0.7.2 - The crowds in stands went wild
Also, if you've been paying attention, you will be aware there were long sections of my life when I have been very financially disadvantaged; I'm privileged that currently, this is not one of those times. I have a decent (if annoying at times) job which pays well, a relatively low mortgage because we live in a very modest house we purchased with help from Catherine's parents 15 or so years ago, and we don't have kids. What this means for me specifically is that, global health crises notwithstanding, I'm fortunate to be able to indulge in my love of live music with some regularity, depending on who is touring. Once upon a time I used to keep all my ticket stubs from the various concerts I had attended. Somewhere on the wall of my office is the framed tickets from when I saw R.E.M. and Radiohead live, the only two I have managed to retain. But in this increasingly irritating world of every single venue having its own app and specific eticketing policy which means the second page of my iPhone is just twenty different eticket vendors all desperately scraping my cookies for information on where I live and what I had for breakfast, keeping physical copies of tickets is no longer possible (apart from the new hilarious scam of companies charging you for a fake jpeg of a ticket you can print out at home for your collection).
Considering all these factors, I made a decision a few years ago which I have stuck to ever since. Every time I go to a show, if there is a merch stand, and they have something I like in my size, I will buy myself a T-shirt, or a hoodie (or in one case, a teatowel because they didn't have any men's T-shirts left) as my way of financially supporting the bands I like, or bands have never heard of, but went to their gig anyway. It's an extravagant habit that I would drop like a stone were I to worry about my financial future again, but in the moment, it gives me great joy to maintain this dumb tradition. What does that have to do with the nine albums above? Well, until it became apparent my brain wouldn't let me not post the album art as part of the images for the albums I have listened to, the header image for this article was nearly this.
Honestly, this could have been 15, or 20 albums, but I had to draw the line somewhere, and because I've had a very busy week at work this week, time got the better of me so I kept it to a manageable nine. Before we talk about the albums themselves, I have some thoughts about the live music experience here in the year twenty twenty-five AD that I need to get off my chest. I'm often at my happiest when I am at a gig. I'm often, also, at my angriest and most frustrated when I am at a gig, and the pendulum swings between those two emotional states is governed entirely by the attentiveness and courtesy of the other audience members around me. As I get older, it's possible I've just become more misanthropic and generally intolerant of other people. When I was younger, and spent more time in the first few rows of the crowd, in the moshpit, on the dancefloor, than I do now in my fourties, maybe the people who annoy me so now have always been there, I've just never been close enough to notice it. Maybe its an entirely British thing - having seen live shows with crowds from outside of the UK, British audiences have a very "OK, you on stage do the thing while we stand here and watch you" approach which I think bands which are used to greater levels of audience engagement find off-putting. My working theory, however, is that the commodification and instant access to all music through streaming services and social media has, in the psyche of the public in general, devalued the music experience so completely - just push some buttons on your phone, and listen to basically anything you want at any time - that people's reverence for, appreciation of, respect for the people who produce that music has been lost. Now, when I go to a gig, I ask the question - "Are this group of people who have paid for a ticket to see this band going to shut up and actually watch them, or just carry on a conversation as if they were seated in their living room with a beer all night?".
I'm British by nationality and upbringing, so when you are inconsiderate and rude, especially a gig where I have spent money and should be at my most blissfully zen and I'm not because you won't shut up, the worst I am likely to do is glare at you meaningfully with increasing frequency while entertaining fantasies of your violent and humiliating ejection from the venue. I've entertained the notion of taking a £20 note out of my wallet before and telling rude people nearby they can have it if they fuck off to a different part of the venue to continue their conversation out of my earshot. I am truly, constantly baffled why people choose to part with their hard earned money to have the same conversation they can have at the pub for free. Is the value for them just disrupting everyone else? Are they doing it to mess with me in particular? I have no answers, but I desperately wish they would stop.
The only supporting evidence I have for my "cheapening music makes people assholes at concerts" theory is this; I was lucky enough to go to see The Eras Tour last year. It was expensive, and I went on my own, but I love Taylor Swift and without doubt that concert tour is the most significant live music event to take place in my lifetime. If I had missed it, it would have haunted me for the rest of my days. In the stadium in Edinburgh, 80,000 attendees were locked to the stage for the three plus hours of concert experience. I didn't hear a single stray conversation or disruptive incident, despite being way out of the 'hyper devoted fan' zone of the show. But people had paid a lot of money, everyone there was locked in to the experience, and as a result, it was magical.
Why then can I not expect 4,000 people in a concert hall in Wolverhampton, or 1,200 people at the Sheffield Leadmill to be capable of the same thing? If I were a rich, very rich, stupidly rich man, I would open a musical venue with rules similar to the Alamo Drafthouse movie theatre; a staff of ushers would patrol the venue, warning and then ejecting people talking through the performance, being disruptive to other patrons, or generally being annoying. We would be out of business in six months after alienating 95% of our client base, but we'd put on some of the best gigs in the country before we went under, let me tell you.
