Day 13: "And All That Could Have Been" - Nine Inch Nails (2002)

It seems that the highly scientific ordering scheme of The Pile has decided to throw me curveball when it comes to talking about one of my favourite bands of all time, by requiring that I do so by talking about an album format I generally have very little patience for...

listen to me here

I don't understand what purpose "live albums" serve.  Don't get me wrong, I love live music.  Love it. As has been illustrated in my Nerina Pallot post, I'll drive two hours out of my way on 90 minutes notice to see a band I don't care about if I have any sense it will be a good show.  I spent five years taking my summer holidays to music festivals.  I get worried if I don't have an upcoming gig to go to, or I haven't seen a band for a few months.  

So why do I hate live albums?

Well, they're about as close to the real live experience as photos of the Grand Canyon are to actually being there - its a pale imitation which reduces an experience which is visceral and immediate, and informed by a hundred factors going on around you, to a snapshot, aimed a single sense, in the vague hopes that your memory will fill in the gaping chasm which makes up the rest of the real, in person experience.

In fact, there's an easy way to convert any of your studio albums into live albums - just put your speakers in a cardboard box at the other end of the room from where you're going to sit to listen to it, find a Youtube video of random crowd noise, and play that through another device right next to you. You're welcome.

But I own this one, and its for reasons even more stupid than the existence of live albums in the first place.

I hate you Trent Reznor.

There's a mentality that afflicts certain people, and I'm definitely one of them, where the desire to have a 'set' of something is triggered by telling someone how many things there are to collect.  It's the same mentality which drives people to collect pigeon feathers in Assassins Creed 2 (got all of those) or Riddler Trophies in the Arkham Batman games (got all of those for the first two as well).  Somehow, long before the gameification of everything, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails said "hey, we're going to put a Halo number on all of our releases in order, so we can release something obscure and our fans will have to go buy it because otherwise they are missing one of the numbers and that will make them crazy".

In a few months, look forward to me reviewing 6 remixes of a song from an obscure David Lynch film because of this stupid system.

The other reason I don't resent owning this album as much as I could is that I was there.  Not specifically at the gigs this album is mastered from, which were all during the North American leg of the tour, but at the Fragility 2.0 tour when it came to the Uk in 2000 and they headlined the Glastonbury festival.  The chance to see them live is what had guaranteed that Glastonbury was going to be my festival destination of choice that year.

And they were spectacular.  I remember that, in a scheduling choice that will continue to baffle me for all my life, Moby was the last act on before Nine Inch Nails headlined.  Me and Alex had turned up half way through Moby's set to try and work our way to the front, and had ended up standing next to a pair of nice guys from New Zealand who had brought some booze in plastic bottles with them and shared it with us as we waited.  I remember Moby finishing, and looking behind me at the massed crowd of people waiting at the stage.  Almost in real time, the field of bright, tie-dye colours slowly bled away until it was awash with nothing but black as far as the eye could see.

With a set list which veered wildly between explosively aggressive and quietly introspective, things down in the pit got pretty crazy during songs like "Head like a Hole" and "Wish".  Somehow, a pair of young women wearing rucksacks (sidebar:  please don't wear rucksacks when you're standing in a crowd of people at the front of a show, its absolutely miserable for everyone involved) had ended up stood in front of us, pinned nearly to the security rail, so me, Alex, and the guys from New Zealand ended up trying to act as a kind of human shield between the crashing waves of humanity and what felt like the certain doom of these young women.  I had bruises on my back for weeks after.

It's still one of my favourite gigs of all time.  But unless you were there, unless you can fill in those missing pieces of the experience from memory, don't buy live albums.  Not even if the band puts a number on them.