Why do I love music? Is it in my nature, derived genetically from my parents, and going back before that, to my paternal grandfather, who was in a singing group in his teens? Or is it nurture: was I made this way by constant exposure to music from the day I was born? Why do I love Bowie and not Céline Dion? I’ve made judgements about music all my life, and I wonder if I’m getting more argumentative as I get older. My views have become more concrete in terms of my own moral (political, social, feminist, equality-based) certainties, but I do think my likes and dislikes have evolved towards greater open-mindedness, and I certainly know myself in a way I didn’t in my 20s. I suppose we’re all the same. We have passions that we want to share with others and we want others to feel the same love we do, whether about our politics or the art that matters. What I hope to work towards, when it comes to differences of taste, is the ability to restrain myself from feeling negatively about someone who loves/hates something that I hate/love. It’s something I am trying, struggling, to do, to improve myself: to stop being so knee-jerk about oppositional views, which in the current internet age feels nearly impossible some days.

Our parents make us in their image, and we mirror their tastes because they are our first and primary influencers. But at some point, you break away from getting all your opinions from them. Yes, there’s a primal pull for me in judging someone’s music taste, as my mother did. She would question everyone about what they liked and, if their answers didn’t meet her high standards, she would, sometimes in a charming way, sometimes not, rebut them and scoff at what they loved. Once she questioned someone about their favourite band, and when the answer came back as Take That she bit her tongue and asked who this person’s favourite member was? The reply, under pressure and beneath mum’s stern, demanding eye, was that she couldn’t remember their names. This was the final straw; mum was incredulous at such a lack of attention to detail. It wasn’t about liking Take That anymore. It was about the fact that, if you’re going to have a favourite band – even if it’s a shitty one that I hate, she thought – the very least you can do is know their names.

My reactions to the music other people love have often resembled my mother’s: super, ultra, crazily judgemental. Dad is similar, but less wild-eyed about it. Though I did speak to him about this review and he confessed he is still baffled and annoyed by his best friend’s extreme dislike of two artists – Beatles, Hendrix – who most rock fans, which he is, adore without question. I’d like to evolve somehow past all that judgement. Who am I to be passing comment on what I perceive to be a lowbrow taste, a devotion to music I deem of poor quality (writing, performance, production) or sentimental in the worst way? What I should be doing is trying to strip myself of being so argumentative and just be grateful that other people have… loves and hates and passions just like mine (thank you Moz, you have a lyric, if not a novel, for every occasion). I value music and admit I feel sorry for those who think it’s alright, own a few albums, quite like it but could live without it. I barely understand how there are people on earth for whom music is not only unimportant but absent in their lives. I know: how pretentious and condescending is that? If everyone likes what I like as much as I like it, then everyone is the same. And that sounds pretty dull. This all leads me to a book I was recently bought: Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste. I actually think this beautiful, insightful, intelligent, even moving book could make me a better person. Perhaps I am this way because I’m a frustrated music critic at heart, because I don’t create. I’m cool with that – it’s a living (pretty much). But my intense need to correct doesn’t just extend to books or magazines or menus, it goes to people as well. I can’t resist telling people what I think of what they think. I’m not immune from being the subject – tying into Wilson’s concepts of the social hierarchies of how we relate to others – as only the other day I was getting into it on Facebook. The subject? U2. Having posted that I was excited about seeing them live, friends immediately rushed to tell me how much of a gigantic twat Bono is (no mention of their music from the Bono-haters). Others told me they loved U2, who put on a great show, etc. (no mention of Bono from the music-lovers). I couldn’t help notice that the haters were those with otherwise ‘cool’ music taste (indie/alternative types), and the ones who loved U2 also loved the Stones or Bon Jovi or other mainstream rock music. I admit that U2 are somewhat of an anomaly in my own music collection. If you were to glance at my iTunes Library you would find tons of classic pop/rock, certainly. But you’re more likely to close your eyes and stick a pin in Albert Ayler or Ornette Coleman or Wayne Shorter or Sufjan or Terry Riley or Joanna Newsom or Laura Nyro or Björk, and so on. What this means is that, certainly as I’ve gotten older, my ears seem to like, and my brain seems to seek out, music that’s sonically diverse and/or unusual. In my teens I was all about three chords and the truth. It was all big rock by white, straight guys: from the Beatles to Guns ‘N Roses to Aerosmith to Led Zep to the Doors (all of whom I still like). In my 20s I expanded that palette a little to the Flaming Lips and Radiohead et al. In my 30s all hell broke loose in my music collection, with old off-kilter discoveries coming by the day (Tom Waits, Kate Bush, Eno, innumerable jazz albums), genre gaps being filled by the truckload (country, Americana, folk, psychedelia, prog, free jazz, krautrock, classical, electronic, ambient, everything!) and suddenly, unexpectedly, a passion for hip-hop (Kendrick, Kanye and getting in with the godfathers like Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, then Public Enemy, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, in short catching up with forty years of rap culture). There are not enough hours in the day to listen to everything I want to listen to.

The Wilson book, which he talks about here in an excellent Pitchfork interview, has been recently reissued and extended with accompanying essays from the book’s admirers, including Krist Novoselic, Nick Hornby, Ann Powers, Owen Pallett and James Franco (my copy is the original). It has become perhaps the most acclaimed title in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 imprint, which puts out small-form books, each about one album. I was gripped from page one. It’s about judgement, taste, sentimentality (which he defines as the opposite of cool), love, hate, cultural and social capital, music history, prejudice and more. For a case study, Wilson chose an artist he hated: Céline Dion. His concluding point, in general, is that writing the book made him become more open to opposites, which goes against the way the internet is designed to dominate cultural life. The online experience is based around ‘we know you like this, here’s more just like that’, whether it’s Amazon recommendations or Last.fm libraries or iTunes Genius. These systems are set up to sell you more of the same, which is the opposite of what I want now. I already have hundreds of classic albums. What I want, as I get older, is stuff I’ve never considered before.

Wilson could just have easily chosen U2 over the Québécoise chanteuse. Except his objections would have been based on music versus not-music. What that means is, despite 220 million albums sold, people despise Dion’s music and, despite 170 million albums sold, people despise Bono. They object to her music and his personality. Nobody cares much what kind of person Dion is: they just hate her cheesy, saccharine, shrill and ubiquitous songs, despite only hearing My Heart Will Go On. Nobody cares much what U2 sound like (in fact, most pop/rock fans would admit their music is actually, technically good, with its gargantuan hooks): they just hate Bono’s political pontificating and lecturing. So it came to this: in a confluence of events so deliciously perfect as to defy parody, I was sitting on a little step at a U2 concert reading the Céline book last night.

