Quite a few lessons learnt tonight.
Lesson one. Sometimes you can recreate the past, repeat an experience, infuse it with enough nostalgia to achieve that alchemic synthesis of present and past joys to remind you that life can sometimes be good, REALLY fucking good; but sometimes, an attempt to dig up the past gets a bit too Burke and Hare; and grim.
My second year at university - a year of indulgent post-adolescent over-introspection - was soundtracked by a few appropriately melancholic albums of the time, one being The House of Love's 2nd eponymous album, the one with the butterfly on the sleeve, the one with Shine On and The Beatles and the Stones. They even came to Reading to play the Union and it was a brilliant gig, branded into my memory like all of 1990's highs and lows (and there were a fucking lot of each). So, as I walked past the Roundhouse earlier this year - working opposite it as I do - and seeing a poster advertising their first album on the curved walls of that most beautiful of venues, I was taken aback. The House of Love disappeared after their 3rd, complete turd of an album. Why was that poster there? I looked it up on t'internet and discovered that they were playing a 30th anniversary gig to celebrate their debut album from 1988. Remembering the Reading Uni gig and my love of album #2, I bought myself a ticket. And I went along tonight...
Lesson one, continued and slightly expanded: Remember the bad bits as well as the good! I'd completely forgotten that at some point in the past, I had decided that I really did NOT like the first album and consequently made an unusual decision to actually dispose of my copy of it. Therefore, when I read that the gig would involve the band playing the celebrated 30 year old album in its entirety, I thought to myself, 'Oh, I've not listened to that in a while, that'll be nice'. As opposed to, 'Oh, that album was shit and I threw it away.' That realisation resurfaced a few songs into the gig.
Lesson two. I hate people at gigs (I kind of hate people in general, but at gigs it's a particular form of hatred, as outlined in the 'Gig Bastards' part one post). Now, three days ago, I went to see The Decemberists with my daughter and it was so good that my fellow human attendees could do nothing to spoil it. But tonight, as I grew increasingly bored by The House of Love churning out song after song from an album that I disliked, I had no distraction at all from the insidious anti-social and irritation-inducing machinations of people on the fringes of the audience.
Because that's where I was. With no desire to carve out a space in the front or middle of the crowd, I found a wall to lean against at the side, still close enough to enjoy it, as the Roundhouse's intimate size makes every view a good one. As each wave of gloomy disappointment washed over me a few bars into every song for those first 40 minutes, I found myself tuning in to the gig bastards all around me. The talkers, the spatially unaware, the crisp-cruncher... But I told myself that patience was required, that I would move once the first album had played out and those great songs from the butterfly 2nd album inevitably followed.
As it turned out, I had to move earlier than that, because a bloke who'd opted to plonk himself in front of me, a bit nearer than he would have done had he not been spatially blinkered, dropped a fart that rose through the air and swiftly made that half metre journey from his arse to my nostrils. I moved three times, from one group of talkers to another, at one point being barged into by some rude cunt (I actually saw it coming, so admittedly moved a bit into his path and stiffened my shoulder, anticipating his lack of manners and likelihood of walking into me anyway.... it's been one of those weeks, I'd already tripped up 3 other rude bastards on the commute to work). So, by the time The House of Love trundled sluggishly into the opener from album 2, a wonderful track called 'Hannah' with one of my favourite segues ever when it turns into 'Shine On', I had become so pissed off with 'people' that nothing could have made me enjoy that song. Not even an excellent version of it, which it wasn't. Next up came 'The Beatles and the Stones', a gentle and beautiful song that demanded silence, and yet, the fuckheads who were here as much for the beer and chatter with their friends, considered the music a mere background to their night out and chose to accompany the song with conversation, stabbing through the ambience, pissing all over the magic, nonchalantly ignorant that people would prefer to listen to the band rather than them. Cunts. I left at that point and went home.
Adding a crust of crap to the night was the fact that travelling to the Roundhouse felt like travelling to work, because it pretty much is, plus the train journey throwing up all the usual tribulations of enduring the noise of phones from (other) selfish bastards; and the fact that one pint of lager in the venue was unpleasant enough to make me feel too nauseous to buy another.
So, lessons number three and four: Don't go to gigs unless ALL the circumstances are right; and think carefully about not going out at all, because other people going out are really, very, fucking irritating and I am even more of a misanthrope than I was when I started this blog about 7 years.
