Ashley on Live Gigs

ARENA CONCERTS. I feel fortunate that I saw bands like Genesis, Yes, Santana and Floyd not only at their zenith but also inside proper concert halls. Giant auditoria near me like the NEC and Nottingham Arena are not concert halls. They are cold, soulless aircraft hangars with hard plastic seats where the act you’ve paid a fortune to see are mere dots on the stage so you are forced to watch the entire performance on the giant video screen which is itself a sorry admission that your view is crap but “thanks for your money, sucker”. Worse still are football stadia. I remember Genesis in the 1980s admirably returning to concert halls as a ‘thank you’ to the fans who had (ironically) elevated them to stadium rock status. This year, 100,000 tickets were bought for the UK leg of the Turn It On Again reunion tour which involved only two dates (at Old Trafford and Twickenham). The band could have played to the same amount of people by choosing to perform three successive nightly sets at each of 10 or 12 UK concert halls (and what about a few matinees?). Sure, it would have taken them a good deal longer to tour the world but what other jobs have they got to go to? This IS their job. And surely their fans would have been more grateful to see them in a more intimate and acoustically favourable space? As it stands, the grump in me can only see that tour as nothing more than a vast money-spinner with scant regard for fans. Talking of which…

TICKET PRICES. Even though I was a typically cash-starved teenager and twenty-something in the 1970s, I can’t ever recall getting irate about the cost of live music. Don’t worry: I’m not about to harp on like an old fogey telling you how in the good old days you could buy a packet of fags for a farthing. I will merely express the pertinent fact that concert tickets were considerably less than the price of an album. The contrary is now true, and how… nowadays you can get a top band’s new CD for less than 8 quid yet, because they are a top band, they insist on playing in football stadia or aircraft hangars and you have to pay twelve times that amount to see them live. I love the music of The Police but if Sting thinks I was going to pay 90 quid for a reunion concert ticket so he could buy a bigger, better New York penthouse, he can sod off.

VARIOUS CONCERT/GIG GRIPES.
A friend of mine decided, after many long years of admiration for Bob Dylan, to see him in concert. It was bad enough that it was in a giant arena but the worst part was that Dylan never, at any time, acknowledged the audience. Not even one “hello”. Is this the same guy who articulates so well on his own radio shows? “It was as if Dylan couldn’t give a toss about us”, complained my friend. I got the same thing at a Van Morrison concert once. For one thing, the old curmudgeon was about as sartorially dressed as my plumber but at least my plumber talks to me. Van just tore through his set and spoke only once, to shout out the names of his band members. Just one solitary “hi there, Derby” or “thanks for coming” would have been something. My subsequent lack of respect for him even made me glad that his music started to go off. Dylan and Morrison aren’t the only offenders, though: there are also the vocalists who can sing poetic words into a microphone all night yet inbetween the songs can barely muster anything other than “er, thanks, that was a track off our new album, and, um… ‘here’s another one”. Yea, really illuminating, mate.

Mind you, there’s something even worse than an artist who doesn’t talk much or at all to his audience, and that’s an audience who talks while the artist sings, specifically at acoustic gigs. I remember sitting in disbelief at a Roy Harper gig wondering why so many audience members had paid good money to see someone they presumably admired yet yapped throughout his entire set. I wish they’d been at a Tom Robinson gig I attended once: he actually stopped playing mid-song and told the chatterers to either shut up and listen, or go home. Fortunately, all did one of the two.

I’d rather artists not talk at all than insist on yelling at us: “LEMME HEAR YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS!” I’ll decide whether to clap my hands, thank you. I am not a trained seal.

Almost as bad is: “are you having a good time?”, as if we’d ever say “no, not really”, made infinitely worse if it’s followed by the pantomimic “I SAID: ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME!!??”

I’m definitely not having a good time if the guy standing in front of me at a gig is over 6 feet tall. Why DO the lanky members of our society insist on standing in front of us short-arses?

I’m having an even worse time if I hear a bass guitar solo or, even worse, a drum solo. Any drummer who performs a solo of five minutes or more has obviously never sat in an audience to hear another drummer inflict this appalling tedium on us. Dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-ting-ting-ting-ting-boom-boom-boom-dum-dum-dum…boring-boring-BORING!

And if you have to perform a guitar solo, don’t stretch it out, especially if it eventually means us putting up with the excruciating sight of you closing your eyes and throwing back your head in intoxicated, orgasmic self-congratulatory wonder at the exuberance of your virtuosity. It’s only a few notes.