Tags: U2, Céline Dion

The question that Rocky Horror creator Richard O’Brien has been asked most in his 73 years on this planet concerns what he thinks is the secret of the show’s success. People seem to be hoping for arcane knowledge, that he has a line to the abstract and can divine what exactly it is that has made his odd, subversive 50s-style rock and roll musical the biggest cult theatrical experience and movie of all time. Each time this question is asked he smiles benevolently, and answers very politely, as he is a very well mannered human, that he thinks it’s because the origin story is an eternal fairytale and has existed to intrigue audiences since time began since it is, essentially, a retelling of Adam and Eve (and Babes In The Wood, with a bit of Hansel and Gretel thrown in). There is innocence lured toward corruption by a snake, with human nature making it impossible to resist. For the snake, read: one of the greatest stage and cinematic creations of all time, Dr Frank-N-Furter; and for the apple, well, he’s offering a little bit more than a piece of fruit…

Along the way we have a murder, a touch of incest, transvestism, non-binary gendered characters, the hint of cannibalism, oral sex performed on both genders by the same person, straight sex with a virgin, gay sex with a sex slave, echoes of Frankenstein and King Kong, and the intimation of Americans engaging in Nazi-sheltering, all soundtracked by classic rock and roll. It’s quite a lot to fit into an hour and a half. It was written in 1972, so it was ripe for the times, as rock operas and hippie musicals pervaded. But this show is no Hair or JC Superstar (O’Brien starred in the former and was cast by Jim Sharman, who would later direct both the play and the movie, in the latter). There are no religious parables Godspell-style, anti-war polemics or longhaired hippies. Instead, it’s a science fiction horror tale that sits dead centre on the Kinsey scale and has just about zero gender/sexuality boundaries. Frank is not a woman, nor does he wish to be, nor does he dress as a woman. He is a man in a corset, stockings and suspenders, silk panties and platform heels. He wears manly leather and ladylike lace, delicate fishnet and tough chains. He’s a pansexual alien from, seemingly, a planet of transsexuals in a distant galaxy. He is the hero you swoon over, despite the fact that we see him treat his acolytes like slaves, hack someone to death (off screen) with a chainsaw, then serve the body for dinner. We hang on his every word and mourn when he is sacrificed at the end. If played right, every audience member must want to be seduced by him. That is some anti-hero.

In short, this play and its subsequent film are utterly bonkers with everything but the kitchen sink thrown at them. So tell me, Richard, why do you think it’s all been so successful? You’d forgive him for replying: ‘I really have no fucking idea. If I knew I’d have done it again’.

It wears its 1950s influences on its sleeve without ever being a rip-off; it’s too clever for that. The opening song – sung on stage by an usherette and by a Man Ray-inspired red lipstick covered mouth in the film, Patricia Quinn’s Magenta miming to O’Brien’s voice – Science Fiction Double Feature pays homage to Richard Smith’s childhood, which was spent in the cinema in Cheltenham, where he was born in 1942. He grew up in New Zealand (where he has since returned to ‘retire’), moving there in 1951 and returning in 1964 to become a stuntman and bit-part theatre actor. He chose for a new surname O’Brien, his mother’s maiden name, as inevitably there was already a Richard Smith in Equity. By the time he sat down to write this odd rock musical he was a married man with a baby son. He drew on his love of B-movies for this classic opening song, managing to name check:

The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flash Gordon, The Invisible Man, King Kong, It Came from Outer Space, Doctor X, Forbidden Planet, Tarantula, The Day of the Triffids, Night of the Demon and When Worlds Collide.

Just in one song! It sets out the stall for the rest of the play, which has at its heart a fairly pedestrian premise: an innocent young couple’s car breaks down on a rainy night; they see a house and ask the occupants for help. In both the original stage version and movie they are met by O’Brien’s Riff Raff (looking not unlike a Roxy-era Brian Eno), who lures them in with the promise of getting dry and using the phone. They’ve arrived on a rather special night, for the master’s creature is destined to be born. And we’re off. It’s all a bit Hammer Horror, which fits perfectly as the movie ended up being filmed on the old Hammer lot in Berkshire. With this simple premise comes a fast-moving tale of sex and horror and death, one which must always be driven by the master of the house, Frank, the mad scientist. I can’t say anything new about the remarkable Tim Curry, except that he owns every second of his on-screen performance. There is no moving footage of him on stage in the original 1973 Royal Court Theatre production but fortunately, for posterity, the movie captured in glorious Technicolour every flirtatious wink and facial expression, alongside that rich voice and electric sexual charisma. No actor can outdo that performance: you just have to make it different. Many have tried, and some have been very good indeed (like Jonathon Morris, Anthony Head – Murray’s brother, musical nerd fact – and a few others) but I didn’t think anyone had delivered a performance to rival the original… until I saw the show last week for the first time in 21 years. Step forward David Bedella, a 53-year-old Chicagoan actor best known for his Olivier-winning role as Satan/the Warm-Up Man in Jerry Springer: The Opera and an unlikely turn on Holby City (he’s an experienced West End/Broadway performer, having played Sweeney Todd, Billy Flynn etc.). He has said that he tried to do the English accent and it came out so much like Tim Curry it was abandoned in his first rehearsal in 2006. Using his own American accent, a deep and sonorous baritone for both speaking and singing, it changed the part completely and allowed for a new painting. Since then he has become a fan favourite and the go-to Frank. He played the role for the first time in 2006/7, then again in 2009/10 and was bound to get the call – no doubt over some much more famous actors – for this two-week engagement. I now can’t imagine anyone else playing this part on stage, which is a shame really considering that it’s fairly certain to be the final time both he and O’Brien will appear in it. His Frank is everything it needs to be: flirtatious, filthy, masculine, seductive, rapacious, cruel, funny, empathetic and incredibly, ridiculously, sexy.

My own Rocky Horror history goes back over 25 years. I’m fairly sure I first saw the movie in 1989, so I would have been 12 or 13. Perhaps it was on TV, as it’s just the kind of thing Channel 4 would put on in those days when they were actually fulfilling their own remit of interesting programming and not just reality guff. I fell in love. One might say the two imposing figures of my puberty were Jareth and Frank-N-Furter, who on the surface are not dissimilar characters. Both a little evil yet dominantly alluring, both make tempting offers to innocent virgins, both are banished at the end but appear to survive, both sing and wear skimpy pants and have expertly applied their eye shadow. It’s no wonder I’ve turned out like this. I think it best not to convey exactly how much I enjoy viewing men wearing fishnets and heels, but suffice to say it has informed my tastes to this day, as a devoted viewer of Drag Race and fan of all things androgynous. In 1990 there was a West End revival but I don’t think that I saw Tim McInnerny (from Blackadder) in the part. Memory can be unreliable but I believe that a very odd thing happened when I went to London to see this version. I was all set to see Tim in the role but, unless memory has let me down, he broke his arm the night before and had to pull out. As Frank has no understudy, a stand-in was used: to the extreme shock of everyone present, when his entrance song kicked in Richard O’Brien himself was playing the part. I don’t think he’s ever done it before or since. I recall that Ade Edmondson, a year before he’d debut Bottom, his masterpiece with the late great Rik Mayall, lent a kind of unhinged quality to Brad that had been previously unexplored. Connections abound: Tenpole Tudor played O’Brien’s Riff Raff, and would later take over for him again and deflate The Crystal Maze (about which I could write another article). Jonathan Adams played the Narrator, the part he originated in 1973; for the movie he was moved over to play Dr Scott so a famous name (Charles Gray, Blofeld from Diamonds Are Forever) could take over. What I am sure of is that I saw the next iteration with Anthony Head playing Frank the year after and also twice more in 1994, with Jonathon Morris, who was a revelation. I was also lucky enough to see the 21st anniversary show and witnessed Patricia Quinn reprising her stage and movie role as Magenta, with O’Brien as the doomed biker Eddie.

