I am going to a gig tomorrow! I had thought that – Glastonbury aside which is of course “not about the music man” (i.e. the music is atrocious) – this was my first gig in three whole years but I’d forgotten about Brian Wilson. That didn’t feel like a ‘gig’ though, I wasn’t sipping lager out of a beaker and I was comfortable.
I don’t avoid live gigs out of any ‘anti-rockist’ principles (as I say in Popular, live music scenes can have fantastic impacts on pop as a whole), I just don’t personally enjoy them much. Recorded music just sounds better, and it suits my low boredom threshold, and I can sit around and chat while it’s playing, blah blah. I’ve had good times at gigs but hardly ever the kind of transformative experience habitual gig-goers talk about (actually most habitual gig-goers who go and see poxy no-fans bands seem to do it for the usual music-lover reason: there’s that slim chance of hitting the jackpot which keeps us going through the mediocrity.)
Anyway the band in guestion are the Go!Team, who are from Brighton and make an uplifting racket. They are supposed to be a bit awful live but their album already sounds to me like people playing great records a room or two away so a ramshackle approach would do them no disfavour. I’m hoping for a kind of boozy good times amateurish atmosphere and my hopes are further raised by the fact that they don’t get onstage until one.