But when I'm not slowly simmering in my own frustrated rage at the people around me, the live music experience is me at my happiest. Rare are the opportunities to be in a room where music I love is turned up to a volume where I can feel the bass vibrating through my ribcage, where the degree of distance between performer and audience is torn down, and we are in this together. I will famously go and see nearly any form of live music if you ask me; I don't think there's much of a better way you can spend your time. So let's talk about some performers, and live performances, and albums.
I knew nothing about Seth Lakeman the first time I went to see him live. My friend Jenny had a ticket that someone wasn't able to use, and asked me maybe three days before the gig if I was free. I was, I said yes, as I always will in these circumstances. We arrived for the gig, and I bought a T-Shirt from the merch stand having not heard a single note of his music. If you had asked me before that night if I would end up listening to several albums of folk songs about shiphands and miners and the plight of the working man, I would have scoffed at you; but the true power of the live performance of anything is to infuse a concept with understanding and immediacy and energy, things a studio recording make impossible to convey. Seth Lakeman plays fiddle and guitar and has a band of talented musicians alongside him and sings the songs of the working man and since that gig, I've seen him a second time and listened to the majority of his albums, including THE GRANITE WAY (all caps why?) which just came out this week. I really enjoyed it, but if you want my recommendation for an album, start with Kitty Jay or the song The Bold Knight off that album as a taster. But really, the best way to experience it is in person.
Some time in February last year, my friend D sent me a message asking me if I wanted tickets to see The Last Dinner Party in Sheffield; I didn't know who they were, made a note to look into them, because I wasn't going to spend money on a complete unknown (I'd have said yes if the tickets were free though...). A month later, I listened to Prelude to Ecstasy, made Catherine listen to it, but by then, the tickets were all gone. A missed opportunity, and we'd been annoyed the previous year by missing out on Wet Leg tickets in similar fashion. This time, Catherine refused to be denied, and put her name down on a waiting list for the Sheffield Octagon. In November last year, while I was 90 minutes drive away in one of my rare days in my companies head office, I get a message from Catherine - she has secured two tickets for tonight, can I get back in time? I make my excuses, run out of the door at 4pm and tear down the motorway, making the concert in fairly reasonable time*. I think people get very in their feelings about TLDP; they get industry plant accusations, people call them posh and privileged and out of touch, they don't endear themselves to people by cancelling tours half way through - but this is a group of young women who met at art school, were you expecting Billy Bragg? And they cancelled their tour for mental health reasons, and I've seen enough dead rock stars to suggest that's probably the healthiest decision a touring band can make. They put on a great live show, deployed a surprise live cover (as everyone know, I enjoy those), and I think as debut albums go, this grandoise vision of feminist anthems by a band formed by fusing Kate Bush with Bikini Kill sets the bar for a follow up album very high.
Look, when I said I was able to stop listening to Interpol any time I like, I was obviously lying, but this topic at least gave me a good excuse. I've seen them twice now, once for The Other Side Of Make Believe tour, where they spent the entire set basically motionless and in silhouette, I was in incredible back pain for some reason (I am old and had been stood up all day is the reason) and really needed two ibuprofen and a sit down, and there were the aforementioned chatty audience members cycling in and out of our radius and its still amongst my favourite gigs just because it was finally an opportunity to hear songs I had listened to many, many times in a live environment. Last year, I went on my own to see the Antics 20th anniversary tour the night before my cousins wedding. I was devastated to learn John and Sarah had scheduled their wedding for the same day as this tour performance in Manchester, so instead I drove nearly 3 hours each way to see them the night before because I could not bear to miss it. Antics is my favourite Interpol album by some distance, so getting the whole thing cover to cover, sat in a comfy balcony seat, surrounded by quiet, appreciative fans was one of the high points of my concert going last year.
In excellent timing, This One Goes To 11 also covered Haim's Days Are Gone this week, so I am going to leave the album pitch to them. I started listening to Haim in the stupidest way possible, because Justin McElroy from My Brother, My Brother and Me mentioned one of their songs in a segment on the podcast in 2019, and being a curious individual, I sought out The Wire, then listened to all of Days Are Gone, and then in fact everything they had ever put out, including their recent Women In Music Part III album which I deeply love. We saw Haim play at Nottingham Arena in August of 2021 I think, and we were in the middle of a raging heatwave in the UK, something we are ill equipped to cope with. The band performed in this roasting hot, sticky arena in a little clothing as was possible to retain their modesty while we danced with what little remaining energy we had. I'm very excited for the possibility of another Haim album in the future, and another tour, hopefully in more reasonable weather conditions.