For the actors, it’s a bit of a strange ‘adult panto but worse’ vibe. There are, effectively, two scripts: that of the play, that of the audience. Heckles are established and well practiced. An actor can barely reach the end of a single line without having something shouted at them that has wildly varying levels of cleverness and wit. Creating space for pauses, getting a song to yourself, allowing comic timing and interaction with other performers are all on shaky, often absent, ground. It must be a weird show to be in, where the audience are such a part of the experience, though you do get to be a rock star for the night. It’s the kind of thing you need a break from, and perhaps that’s why I’ve not seen it live in so long. I love the movie and its exquisite timing, so being surrounded by people screaming out every 10 seconds can be intensely irritating. But, as the song goes, once in a while…

There have been tours in the last decade but they never quite registered with me. However, when I heard that Richard O’Brien was returning to the role of the Narrator, surely for the last time, I was drawn out of my Rocky hibernation and grabbed a ticket for the Saturday night, which I thought would be the last performance but the week-long run got extended to two (good job it wasn’t more, my debit card would have been begging for mercy). What a rush, what a beautiful teenage nostalgic rush it was. By the interval I knew I had to get a ticket to see it a second time. The crowd created a deafening noise and gave O’Brien a standing ovation before he’d said a word. He raised an eyebrow, always the commanding performer, and took all hecklers on with panache. David Bedella, however, is not one to be outshone. I’d heard that he was a fan favourite and now I understand why. The man owned that theatre, right to the back row. By miles, the best stage Frank I have seen, and probably that has ever played it. Interestingly, he’s the first gay actor to take on the part. I can’t figure out why it’s always straight men who play Frank but there we go, an odd fact. No particular reason I’m sure, in the same way as Hedwig (another character that owes a fair bit to Rocky Horror) is fairly often played by straight actors. Everyone played their parts with aplomb and the show was as tight as a drum, as you’d expect and as it has to be given the nature and timing of the audience participation aspects. It rattled along at a breathless pace and the songs seemed closer together than I remember; for that reason, I was struck by their sheer quality. From the iconic There’s A Light… to the blustering Hot Patootie (Eddie’s cameo, Meat Loaf in the film of course) to the classics (Time Warp, Sweet Transvestite, which were reversed in order in the play, changed for the film then kept that way), and my personal favourite, the suite of ‘floorshow’ songs at the end: Rose Tint My World/Don’t Dream It, Be It/Wild and Untamed Thing.

During that run of songs comes a delicate invocation, almost a limerick, of Frank’s origins, which I’ve always found rather sweetly poetic:

Whatever happened to Fay Wray
That delicate satin-draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
For I wanted to be dressed just the same.

Tags: The Rocky Horror Show, Richard O'Brien

You'll Be Gone / Let The Right One Slip In / Suedehead / Speedway / Ganglord / Boxers / World Peace Is None Of Your Business / Kiss Me A Lot / Staircase At The University / Alma Matters / Will Never Marry / My Dearest Love / The Bullfighter Dies / The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores / Oboe Concerto / Meat Is Murder / Now My Heart Is Full / Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed / I Will See You In Far-Off Places / Everyday Is Like Sunday // The Queen Is Dead

Tags: Morrissey, Hammersmith Apollo

In 1997, during a visit to London, I saw The Dance, a VH1 concert that Fleetwood Mac had been persuaded into reforming for; Lindsey Buckingham had been out of the band for a decade by then, with the exception of an appearance at, erm, Bill Clinton’s inaugural ball in 1993 (he’d used Don’t Stop as his campaign song). I was instantly smitten by such perfectly formed songs – I also developed quite the crush on Lindsey, I freely admit. More than that, I was utterly entranced by Stevie’s voice and that whole lace-clad ethereal gypsy persona (much copied, stand up Florence, Courtney Love (love this cover), and many more). She threw him some serious shade, as they sang to each other:

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain.

I’d never seen anything like it, that charged connection between two singers, and his incredible, intuitive guitar playing, without a pick, which was another first for my eyes. I knew very little about them, but learned fast, via the BBC’s brilliant Rock Family Trees documentary series. I may have a tendency toward sonic oddities, but I love, just absolutely love, impeccably sophisticated pop music, which no doubt comes from being raised on Motown and the Beatles/Stones. I never bought into the idea that Fleetwood Mac were bland soft rock. They are not The Eagles. I think that attitude toward them came from post-Peter Green snobbery, based around the opinion that a blues band is more authentic and should be more respected than a band who ditches that style entirely and brings the hippy Californians in so they can become huge-selling. The Fleetwood Mac of the late 60s and early 70s is dramatically different in tone from the Buckingham/Nicks version and I think English blues fans, my parents included, felt they had lost something. To me, they had moved forward, with only the band name remaining the same. Peter Green’s FM are great, but the mid-70s output is what I fell for. I also only recently discovered the album that got the Yanks into the band, the superb Buckingham Nicks, which has never been reissued or remastered on any format since it came out in 1973.

Everyone knows the tales – addiction, rehab, affairs, divorces, rancour, break-ups; they embodied that 70s private jet, separate limos, bowls of coke excess – and to an extent that lived experience is part of the attraction if you see them live. You’re paying to see Stevie and Lindsay, who met in high school and were together for almost a decade, a lifetime ago, give each other the side-eye and bicker. You’re there to witness that attraction between them that will never end. You get the feeling neither is still entirely comfortable with having to spend their professional lives together, playing out songs from their break-up every night on stage, like a lifelong version of The Mousetrap, but they accept they are destined to stand on stage together, holding hands, until someone drops. Neither seems to be easy to get on with either. Lest we forget, in 1987, with a tour for their hugely well received comeback album Tango In The Night already booked, Lindsey airily announced at a band meeting that he had had enough and was leaving. Stevie chased him out of his own house, pinned him to a car bonnet and tried to strangle him. These rock tales are part of the attraction, but there is also clearly genuine affection between them, if a little sadness on her part. By virtue of biology, men get to move on in ways women can’t, inhibited by time. In his 50s Lindsey (now 65) met a blonde woman just over half his age and got married, then had a family; Stevie has said she knew it was finally over when his first child was born. A woman is not afforded that same luxury. Stevie married her best friend’s husband in the early 80s, a few months after losing her (cancer grief makes people do odd things), annulling the marriage a few months later, but she seems not to have had a significant relationship since, aside from one in the 90s with a younger non-famous man. It fell apart because, she said, they couldn’t go anywhere because of her fame. I get the sense she never got over Lindsey, that he is her great lost love. Incidentally, how weird must it be for his wife to see him holding his ex’s hand, singing to her every night? He’s worked through it all – it might be easier when love is found again – and you can tell he’s spent a long time in therapy just from the way he talks about full circles and patterns, that slightly loopy Esalen-style psychobabble. That story, that dynamic, is how you get drawn in, true enough, but if the music was average your attention couldn’t possibly justify the investment. It’s those songs; they are for the ages. I’d walk a million miles to hear their masterpiece Landslide, which has taken on such a poignant ache now the duo are approaching 70….

