers.  Don’t laugh, but I went on my own to see Jethro Tull at my local venue in St Albans.  YES, IT WAS FULL OF BEARDY-MEN, ALRIGHT?  And it was a nice sedate atmosphere in which to LISTEN to the songs and, you know, tap your foot a lot and maybe nod your head and think NICE and COOL and the such-like.  Well, all jolly lovely unless one beardy man two seats down from me decides to give his mate – next to me – a running commentary on what album each song came from and what year that was.  And occasionally sing along.  His mate had clearly no interest in Tull nor any discographical details, was often yawning, checking his phone or at one point actually properly sleeping.  When I challenged the bloke to shut up as we’d not paid to listen to him (it was St Albans, I didn’t want to call him a cunt just yet) he defended himself vigorously with a petulant cry of I’M JUST TELLING HIM ABOUT THE BAND, HE DOESN’T KNOW.

I have moaned in a previous blog about people that go to gigs and stand at the back chatting, brainlessly oblivious to the fact that it isn’t rock and roll on stage and so each heartfelt torch song (again, I am Kloot being a case in point) is punctuated by the inane chatter of a couple of gig bastards who really should’ve saved the money and gone to a proper pub that doesn’t provide live musical accompaniment to your tales of mundane fucking rubbish, you loud-mouthed ARSE!

For some reason, any gig I go to in Hammersmith finds me seated near to probably the same American girl with a voice that pierces through the music like an over-amplified violin being smashed into a sheet of plate glass.  Being English, you put up with it for a few songs, hopeful that she’ll adapt to our culture, before resorting to a few head-turns and fuck-off looks, before eventually saying DO YOU MIND? just before the encore.

Finally, a lesser common gig bastard that I have encountered was Bill Oddie.  I say encountered; I saw him walking down the stairs at the Royal Festival Hall just before a Martha Wainwright gig.  (Incidentally, Martha Wainwright herself is a gig bastard for chastising the crowd I was in at the Roundhouse for being English and therefore too quiet and making me think, oxymoronically, “fuck off and sing”.)  Back to Bill Oddie.  He’s not a gig bastard because he spoilt the gig or anything.  He’s a gig bastard because he’s a bastard and he was at the gig.  And wearing his fucking bird-watcher jacket.  Bearded cunt.