{"id":1706,"date":"2009-03-13T01:08:01","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T01:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/03\/13\/five_gigs_of_music\/"},"modified":"2009-03-13T01:08:01","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T01:08:01","slug":"five_gigs_of_music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/03\/13\/five_gigs_of_music\/","title":{"rendered":"Five gigs of music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inspired by Stephen’s U2 fanboy post<\/a>, and by a stellar gig last night, here are some witterings about my top five live music experiences.
\nIn no particular order:<\/p>\n


\nLast night’s K’naan<\/a> gig makes the top five with room to spare. This guy is just amazing. My husband heard him at a music festival on Vancouver Island last summer, and came home raving about him. We found some YouTube clips, I bought his first album the following day, and then the second just a few weeks ago, on the day it came out.
\nThe gig last night was at the Commodore<\/a> in Vancouver, a legendary venue that used to be a ballroom and has a sprung dancefloor that bounces under your feet. K’naan’s performance alternated between intimate, moving moments, and high energy joyful belting out of some awesome songs. My only complaint is that I really wanted to hear the Dusty Foot Philosopher from his first album, but he stuck to the more recent stuff, which I suppose is fair enough.
\n\"\"
\nMy photo isn’t as good as Stephen’s<\/em>
\nSo here’s someone else’s video<\/em><\/p>\n

A couple of notes for the support artist though: first, you went on for waaaay too long. I don’t care if you’re usually the main attraction and are used to “three hours of drinking J\u00e4germeister on stage and telling you all my deepest darkest secrets”<\/em>, we’re not actually here to see you<\/em> and I’m getting too old to get home at 12.30 am on a weeknight. And second, when the main act is going to sing about escaping as a teenager from the soldiers who killed his cousin, and his childhood sweetheart being taken from him at gunpoint, it is Not Cool to spend whole minutes complaining about how it’s soooooo hard being a Canadian in LA because they don’t sell dill pickle potato chips, and there’s only one<\/em> restaurant in the whole city<\/em> that sells poutine<\/a>.
\nThe Commodore was also the scene of my second pick – Gomez<\/a>, in 2002. I’ve seen this band many times, but this was my first time seeing them up close and inside, rather than through the rain of a Scottish music festival. The venue made this one – I’ve seen them since at other venues around the city, but the Commodore is just perfect for their kind of music. I hadn’t really appreciated the diverse contributions that each member of the band makes before seeing them from five metres away, as part of a happy, energetic and tuneful weekend crowd. They seem to like Vancouver a lot, coming through once every year or two, so hopefully they’ll make a return to the Commodore before too long.
\nThe venue was all-important for my third pick too, even though I don’t know its name. My sister was living in Paris in 2000, and my American cousin and I managed to cram ourselves into her tiny flat for a week of, quite possibly, the most fun EVAH. On our first evening together, my sister and I ignored our cousin’s protestations about jetlag and made her go to see Travis<\/a> with us. Again, I’d seen them at T in the Park<\/a> and Glasgow Green<\/a>, but had never seen them in a smaller venue. Tickets to see them at a home-town inside gig in Glasgow were selling out a matter of minutes after going on sale, and I always seemed to miss out.
\nBut it turns out that Paris is a great place to see popular British bands (my sister had discovered this fact about a week after moving there), and we got to see one of my favourite bands at the time in a crowd of no more than a couple of hundred people. Everyone there was British, pleasantly drunk, and up for a fantastic live music experience. My cousin was hugely impressed and went home to Ohio with Travis CDs tucked safely into her luggage; she later sent me a clipping from the newspaper she works for, in which the music editor raved about what great taste his colleague had and how he wanted to send her to Paris with her cousins again to get more hot tips!
\nThe mention of Paris brings me back to U2. As I commented on Stephen’s post, I saw them in Paris in 1999(ish), as we’d failed to get tickets for any of their UK gigs. We enjoyed the show from seats about halfway up the massive stadium, and behind the stage (the band turned round every once in a while, but it was far from ideal). A day or two later, we got home after the bus journey from hell to hear the news that U2 had just<\/em> announced a Glasgow gig. My flatmate and I went straight back out to queue for tickets, and actually managed to get four! My friend in Newcastle immediately claimed two of them, and said she’d drive up to meet us as soon as she finished work, but that as a junior doctor she couldn’t guarantee a time.
\nLeaving the two spare tickets at the Will Call window, we got into the venue (Glasgow’s SECC<\/a>) about three hours before the posted start time, secured a spot two rows back from the walkway that extended into the crowd, and waited.
\nAnd waited.
\nAnd waited.