I took my love and took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Till the landslide brought me down

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too

There is also one, very new, X factor in this soapy drama: the return of Christine McVie (the oldest, at 71). If Lindsey’s tenure out of the band had ground them to a halt between 1987 and 1997 (they toured without him after his Tango tantrum but it was half-hearted), Christine’s departure in 1998 didn’t change the band’s plans. They toured without her because they had the momentum, even though it wasn’t the same and led to the loss of many great songs from the setlist (Say You Love Me, Everywhere, Little Lies, Songbird, You Make Loving Fun). She was happy and had retired to the Kent countryside; nobody expected her to return to the band, who, remember, have weathered the departures of Spinal Tap levels of members. Peter Green took too much acid, went mad and left. Jeremy Spencer got plucked off the street in LA by a religious cult and went off down his own path (still touring and making music at least). Danny Kirwan’s alcoholism got him fired. Bob Weston was fired for having an affair with Mick’s wife. And so on. So they are used to moving forward when a member has had their day. But it felt different with Christine. She’s always been the heart of the band, a hugely gifted songwriter and keyboardist, with a flawless voice, and her returned presence alone seems to just knit everything together. Stevie is visibly happier since she returned, following a one-off 2012 appearance at the O2 that last year turned into full un-retirement (she’s older than Bowie. It’s never too late. I’m just saying). Everyone seems thrilled she is back; they’re genuinely having a grand old time doing what they were born to do. The vibe on stage is warm and filled with energy. Mick and John in particularly are quite a pair of old boys, travelling musicians, on the road for nearly 50 years together. It’s what they do, it’s who they are. It’s life, living in hotels, always on the move, the adrenalin ups and managed downs (not with mountains of coke, these days, fortunately).

I’d never seen them live before; I’d been tempted on many occasions in the last decade but somehow never got round to it, perhaps it never felt right. I’m glad now that I didn’t see them without Christine – those five people are special, you can’t replicate that chemistry with just the four. For a while there I thought I might not see them ever, what with John McVie’s cancer diagnosis last year. He was looking a little grey around the gills (he’s 69) and only a few weeks ago talked about how he’s not got much more touring left in him, which is understandable. His musical partner and best friend Mick Fleetwood (68 and behaves like a teenager) is going to tour until he drops dead on stage, of that I am quite certain. His energy levels put us all to shame; he’s a funny, eccentric man who would have fitted in quite nicely to a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah line-up. He once played a fish in Star Trek: TNG you know. Anyway, my excitement level for this gig was sky high, as I’d loved this band for nearly two decades. I think perhaps the moment I realised they were for me back in 1997 was this crazy brilliant solo version of Big Love, where Lindsey plays both rhythm and lead parts at the same time; it’s a remarkable piece of work, I still have no idea how he does it. People don’t play guitar like him anymore, the way he does it, with all the solos and O-faces (seeing Santana next month, mind you, am expecting a two-hour-long solo). I wasn’t certain if they played it live, and given that the version from The Dance is nearly two decades old, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d chosen to play it a bit safer (with full band, like the original). So, I was utterly thrilled to hear the acoustic version exactly like I remembered it, now that was a serious highlight.

The big tunes kept coming, breathlessly, with the three singles from Tango In The Night – Big Love, Everywhere, Little Lies – getting huge responses. As many fans present were in their 40s and grew up hearing those late 80s singles as remember Rumours from the 70s. The only lengthy interludes, aside from a ridiculous drum solo (is there any other kind?), were a pair of songs back-to-back that saw them play around beautifully outside of their comfort zones as four-minute pop song purveyors. I’m So Afraid had such prog majesty it bordered on Pink Floyd-esque. But my highlight was a dramatic, lengthy, epic version of Gold Dust Woman, with Stevie doing her twirling mystical thing and the band getting a real head of steam on.

Oh, Stevie Nicks (the youngest of the five at 67). As 70s icons go – Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell – she is in their exalted company, easily. Her voice has no high range these days but she’s developed this gorgeous, deep, gravelly, powerful tone that has no trouble at all delivering these songs. She’s just so likeable, too; she exudes a kind of maternal kindness. And to have her girl Chris back in the band, it’s just added so much to the dynamic, musically and personally (interesting section in there about how they both felt unable to have families, like the men did). Stevie, incredibly, was only accepted into the band in the first place because Mick wanted her boyfriend in to play guitar and they were a package deal. They had no idea what they had; what a singer/songwriter she is, well able to write beyond the band too – her 1981 solo album Belladonna is superb (there’s no beating Edge Of Seventeen, a classic, or Leather and Lace, a Don Henley duet). She told a long, entertaining story before Gypsy – she probably tells the same one every night but I don’t care – about how she and Lindsey supported some of the big bands in San Francisco in the late 60s (Hendrix, Santana, Janis, who she is not a million miles away from, a pop version if you like). Her day job, as a waitress, supported them both while they toiled away, waiting to be discovered. There was a clothing store in the Bay Area, called The Velvet Underground (said without irony; how many minds but mine in the O2 wandered to think of the band?), which sold hippy clothes to the local rock stars, like Janis and Grace Slick. Stevie would go in and know she couldn’t afford anything, but dreamed of being able to buy something without looking at the price tag, which she went back and did only a few years later. Like most stories told by people in therapy/recovery she makes it a paean to not giving in, believing in yourself and following your heart/dreams and all that kind of West coast guff. Gypsy’s opening lyric, of course, runs:

So I'm back, to the velvet underground
Back to the floor, that I love
To a room with some lace and paper flowers
Back to the gypsy that I was
To the gypsy... that I was
And it all comes down to you
Well, you know that it does

I enjoyed the story, it was well told, and the song itself has a beautiful simplicity to it, which is not something you could accuse this band of too much. Their Rumours follow-up, the sprawling but not unlistenable double album Tusk, cost over $1m to make and Lindsey was so out of it, and being an unbearable control freak, he thought it sensible to hire a 112-piece marching band for the title track. Fleetwood Mac are why punk had to happen.

Anyway, regardless of their crowded and complex history, and disparate personalities, all given equal front-time, when they are on stage they click into that rhythm that all great bands have, and everything just works like magic. You get exactly what you want, without that predictability ever being a bad thing; this was their 95th gig of the tour and it still felt fresh as gig 1. You sing and do embarrassing white person dancing and everyone is just so happy. What more could anyone ever want from a gig? I hope I get the chance to see them many more times.


