When you reach a certain age, you find yourself looking back at events in your past that have defined you, pointed you in the direction you eventually find yourself as a person. I write this on the cusp of the 40thanniversary of one of the defining days of my life, Sunday 10th October 1982. That was the day, as a wide-eyed and extremely non-streetwise 13-year-old, I attended my first gig as a paying customer, and thus began what’s transpired into an ongoing, lifelong love affair with live music.
I’ve written before about how lucky I was to be exposed to a wide range of music at an early age, through family, friends and their families, and a voracious appetite for late-night radio broadcasts. In 1982 this manifest itself primarily with an interest in 2-Tone (especially The Specials and Madness), The Jam, and AC/DC. It was pretty clear by that point that I had to get myself to a gig- my friends all had older brothers and sisters who would regale us with stories from gigs past and present, and this hardened my resolve to be able to tell my own tales of musical legends sooner rather than later.
The first gig that popped up on my horizon as a possibility was AC/DC at the Edinburgh Playhouse. I’d bought their latest album, For Those About To Rock, but had found myself almost immediately drifting back to the familiar sounds of their previous album, the now-legendary Back In Black, as the new one failed to hold my attention. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to go though- the drawback being my mates all hated them, meaning this was going to have to be a solo project. My mum was a single parent and money was extremely tight, so asking her for the ticket money wasn’t a straightforward issue. I remember being hugely stressed, embarrassed even, to ask her, but as with so many things that I now remember and realise, she was incredibly supportive and other than voicing a little bit of concern around how I’d get in and out of Edinburgh before and after, she found the money for me when she got paid at the end of that week. The ticket price? An eye-watering £6.50 including booking fee….
The following Saturday I was already planning a trip to Edinburgh with my pal John and his dad to visit the Commonwealth Pool. I gingerly asked John if his dad might detour to the Playhouse to let me go to the box office to buy my ticket, which he asked and relayed back to me would be ok. So, there I was, standing nervously in the queue, at least a foot shorter than anyone else in the room, money gripped tight in my fist as I plucked up the courage to ask the person on the counter for a ticket. Then, money exchanged, I had the precious bit of yellow paper in my hand. Circle, Row C Seat 51. I don’t think I’d ever felt as independent before as I did in that moment. I owned a gig ticket.
The wait for the gig flew by. The ticket, carefully placed inside a small clear plastic bag, hung on my bedroom wall for the duration, the last thing I saw every night and the first thing I saw in the morning. On the day of the gig, my abiding memory is one of impatience: it felt like the longest day of my young life waiting to board the bus into town to go and change my life. I remember sitting watching BBC’s live coverage of the raising of the Mary Rose, trying to find myself a distraction but in reality, all I could think about was the gig. What I’d see, what I’d hear, how I’d feel. 40 years on I still get those thoughts in my head before every gig I go to.
I arrived at the Playhouse. In my head I was the youngest there by some distance, though in reality I’m sure there were others. Everyone seemed like a denim-clad giant around me, all hair and cigarette smoke and with the deafening sound of excited, expectant chatter. I took my seat for the support band, an American hair metal outfit called Y&T who had a clutch of forgettable songs that to my untrained ear sounded remarkably similar to each other. The crowd clapped politely without ever really showing that much interest. Everyone was here for the main event.
The thing I remember most about the minutes leading up to AC/DC coming on is the noise. A combination of loud shouting and the strangest electronic hum in the background, getting louder by the minute, a sound I couldn’t quite place until the curtain went back on the stage revealing the blinking wall of Marshall amplifiers and speakers behind the sparkling drum-kit and scattered microphone stands. Then, out of the heavens, a massive bell descending. Then the band, and the unleashing of a glorious wall of noise that literally shot through my body like I’d been electrified. I’ll never forget that feeling. I could feel the drums battering through my chest. My eyes incredulously open, my ears already feeling the assault that would, years later, culminate in Nicky Wire’s bass cabinet officially tipping me over into a tinnitus diagnosis. And so it began…
The gig itself is a bit of a blur. I can recall flashes, images in my head of the band onstage, the crowd going tonto around me, but nothing that specific, beyond a vivid recollection of Angus Young, astride the shoulders of the biggest roadie you could ever imagine, being transported around the venue while playing a shredding guitar solo during Let There Be Rock, and at one point being literally feet away from me on the steps of the Circle.
School the following day was amazing. A procession of classmates asking me questions about the gig, me brandishing the gig ticket and programme as evidence of my adventure, lest they doubt the voracity of my claims. For about an hour or two I felt like the coolest guy in the world. But by that point I was already starting to think about the future possibilities, what other musical adventures I could embark upon. Later that year I’d see the final show by The Jam in Scotland at the Apollo, early the following year it was Madness at the Playhouse, and from then on in it became an obsession that I’m still living.
I’ve been lucky enough to go to gigs all over the UK and Ireland, Europe, even America on occasion, and I still scour the gig listings to see what’s coming up. I should have been going to see Roxy Music in Glasgow next week on the 40thanniversary of my first gig, but I’m now going to be in New York on the day so it may well be Billy Joel at Madison Square Gardens that’s the designated ‘commemorative’ show if I can manage to get a ticket. I suspect there will be a lot more to follow that, but I’ll never again have that wide-eyed sense of wonder of a 13-year-old witnessing their first gig.
Here’s to the next 40 years.
Well I Wonder... 