\nBeer was out, as a loo trip would have cost us our spots. So we chatted about this and that and wondered when the Newcastle contingent might join us. The support band were a local outfit whose name I forget, but who were touchingly delighted to find themselves supporting such a huge band in such a massive venue. I remember the lead singer actually announcing “we got to meet Bono!!!!”<\/em> in a very non-cool, non-rock star way.
\nSeveral hours and a couple of full bladders later, the band came out. My Irish flatmate was and is, without a doubt, the biggest U2 fan I have ever met, and could barely contain herself when Bono walked right past us… I thought she was going to faint, vomit, and\/or explode. Within about 10 seconds we were dripping in sweat, and found that the arms we’d flung skywards when the band appeared were now stuck up there, as the people behind us had surged forward in such a press that we couldn’t make the space to put our arms back down. As the pins and needles started to get really painful, I finally made some room, but my friend had to put her arm around the man next to her, which pissed off his girlfriend no end. The people in front of us apparently hadn’t realised that standing at the front of a U2 gig might entail some pushing, and started to push us backwards into the guys who were pushing us from behind… oh what fun! The pushers in front of us eventually got hauled out of the crowd by security, leaving us at the front.
\nI’m not usually much of a one for excessive adulation of rock stars, but it was just incredible to be that close to such a legendary band. Every note was spot on perfect, and Bono can work a crowd like no other frontman I’ve ever seen. And there’s something about being part of a crowd like that that is incredibly thrilling. I admit to getting hopelessly caught up in the moment and repeatedly shouting Bono’s name as we waited for the encore.
\nMy Newcastle friend found us some time around the second encore. She and her friend\/boyfriend (still not sure what was going on there) had missed the first twenty minutes, but had had a great time nonetheless. But then they proceeded to tell us a story of such heart break and tragedy that I apparently blotted it out of my memory when I commented on Stephen’s post, only to be reminded of it when I emailed his link to my former flatmte.
\nMy doctor friend was treating a long-term patient, and just happened to mention that she was driving to Glasgow that night for a concert. The patient replied that her daughter was supposed to be working at a concert in Glasgow that night, but had decided to come and visit her ailing mum instead. Which concert? Well, Doctor, have you ever heard of a band called U2?
\nThe daughter was part of the stage management team, and was due to visit some time in the next couple of hours. The mother was 100% positive that she’d be able to make a call or write a note and get us four backstage passes.
\nMy friend was faced with a dilemma – wait for the passes and risk missing the gig, or just drive to Glasgow as planned? She ended up waiting about 20 minutes past the latest she thought she could possibly leave, and missed seeing the daughter.
\nMy Irish flatmate was so distraught by the news that we’d potentially been a few minutes away from backstage passes that she declared the evening ruined. But we now look back on an amazing live experience, and, as I say, try to kid ourselves that nothing else happened that day… and that we didn’t later hear that the daughter had appeared on the ward about five minutes after my friend left the hospital…
\nMy final pick is my all-time favourite live music experience, at my all-time favourite venue – Muse<\/a> at Glasgow’s Barrowland<\/a> in, ooh, 2000 or so. Like the Commodore, there’s a sprung dancefloor (Ash<\/a> once got the crowd to all jump in the air at the same time, and it really<\/em> bounced), and the crowds were always great.
\nThis gig is a bit of a strange pick for my favourite, as while I thought Muse were OK and bought their first couple of albums, I was never a particularly avid fan. My friend was going to this gig, I was newly single and a bit down, and she nagged me into going with her.
\nThe evening didn’t start well, as the “friend” she was bringing with her turned out to be a very attractive, interesting, and (most importantly) single male. She had not passed on this crucial piece of information, and it being a hot and humid evening (yes, I did say Glasgow), and a notoriously sweaty venue, I was wearing ratty clothes and hadn’t bothered to wash my hair. If you have any single friends you will know that this failure to communicate was a major breach of the rules of female friendship.
\nWell, despite that, the gig was the best I’ve ever experienced. The music sounded better live than it did on CD, and the whole crowd on that hot sweaty Glasgow night seemed to know every single word to every single song. We pushed further and further fowards as the gig went on, and were just back from the mosh pit when the gigantic balloons were released from the ceiling. Several games of volleyball immediately broke out, and we quickly realised that the balloons were coated with a substance that fluoresced under the venue’s UV lights. People immediately started to paint their faces with their fingers, resulting in a huge and happy crowd with dots, stripes and zigzags all over their faces, spontaneously uniting in what was a genuinely special moment.
\nAaahhhh, I miss Glasgow.
\nSo there you have it – for me, the right gig is a combination of the right band at the right time, in the right venue, and with the right crowd.
\nWhat’s your favourite live music memory?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inspired by Stephen’s U2 fanboy post, and by a stellar gig last night, here are some witterings about my top five live music experiences. In no particular order:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}