The Chain
You Make Loving Fun
Dreams
Second Hand News
Rhiannon
Everywhere
I Know I'm Not Wrong
Tusk
Sisters of the Moon
Say You Love Me

(Acoustic Set)
Big Love (Lindsey solo)
Landslide
Never Going Back Again

Over My Head

Gypsy
Little Lies
Gold Dust Woman
I'm So Afraid
Go Your Own Way

Encore:
World Turning
Don't Stop
Silver Springs

Encore 2:
Songbird (Christine solo at piano)

Tags: Fleetwood Mac, Lindsay Buckingham, Stevie Nicks

Photo by Richard Etteridge

Not for the first time, I had a moment of realisation last night. There’s an endless list of reasons why I love gigs so much but I think a big one is the utter immersion of it. You’re in a dark room, with strangers. You don’t have anything to worry about, you leave (you should leave) your work/life stresses at the door. You’re shut in. Sound and visual stimulation sweep the space. Anything could be happening outside that room and you wouldn’t know about it. An asteroid could have knocked out half of Europe, austerity riots could be in full swing, a lake of fire could be where the Thames was, or a politician could have nearly done the full Madonna and stumbled off a stage on Question Time. Ok, that last one actually happened. But nothing matters outside the room. It’s like a football match, it’s the most pure here and now of a moment. You’re transported somewhere. Of course, not all gigs are the same. The average, good and sometimes even great ones can cause my attention span to wander (that’s what nearly two decades of being online will do to you)… what Tube route should I take home (for the South Bank I’ve taken to walking across the bridge by Embankment station, it’s lovely)? I wonder if I will get any work in tomorrow? I wonder if that person will reply to that email? Should I get a snack on the way home (I shouldn’t)? I hope I get Dylan tickets in the morning (I did). Some of it boring detritus, some is important thoughts that you wish you weren’t thinking. But not last night, not with Laura Marling. There was no distraction that floated in. I was immersed, rapt, dazzled, by this gifted young woman.

In the current age, where media training faces off in a heavyweight battle with the over-share, we both dread and desire the knowability of the famous. It’s not a new thing, prying into the private lives of people whose creativity has a crucial presence in our lives. I’m sure that admirers and benefactors hounded Mozart about his marriage, while Lennon’s wife and child were hidden from the public in the white-hot glare of early Beatlemania, and this was all before the advent of the internet. Yet, women in music seem to occupy a more studied, criticised, judged place. Perhaps the ground zero for this is Joni Mitchell, an article about whom is never written without mentioning the men she’s slept with and been disappointed by. In her rare but always compelling interviews (try to ignore the interviewer, a now-disgraced Canadian journalist, Google him at your peril) she seems to constantly exist in a state of bitterness at being treated a certain way by the music industry (meaning: men). This is how she is defined – by the male gaze. It’s how she’s defined by others and, despite being brilliant and insightful and worth more, it’s how she defines herself. She always has a bad word to say about her treatment, not without cause. And Marling has been subject to the same clichés, as each article and interview mentions how many folk band boyfriends she’s had (the singers from Noah and the Whale, and Mumford and Sons, articles are keen to tell us) and how she moved to America because she fell in love with a boy, and then they broke up and she’s back here now and she might be single, might not be… and so on. Is this newsworthy? Only if you care about that kind of thing. Does it matter even a tiny fucking amount when you listen to her songs? No.

On stage, it is only about music. Nothing else matters. She barely speaks to the audience. Dylan, incidentally, almost never says a single word between songs. Saving his voice perhaps? (eyebrow raise). She says hello about 20 minutes in, after the first suite of songs, played without breaks, has ended, as the applause and energy that has built up over those minutes explodes. The only other time she speaks is 10 minutes before the end, where she gives a short speech about how she did an encore for the first time the other night, didn’t like it, isn’t going to do it again, and if you want one, well, it’s about to happen right now. She said she had been giving variations on that ‘encore’ speech for the last 8 years. It was charming and the audience lapped it up. Perhaps they had been crying out to be verbally connected to? I hadn’t. I don’t need to know her. I was inside the songs, mesmerised by her voice and the film playing on a big screen behind her. I thought at first it was a photograph of a desert vista: a late afternoon, a low mountain range in the background, with two trails of sandy footprints leading towards (or away from, if you want to think of it that way) the camera. But when I would lose track of it just for a minute or two a small thing would change, like a time-lapse tableau; a half-moon appeared in the distance, the lighting changed, at first imperceptibly, and then the sky started to get darker, glacially slowly. Near the end of the show, time started to move faster – car headlights appeared in the distance, snaking from left to right across a northern California highway. The moon disappeared, and then real darkness fell. The camera started to tilt up inch by inch as the stars came out. By the end the mountains and sand were out of sight and a million pinprick holes glittered, like a shot from the Hubble Telescope. By the time the stars had arrived, and as she sang the aching, poignant Goodbye England (Covered In Snow), given added meaning now she has returned to live here, I felt myself well up and wondered if I could experience a more pure moment than this.

Tags: Laura Marling

Television used to work differently. It’s not that the internet has changed everything (though it has). It’s that in the last 15+ years there has been a shift of talent away from film to the small screen. Maybe shift is the wrong word, as it’s not like movies are now awful and all the good creatives (actors, directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, editors) are now working exclusively in TV. It’s more like a democratisation, whereby the spread of talent is more evenly spaced. This is resultant from the fact that it’s harder to create original projects via the Hollywood studio system now than at any point in history; there are also myriad new outlets available that relate to greater home viewing technology, e.g. Netflix, big flat-screen TVs, better streaming, not to mention illegal downloads and so on. Studios want financially driven certainties, and the monetary gap between tent-pole summer bankers (remakes, sequels, comic book franchises) and the smaller films that the big ones allow to be made is now a vast chasm. There’s not much middle ground, few $50-80m movies. It’s either $100-150m (and more) or $30-40m. There are zeitgeist-led exceptions, like 50 Shades of Grey (cost: $40m, box office $558m – who is watching this dreck I have no idea), but the difference is this: you can spend $30-40m on a 10-episode big drama for AMC, or HBO, or Showtime, and get creative control over everything from the writers’ room to the final edit. So who wouldn’t want to do that when the other option is to make your drama into a two-hour movie at a studio where the marketing department have creative input (read: interference from people who have never written a movie) and their script notes make you want to jump out of a window.

It’s a no-brainer and we think we have David Chase to thank for it, because received wisdom has The Sopranos as the ground zero for the start of movie-to-TV slide. And when it comes to adult drama on cable, that’s spot on. The Sopranos changed everything. But if you look further, beyond cult TV and its few million subscribers, and search for wider cultural influence that far outweighs the eyeballs that have ever laid eyes on Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men, you must begin and end with The X-Files. It was not a cult show, just because it was science-fiction, any more than Star Trek and its tens of millions of fans is a cult show. It was watched, hugely, massively watched, on Fox (which every American household has) by 15 million viewers weekly, often topping 20 million between seasons 4-6 (only in the final season did the viewing figures drop a bit and even then they pushed over 9 million). These are figures that not even today’s biggest cable shows – Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead – can dream of. The ‘mythology’ episodes tapped into that very peculiar American mindset of worry, paranoia, suspicion and distrust of the government, which had been growing exponentially since Watergate. It also existed in a pre-9/11 universe – when Americans thought their biggest threats would be domestic; it’s a show with no idea what was coming in relation to global political extremism but it wasn’t such a stretch to create a world that bluntly told its audience how much the authorities were hiding. It never mentioned a sitting president, nor did it make specific reference to politicians, or Congress/the Senate: this was the point; all of the people really controlling American life were faceless bureaucrats (NSA, CIA, FBI et al.) who nobody voted for. In our post-Snowden era, where drones do the work of pilots and the internet and phone companies record and examine our data and behaviours, so much of it seems chillingly prescient. It always cleverly exploited the disconnect between larger issues of privacy, secrecy, government control and interference, tapping into a somewhat libertarian angle, and the simplicity of relationships, out-there individuals, and communities and their dark secrets. As many episodes as there were about the bigger mythology of what’s being hidden from the populace by shadowy government syndicates and, more commonly, the military, there were far more stand-alone stories about the strangeness of small town life. It trod a steady line between the ridiculous and the plausible, and it was funny, exciting, terrifying, gripping, daft, outlandish and believable, and was propelled, as the best shows are, by great writing, sparkling ideas, innovative creativity and electric chemistry.

