Skip to main content

Add your voice to the sound of the crowd

Image
By
Old... Gold.

There really is something rather joyous about seeing a favourite band live.

And there’s something rather miraculous if you’re seeing them getting on for 40 years since you first discovered them. I was lucky enough to see both Midge Ure (former owner of pointy sideburns, Vienna means nothing to him) and The Human League (still concerned in case you don’t want them, baby) last weekend, and both were fabulous.

Both were also hitting the top of the charts in the early 80s and whilst they have had long careers, many people will remember them largely for their first flourishes of success.

Neither Midge, nor The League’s front-man, Phil Oakey, are exactly youngsters now, with bus-passes just around the corner, and the interesting hairstyles long gone. But boy, they still go for it, rattling out the hits and taking their audience back to a time before worrying about pension funds and aching knees became the norm.

Neither insisted on playing much in the way of later numbers, wisely understanding that the hits are what everyone wants.

A quick look around the auditorium was enough to confirm the approximate age of those gathered to re-live their youth. Grey hair and bald heads were abundant, and the world record for Dad Dancing may have well have been broken, but did we care if we looked a bit daft? Hell, no – a couple of hours off from being depressingly middle-aged is a glorious thing.

It was probably past quite a few people’s bedtime (mine included), and the after gig tipple may now be cocoa rather than a couple of pints, but I suspect that the hundreds of people who went back to the 80s for the evening didn’t mind staying up late one bit.

I didn’t even have to worry about the fact that the New Romantic icons are now old people. We were so high up in the venue that they should consider pumping oxygen up there - it was the kind of altitude light aircraft normally operate at. At that distance, I couldn’t see the passage of time.

Of course, no gig is complete without the obligatory tour T Shirt. I proudly wore my bright red The Human League one in to work the next day.

The bands of your youth won’t be around forever. Catch them while you can – who doesn’t want to dance care-free, like they’re 18 again? Even if you do regret it the next day.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 30th of November. The version used on their website added "Don't you want me, baby?" in front of my already-song-title-based heading. 

 Whilst I've managed to get hold of back-copies of the missing print editions, this one hasn't arrived yet... so I'm suspecting it's not coming. Getting hold of yourself in print is surprisingly tricky!

(CD A-Z: The whopping Freddie Mercury "The Solo Collection"... starting off with "Mr Bad Guy".)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Faking it for real

By
As Donald “I’m really great, everybody says so” Trump is so fond of pointing out, there is a lot of fake news around nowadays. Honest. Your friends at Facebook think so too, and have recently been publishing their top tips for spotting false news – by placing them as ads in newspapers. Considering they came in for considerable criticism themselves, that’s like shouting “Squirrel!” and pointing at a tree whilst you hastily kick away the prize begonias you just trampled. To help you make sense of this (and because I’m a caring person), I thought I’d run you through their suggestions and help to explain them for you. I know. I’m lovely. 1. Be sceptical of headlines READING THIS ARTICLE WILL IMPROVE YOUR SEX LIFE!!! And explain that catchy headlines, or stuff all in capitals might be a bit iffy. 2. Look closely at the URL You can find out more about this at www.wowyouregullible.com if you want to understand how phony web addresses are a sure sign of dodgyness. 3. Investigate...
Post a Comment
Read more

Going Underground

By
The US presidential election and Brexit must have made me more nervous than I’d realised. It seems I’ve created an underground bunker without realising I was doing it. Still – we’ve all done that at some point, right? No? Ah... In that case, the fact that I have inadvertently turned my cellar into a rudimentary survival shelter, just in case it all kicks off, demonstrates a severe case of bunker mentality. Fretting about Donald and his wall, and Hillary and her emails, clearly made me more paranoid that I thought about the possibility of WW3 kicking off. Whilst attempting to find a specific size of imperial washer the other day (turns out I’d mis-filed it in the nut cabinet – Tsk!) I was struck by what a lot of jam and chutney we have in the cellar. And I do mean a LOT. There are boxes of boiled-up sugar and fruit and more boxes of boiled up vinegar and fruit. We’re still only part way through 2015’s output too. Then there’s the plastic containers holding pasta in various for...
Post a Comment
Read more

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more