What the cool kids are listening to...

Went to a concert recently, to see Hard-Fi – they were amazing. They rock. They sounded great and there was a really cool atmosphere at the venue, and a good time was had by all. Highly recommended. I brought Sho along as there was a spare ticket. I had no idea at the time how much this was going to cost me in the long run…

The following week, she tells me she has got the tickets to see Jamie Lidell. I’d not really heard of him, but agreed to go – she came to my rock concert, after all. Jamie Lidell himself is pretty cool – he sings and is kind of jazzy and bluesy, BUT he throws in the occasional hard, pounding dance and electro beats into his songs at odd moments, which seemed a bit unnecessary to me, but the rest of the crowd seemed quite happy, so when in Rome, etc. However he didn’t come on stage until around 10ish. Before his appearance, we had to endure 2 support ‘acts’. I kept trying to tell myself to keep an open mind. Okay, this isn’t my usual kind of music, but maybe I could just go with it – try something new, you know? Yeah, right.

The first support act was fairly inoffensive. True, he was just playing monotonous, deafening dance music from a little set of spot-lit decks in the corner, and it was impossible to tell when each song had finished, because they are all mixed together, but I could just about handle him. The rest of the crowd had clearly experienced this kind of thing before, as they seemed to instinctively know when to clap, despite the music sounding exactly the same throughout his seemingly endless set. Anyway, he eventually left the stage, to rapturous applause – mainly from me, I was very keen to applaud him exiting the stage. I remember thinking to myself, well, at least that wasn’t too bad, and now we’ll have the main act, and we’re getting closer to when I can leave the building. Oh, folly, folly, how wrong I was.

This is when the second support act took to the stage. A very short Japanese guy ran onto the stage and screeched ‘Hello London people!’ into the mic a few times. He was joined by another guy, who went and stood by the decks. Predictably, a repetitive, loud techno beat started to issue forth from the massive speakers. I braced myself. Then the little Japanese guy took centre stage and just began to yell, really loudly, not to mention tunelessly, into the microphone. That’s all he did. He just kept yelling. Then he mixed it up by screaming. Then he stopped (but the beats didn’t), and stood on the stage nodding his head in time to the ‘music’, and a recording of him yelling was then played back over the track. Then he put a big, pink, floppy hat on, and repeated the yelling and screaming combo. I thought that my ears were going to start bleeding. And it was relentless; their set seemed to go on forever. I’d gone way past trying to keep an open mind at this point. I surreptitiously rummaged around in my bag for my phone to check the time, and my hand closed around my pen. I briefly thought about stabbing myself in the eye to make it all stop, but then I reconsidered; I’d die, but not quick enough. Then I started running through a string of possibilities in my head, like, could I set off the fire alarm? Could I engineer a power cut? Alas, the crowd was too dense for me to try either of these actions. I was in for the long haul whether I liked it or not.

When they finally left the stage, to some applause, and to my great relief, some booing (I wasn’t alone; other people thought they sucked too, including Sho), I was ready to go home. But, Jamie Lidell was yet to come on! After the support act ordeal, he could have come on and strangled a cat and I would have applauded wildly; anything would sound good after that. As I said, he was ok, but his set was marred by the trauma of what came before, for me anyway. The whole thing was exhausting.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer live acts to play instruments and sing. I know, I’m clearly not down with the kids, but I’d rather be the girl at the rock show 'cos I like my music with guitars, goddammit! Rock on.