the gigs
Okay, I’m not the biggest Lana Del Rey fan. I don’t know all the deep cuts, all the words to every drooling ballad she’s pumped out relentlessly over the past few years, but I do love Lana. She is simply one of those artists who can make me feel a way no one else’s music can. Over the summer she played at a festival in my hometown, and I didn’t go. Devastating. I have been to, paid far too much for, so many concerts but this one I just couldn’t quite justify the price. Perhaps proving just how much of a fake fan I am (or just that I was unemployed at the time). You can always hear the festival in my suburb but this year they moved the stage, and you could hear every word. But, as this festival clearly has it in for me (it’s always traumatising to attend when I do) they fucked the sound for Lana’s set. I could hear techno. I could not hear Lana. One day, Lana, one day.
I went to a couple of concerts in my early teens, but they weren’t particularly special, so I tend to say my first concert ‘proper’ was to see The 1975 in Nottingham, circa February 2020, just as Covid-19 began to dominate headlines. Beabadoobee, who I had been introduced to the day before by my best friend, with whom I was in Nottingham with, supported them. No one was interested besides the pit and me. I can confirm she was just as special then as she is now. My friend managed to get served and then snuck that bottle of vodka into the arena. The 02 could never, honestly. The space of a concert is uniquely freeing, especially as a teenager. It was the first place I had ever been encouraged to swear, and cry, and scream. They are deeply primal spaces. Perfectly situated in between the cinema and a festival. (Festivals are a different beast.) The tension between the lightness of your limbs and the power the vibrations give them. The year of the pandemic I was booked in to see my three favourite artists at the time: Yungblud (I was sixteen), The 1975 (still love them, fight me), and Billie Eilish (still love her duhh). I only made it to the first but I did finally get to see Yungblud the following Summer, where, it wasn’t my first kiss, but probably my first kiss based on sex rather than romance. She approached me in the queue, asked to put some glitter makeup on my face. I said she could and as she did she found that she loved my eyes. I only thought people asked strangers ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ in the movies. I thought people could only be looked at like that in the movies. It was in London, and I never saw them again but the dullest of concerts is another world to inhabit. Going into it with a stranger who will ever only exist in that space for me just reinforces that other-worldly feeling.
My first concert date was on Halloween a few years ago now. At the time I was unbearably cynical about falling in love. Love Will Tear Us Apart started playing on the pre-show playlist. I pointed to where the sound and turned to the person I was seeing.
“See, he gets it.”
“He killed himself.” They told me.
Earlier on this year my social media feeds were inundated with videos from Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts Tour as she embraced mega-stardom for the first time. I was home from university, bored. After a few hours of traipsing through translated web pages for gigs across the world I figured it would be cheapest in all to fly to Antwerp to see her. And so, without any convincing really needed my friend agreed to join me. It was only after we booked she realised she had exams the following week. We only met last year, and this was our first proper trip together. It was properly special. I stayed in a hostel for the first time. We wondered through the smoky, oh-so-European streets, at night, where coffee shops are open till bedtime. And public spaces are built for all of the public. We were there-and-back in thirty-six hours. What a time.
Admittedly, my concert (and festival) antics aren’t always particularly wholesome but that wasn’t the case when I finally got to see Taylor Swift a couple of months ago (even if I did wear a t-shirt with the pap picture of her and matty printed on it). It was pure, unfiltered, unadulterated, beautiful euphoria. Three-and-a-half hours of smiling and crying. So special.