It’s important to try and quantify some of the influence it has had in terms of the current TV landscape. So what do we have to go on? Let’s start with the obvious. There would be no Breaking Bad without it. Showrunner Vince Gilligan learned his trade writing and producing X-Files episodes; his season 6 episode Drive cast Bryan Cranston as the lead guest and the rest is history. Researching this article has made me realise just how many of my most cherished episodes were his; they must get him back in the summer at least as a consultant, Better Call Saul is just going to have to cope. Then there’s Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa; they’re responsible for 24 and Homeland (talk about paranoid and preposterous, with a lead equal parts brilliantly intuitive Scully and haunted/slightly unhinged Mulder). Writing duo James Wong and Glen Morgan left in season 2 and created the wonderfully trashy Final Destination series; they now write/produce American Horror Story. Michelle MacLaren produced the final two seasons and now works on The Walking Dead, having won Emmys for her work on Breaking Bad. There’s many more… from David Greenwalt (Buffy, Angel, Grimm) to Rob Bowman (Castle), the tentacles of this show reach every corner of TV. Some of the guest writers are a pretty impressive roster: Stephen King, William Gibson, Tim Minear (American Horror Story), Jeffrey Bell (Angel, Alias, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D), Chip Johannessen (Dexter, Homeland), John Shiban (Breaking Bad), Steven Maeda (CSI: Miami, Lost).

One of my favourite influences is nicely called The Scully Effect. This details, essentially, how Gillian Anderson encouraged generations of teenage girls to go into science careers. She did this not just because she played a doctor, but because she wasn’t a bimbo. That in itself caused consternation at the network, who wanted to replace her with a Pamela Anderson type (imagine that for a second would you). Chris Carter, the show’s creator, head writer and showrunner, refused, saying simply that this woman had to be believable as a medical doctor and that he had found a gem in this unknown 24-year-old. He dug in and fought for her, and everyone knows what a remarkable actress she has become. She had to be the centre of exposition, every week, reining in her crackpot but brilliant partner, and when she got pregnant one season in Fox fancied this as their chance to get rid of her, but no, Carter wouldn’t have it, so she was written around and prevailed, becoming surely one of the most iconic characters in TV history (though it took her years to get the same pay as Duchovny). Their relationship, off-screen and on, well, that’s a complex issue.

I think part of the magic of the show was their slightly distant relationship in real life. That on-screen crackle, that annoyance at each other’s viewpoints mixed with very obvious sexual attraction, seems to derive from it. They are very different people, and when the show was being made were at very different points in both their working and personal lives. In addition, working a 14+ hour day, 5 or 6 days a week, in beautiful but chilly and rainy Vancouver, doesn’t incline you to go out boozing with your co-worker. They got on, as they sat in the eye of a weird storm together for nearly a decade, but spent time enough together on set. Ironically, the two actors are very close now (and flirt with each other via Twitter, causing the internet to implode into its own event horizon), which makes me wonder about what effect that will have on-screen when the show returns. The X-Files, it is no coincidence, lost all impetus and good sense when Mulder and Scully became a couple (of sorts, they had an alien baby or something, it’s stupid and complicated). I find it best to try and pretend that large swathes of seasons 8 and 9 and the second movie didn’t happen. Having said that, they’re going to have to deal with all of this in the upcoming miniseries, 6-episode revisit/reboot/continuation, whatever you want to call it, which has me feeling a bit cautious. You can tell by now, this show means a lot to me.

I remember seeing a trailer for it on BBC2 – it was, as I have now found out, September 1994. I was 17 and my friends and I had discovered the joys of nightclubs and boyfriends. University beckoned and life was changing dramatically around me. The show had premiered in the US a year earlier, and on Sky in January. This comes back to the pre-internet era, which nobody under 25 even remembers I’m sure. You had to wait, for months upon months, to watch your favourite American shows. I started going online in the mid 90s, I would go to the Manchester branch of Cyberia (the first ever internet café) opposite the Central Library and try not to spoil episodes during my endless visits to rudimentary newsgroups, message boards and websites, or fansites as they were called then (ironically, the founder of Cyberia, Eva Pascoe, is one of my clients now, talk about full circle). I remember waiting a good 10 minutes to load tiny pixelated 30-second trailers for the next episode and gleefully perusing obsessive-beyond-words ‘shipper’ sites (like this one, last updated in about 1998). Shipping, a sub-genre of fan-fiction (which was invented by Star Trek fans in the 60s), where fans write relationships (cf. porn!) between characters/actors/pop stars, was invented by the X-Files. The first shippers were Mulder/Scully devotees and they pounced upon every glance, smile, brush of the arm, bit of chaste flirtation, and if you were very lucky, the odd hug (blogs like this and this make me feel positively normal). It was precisely the lack of on-screen physical contact that caused the tension to thrive at the pace it did. This was purposeful, and when the characters actually got together, once the initial thrill was over (they played it so well, mind you), it deflated the relationship like a Roswell weather balloon. The meta-joke of it all had been explored smartly in the otherwise terrible garbage monster episode Arcadia (season 6), where they posed as a married couple. So, anyway, yes, I saw a trailer – a tall, thin man, with a cigarette in his hand, walking toward the camera, in what turned out to be a Pentagon warehouse with boxes of evidence of all things piled high on either side Raiders of the Lost Ark style: the fruits of the government/military’s labour, working hard to hide their secrets from you. I was intrigued and watched the pilot; instantly, I was hooked. I think I watched the first two seasons on the BBC before getting exasperated with the time delay.

I had a friend called Ellen Singer; we met when I was 11 and she was 15. My first day at secondary school I think gran had taken me and she spotted this, frankly, Jewish-looking girl outside the gates. Not a lot of Jews at Manchester High School For Girls. She asked this girl, essentially, to keep an eye on me and make sure I was ok (thus beginning my tendency to basically have no friends of exactly my own age). She became responsible for my love of both Queen and Star Trek. I would go to her house on Parkhill Drive in Whitefield and hang out with her and Steven, her super geeky nuclear physicist brother. Through them I learned everything there was to know about Trek, X-Men (she was a comic collector), Dungeons and Dragons, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, Terry Pratchett and very basic computer games. I used to go round every Sunday night and we’d get Chinese food and watch the new episode of the X-Files on Sky. This went on for years, but we grew up and drifted apart, sadly. Her parents were Conservatives, her father was the Mayor of Bury actually, and as I became more politically aware I realised how different we were ideologically, though it was my departure to university that caused the drift. I still retain great affection for her, however, and her role in my life, and we exchanged some messages when my mother passed.