When I wrote about A Certain Trigger back in January, I think I said it was really the only Maximo Park album I had listened to more than once. I am here to tell you, having listened to Our Earthly Pleasures that I am wrong and I know this album much better, but obviously not by name. Catherine and I saw Maximo Park at the Sheffield Leadmill last year; she has no real connection to them, and it was difficult to give her a crash course before the show. They're a band which, despite advancing years now, perform with great gusto, with a very loyal crowd. However, Catherine wasn't feeling great and the combination of loud music and crowded space was making her so uncomfortable so we left three-quarters of the way through, the first time I can remember in my life leaving a gig early. It was the right thing to do, but I still kinda regret not seeing it through to the end.
Remember when I wrote about E•mo•tion (went back into that article on Blogger and copy-pasted the album title rather than remember the keyboard shortcut for the dumb dots) for Valentine's day? The story of our live music experience seeing CRJ was contained within. I love this album - I don't know if all the music that came out during the pandemic was good, or if my emotional need for new music at the time was so intense it infused every with an larger-than-life appreciation I've never been able to edit out of my critical thinking - but this joined a list of twelve or so albums in heavy rotation during lockdown, and when I discovered she was playing in a relatively small club near us, for a very modest price, it was the fastest I have ever sight-unseen booked tickets. I think The Loneliest Time is the best CRJ album by some margin (and I love E•mo•tion) and would recommend Beach House, Go Find Yourself Or Whatever, or Bad Thing Twice as representative samples.
I'm gonna have to write a separate article about Metric because I can't do them justice in a single paragraph, so I might do their discography next week and talk more about them then. Formentera II got listened to this week because I told Catherine to pick a Metric album, not expecting her to pick this most recent one. We went to see the Formentera tour (which was again a band playing a far smaller venue than I expected) with my friend D and his partner, and apart from the size of the venue not really suiting the gig (Emily Haines needs at minimum a theatre sized building to match the size of her performance and charisma) and the small audience needing a while to warm up and get engaged, it was everything I wanted from my first chance to see a band live I had been listening to for 25 years. I did hope they would tour again when they released Formentera II as the companion to the original album, but it was not to be. Now they are touring in the US with Bloc Party, doing Silent Alarm and Fantasies and the fact that this tour is limited engagements and US only is basically a personal attack on me and I hate it.
Catherine and I have seen Florence and her machine three separate times now, and as a live act she never disappoints. Her constant energy on stage is really something to see; every time we've seen her perform, from a small theatre in Halifax (I lucked into some fan-only pre-tour warmup gig tickets for High As Hope and we saw her in a room of about 900 people. The girl next to me kept throwing glitter into the air during every song, I was washing it out of my hair and beard for weeks after), to a huge arena, from the moment she steps onto the stage to when the final note sounds, she seems to never stop moving. She has incredible cardio - the first time we saw her, she got to the end of the main set and before the encore, she ran a lap of Sheffield arena, from one side of the stage, round the standing crowd, hugged a women just emerging from the toilets, then back to the stage to start the encore. Her reluctantly jogging security behind her I suspect were not expecting, nor pleased, by this turn of events. I know Florence isn't everyones cup of tea, but she's very much mine, I love the power of her voice and the harmonic arrangements of her vocal tracks; I like the subject matter and the musicianship that accompanies it. High As Hope somehow feels a bit like a lesser Florence work, lacking the crowd pleasing mega hits of the earlier Lungs and Ceremonials, but without the high concept interest of her most recent album Dance Fever. Lesser, perhaps, but not insignificant, or disappointing, or bad - still possessed of merit, just struggling in the light of its colossal peers
Like Metric, I can't encapsulate Pulp in a single paragraph. When I do my treatise on the musical artists from my adopted home city, they will get their flowers more completely at that point, but in the world of Blur and Oasis going head to head in the war for Britpop's soul, the secret correct third answer was always Pulp, the band consistently putting out albums of incredible depth and quality only to be overshadowed by the London/Manchester set and the media attention they attracted. I wonder what was in Jarvis Cocker's mind when writing This Is Hardcore in 1998; the Britpop bubble had burst, and the chart appearances of Disco 2000 and Babies and obviously Common People were a few years in the past. Does that send your mind to a place where a darkly comic album about sexuality, performance and voyuerism can be fashioned? Or was it always there, and there could never be a better time than this to reach the apotheosis of the darker sentiments scattered through their earlier works?
No matter the reason, I'm an outlier fan who prefers This Is Hardcore over the other Pulp offerings, precisely because the sleazy menace of the whole thing stands out in stark relief to the direction of their music, and music in general at the time. We saw them perform the This Is What We Do For An Encore tour in Sheffield, our shared home town, and it was an exemplary performance by a band who thrive in the live environment. We're very excited to see them headline the Tramlines festival here in Sheffield this year - maybe that will be the incentive I need to write about the musical legacy of the original Steel City, and my relationship to it.
See you in...August?
* In a weird postscript to this story, while I got to see TLDP live despite missing out on early tickets, D and his partner had their gig changed, rescheduled it to a different one, which got cancelled, and they never actually got to see them live at all. Sad times.
