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

"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

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shouting in the social media mirror

By
It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...
Post a Comment
Read more