So after a few years of watching the X-Files at her place, I yet again was driven to realise my need to get hold of episodes faster. I was active online and, I can’t at all remember how, got a penpal. This guy, let’s call him Mike (because that was his name), lived in Iowa and was about twice my age. He was very smart indeed, well-read, liberal, and a porn fan who had his creepy moments. Largely, we had brilliant email interactions, and I learned a huge amount about American politics from him. He worked in a community college in the AV department and had access to dubbing equipment. So the next X-Files era began – he would tape each episode, dub and convert it from the American system of NTSC to the UK system of PAL, sling four episodes on a VHS tape each month and mail it to me in Manchester. In exchange (before you think it, no I didn’t do anything weird for him in return) I would tape him stuff from British TV that he liked, sitcoms and music shows, and I’d find and send over bootlegs (he was a big Beatles/Clapton fan). After the X-Files was over, incidentally, he did the same thing with Buffy. For years we exchanged VHS tapes, in a pre-WeTransfer universe. It was so exciting, to get hold of American TV only a few weeks after they had seen it, and surely before anyone else in the UK who wasn’t similarly enterprising. Even Sky didn’t show the X-Files until 3-4 months after the episodes were on in America. How different the landscape is now, as the internet allows me to watch everything, from Modern Family to the Daily Show, as early as the morning after US broadcast.

There was great excitement in our house when the thud of the tape on the hallway mat took place. I would usually watch the episodes at my gran’s, at the weekend, first, then bring them home for mum and I to watch together. She loved the show, truly. We would howl with laughter at both the funny bits and the scary ones; we had episodes we talked about for years. Like season 3’s Teso Dos Bichos; a very average episode about possessed animal spirits (Scully is attacked by a feral cat, not even kidding) enlivened only by a scene where a mass of rats comes out of a toilet bowl. As a lifelong phobic of both rats and mice my mother would squeal and hide behind her hands at the sight of any ‘Mickey’, as she’d call them, on TV. The idea of rats coming out of a loo when you opened the lid made her jump in the air. I feel the same way about spiders, which remained thankfully absent from any episodes, though season 3’s brilliantly weird and funny War of the Coprophages (fancy word for shit-eaters) makes me squirm to this day even if I think about its thousands of cockroach cast members. We had a particular grim affection for season 5’s remarkable Home – an episode so fucked up and horrifying that it was banned from Fox as soon as it aired and has never been shown on American broadcast TV since (it’s all about multi-generational incest, as soundtracked by Johnny Mathis, and features an inbred woman, who gives birth to her sons’ children, with no arms/legs living on a piece of wood with wheels nailed to the bottom under a bed). How it even made it onto TV I have no idea but it’s still one of my favourites. You can’t watch it late at night. It’s much scarier than The Calusari, the disturbing season 2 tale of a possessed blank-eyed Omen-like child, which still stands as the only episode to be rated 18. My mother would have been so thrilled and excited to watch new episodes, so I expect a raft of mixed feelings when they appear.

Tags: The X-Files, Scully, Mulder

Having written that cathartic blog last week I’ve been having trouble finding anything new to say. I’ve already covered in painful detail what Queen mean to me and how their unnatural end changed my life. I dredged up feelings that had been buried for over 20 years. But I feel like I can’t bring the chapter to a close without reporting at least something about the concert. I’ve been avoiding writing anything because there’s too much to think about, and ok, because I’d really like to go and see them again at Wembley Arena next month and properly commit to getting to the front. I was just less than half way back on the standing floor at the O2; admittedly, I had a great view of the B-stage activities and the people around me were nice (if a little greatest-hits-y, I don’t think they knew Stone Cold Crazy, a super loud live favourite; so heavy, in fact, it was covered by Metallica). But… gigs are better when you’re in the thick of it and I wasn’t right in there. If I can go again I will, but I’m not paying a tout for the privilege (though let’s see how desperate I get). Incidentally, I was impressed that they had standing floor – other oldie acts, for that is what they are, like The Who or Fleetwood Mac don’t do that (though I bet Aerosmith do).

So, simply, honestly, it was everything I could have wished for and more. I don’t take part in online activity related to Queen but a quick scan of the two main forums (official and the biggest fansite, QueenZone), as expected, are split over whether this whole Adam Lambert adventure is to be approved of. Some liked Paul Rodgers, for some reason, and some hate Lambert (I’ve even read a few instances of outright homophobia, which I find shocking, calling him too ‘lewd and camp’. Never mind that Freddie was the queerest singer in rock history). Some, the real hardcore, refuse to accept anything post-1991. The band without Freddie is not worth a damn. A part of me, as a Queen purist who has hated pretty much everything they’ve done since 1991, gets that. I couldn’t bear to hear those songs done by an imposter either, but something about Lambert just tickles me. He’s got a great voice, tons of charisma and stage presence, and he’s beautiful, cheeky, camp, flirtatious (with everyone) and overtly sexual in a way that Freddie could never have been in his lifetime, which itself is worth something in the realm of progress. I liked him before he joined the band and I like him even more now. He’s not trying to be Freddie, nor is he trying to banish his memory. He respects what brought him to this place, standing on this stage. I get it – he has the real spirit of proceedings spot on. He’s respectful, but doesn't shy away from making the night his own. The balance, all night, was perfect. It wouldn’t be a leap at all to say that I can imagine Freddie would have adored him. Of course, however, it’s emotionally complex for everyone, Brian and Roger most of all. In particular, two songs exemplified this, which I’ll come to later.

One Vision
Stone Cold Crazy
Another One Bites the Dust
Fat Bottomed Girls
In the Lap of the Gods... Revisited
Seven Seas of Rhye
Killer Queen
I Want to Break Free
Don't Stop Me Now
Somebody to Love
Love of My Life
'39
These Are the Days of Our Lives
Bass Solo/Drum Battle
Under Pressure
Save Me
Who Wants to Live Forever
Last Horizon/Guitar Solo
Tie Your Mother Down
I Want It All
Radio Ga Ga
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Bohemian Rhapsody

Encore:

We Will Rock You
We Are the Champions

Last year, the brilliant Mikal Gilmore wrote a tender, heartfelt piece about Queen that encapsulated what kind of band they were and carefully unravelled the nightmare that saw their end. The subhead was the best summation you could imagine: theatrical, brilliant, excessive and doomed. Of course, they were a million other things too, and there was not only no other band like them, but their leader was… well, what adjectives are left to describe him? I thought of that article this week, in the lead-up to seeing (half of) them live on Sunday January 18th with Adam Lambert, who is going to do a fine job, because he gets it; his American Idol audition was Bohemian Rhapsody.

So why I am writing this? I’m not even certain I want to write anything down for permanence, opening up those old wounds, let alone have anyone read it. I have so many memories and thoughts swirling around my head, some of which are profoundly strange, so I feel uncertain about whether anyone should read this, even if it is a personal catharsis. This band are the most personal to me, more than any other, and their emotional effect is indescribable, more so than Bowie. Perhaps it’s because he’s still here, even if I don’t get to gaze upon that beautiful face in real life anymore. Perhaps it’s because I went through a trauma with them in a way I never have with anyone else. I have never loved a band like I love Queen – that first, teenage, love, right? It never goes away and it is never surpassed. The Beatles and Stones and Zeppelin and The Doors and Dylan and all the rest are the bands of my parents, first. Queen never were. They were mine. My dad doesn’t get it at all. He finds them ludicrous, overblown, preposterous and irritating – he is right on all counts. I learned, recently, that it’s Brian May’s playing that lies at the crux of his allergy, which is a bit of a problem because his sound is Queen as much as the voice. He couldn’t exactly explain what his problem with Brian is, something about wringing the notes out, the very timbre of the sound of his playing is like Marmite to dad, which is funny in a way because he loves old fashioned guitar playing and in July will make me sit through 2 hours of Santana’s scrunchy-faced, over-wrought, endless soloing.

I think (hope) he recognises that Queen have written some great pop/rock songs, but he’s formed in his head a pre-conceived notion that will not change, despite being based only on the ‘famous’ singles they’ve released. If I told him I’d discovered this awesome prog band from the 70s he’d never heard of, and sent him a copy of Queen II with a fake name, he would love it if he thought it was by someone else, for its sheer musicality and inventiveness. The core of their appeal, I think, is that there’s something for everyone. They were wonderfully hit and miss, and god knows there is some real dreck in their catalogue, entire albums with only 2 or 3 good songs. But when they hit it, boy did they hit it. Only Bowie has attempted as many genres, which is probably why he fancied them as a perfect fit for Under Pressure, which let’s face it is a pretty strange record. You know it well, but if you actually listen intently it’s most oddly structured, has no chorus and faintly disturbing and doomy subject matter. They’ve done it all – big pomp rock (what is more ridiculous than We Are The Champions?), massive stadium pop tunes (Radio Ga Ga), vaudeville (Old Fashioned Lover Boy), prog, classical and operatic madness (all in one song, you know which), gorgeous love songs (You’re My Best Friend), novelty records (Bicycle Race), Elvis-pastiche-rockabilly (Crazy Little Thing Called Love), fairly heavy metal (Sheer Heart Attack, Stone Cold Crazy and lots more), even pop funk, Moroder-style, on the not-as-bad-as-you-think Hot Space album (Dancer).

Freddie used to say that they were the most preposterous band that ever lived. I think what sets them apart is sense of humour; a bit like Jethro Tull, and unlike other prog luminaries (yer Genesis, ELP), they knew they were outlandish and it was all rather done with a wink (just give a glance to the video for I Want To Break Free). You may be surprised to hear me say they were prog but for much of the 70s, certainly their first five records, they absolutely were. Every member was a songwriter and had an ear for a great pop song, each contributing plenty to the canon. I forget exactly when I fell for them, but I think it was around the time of The Miracle’s release in mid-1989. I was just starting to get into heavier rock and I Want It All was a big record for me, as was the follow-up single Breakthru (its video is still tremendously fun). I had a friend at the time who loved them and I’m certain she was partly responsible for introducing me to their music. I couldn’t take my eyes off the singer and I fell in love with the brilliant musicians around him instantly – I marvelled at the guitarist’s mastery, ideas and ability to control a song so completely, and of course, I had the biggest crush on the drummer… what a pretty boy he was back in the day. The bassist always seemed out of place, like he’d rather have been a provincial Home Counties chartered surveyor, though he certainly knew his way around the instrument and penned some brilliant songs as well. When he retired from music in 1993 and retreated completely from any kind of contact, except financial, with Roger and Brian, absolutely nobody was surprised.

When they went one man down, on November 24th 1991, they all agreed the band was over – but it just wouldn’t die. After all, what else can touring musicians do? They don’t know how to, nor do they wish to, do anything else. Remember also that they had missed out on the last five years of the band’s touring lifespan and hadn’t played a gig since 1986, at Knebworth. Oh for a DVD of that gig… but having had two shows already filmed in entirety on that tour (Budapest and Wembley) they chose not to film it so it’s lost to the mists of time forever. They wanted to play live again, which is understandable, so in 2005 recruited the very macho, heterosexual, bluesy ex-Free/Bad Company singer Paul Rodgers to front. I thought it was a huge, nay gargantuan, mistake. You don’t have to be gay to sing for Queen (and indeed Freddie himself liked a bit of both in his younger days) but it helps. You have to acknowledge the thoroughly bonkers, camp, heavy and commercial songs and persona that came before you. Doing it straight, no pun intended, was not the right approach. A leaden, lumpen, and worse than anything else, boring set of live shows, and a badly received album, set the band back. I also felt that the We Will Rock You musical, though lucrative and hugely successful, was damaging to the legacy, not least because it’s such a piece of shit. The songs are what they are, and nicely delivered and staged, but my god, you can barely believe the guy who wrote it once did The Young Ones and Blackadder. I suppose, however, it’s kept the band in people’s minds; they are bigger now, it seems, and more sewn into culture than they were during the 18 years (yes, only 18) they were making records.

Another example of poor legacy management, and one which I don’t think much of either, has been to haul out the last demos of songs and work them round, like The Doors did with An American Prayer. Not a lot of quality control going on though when the poor fucker doing the singing is just getting out as many notes as he can until he drops. Last July I did get to stand on the very spot in Montreux he sang his last in (the famous Smoke On The Water casino, now turned into a small but wonderful Queen museum), which was almost unbearably moving. However, I have little desire to listen to bits of songs magically discovered from some old demo (the truly awful There Must Be More To Life Than This, a duet with Michael Jackson, proves beyond doubt that these things should be left on the cutting room floor); let the albums rest as they are. Innuendo was a fine enough swan song, equal parts overdone, heartbreakingly sad, funny, majestic and filler. It was, in fact, when Innuendo, the title track, came out (entering the charts at number 1, which is common now but was almost unheard of in 1991) that I became so devoted. It is an absurd epic, an ambitious and intense six minutes of ageless prog opera (it even includes a flamenco section rendered by Brian and Steve Howe from Yes, it’s that arrogant!) and to this day it makes me walk a little taller when I hear it on the iPod. I bought the album, on cassette, the day it came out. It was shortly after its release when the black clouds started to gather and trouble began to loom, with accompanying whispers and rumours and worries. In early 1991, I was watching the video for Headlong on TOTP when mum came in and told me, for she was as blunt as the day is long, how ill Freddie looked, how gaunt. I was a pretty naïve 14-year-old, quite sheltered, and I said: don’t be daft, he’s fine! What did I know? Absolutely nothing it turned out. I marvel now, and shake my head, just thinking about it because you can see so very crystal clearly exactly the progression of AIDS just from watching the band’s video clips. How could I have not seen it?

He was unlucky enough to have gotten it at a time before the treatments and medications changed the lives of so many millions of people, who are now living long lives with the disease. If he’d contracted HIV even just a few years later he’d probably still be here. It’d be him marrying his handsome Irish partner Jim Hutton, a shy, quiet barber (also now gone, to cancer 5 years ago; if you have the stomach for it, here’s his account of the last days, grab a tissue) instead of Elton and David. It’s possible to make an estimate for when it all began as being somewhere in early 1987, just after he had left Munich (he’d spent several years living there, the city being famous for some of the most bacchanalian gay nightlife in all of Europe) for London. You can see it all, laid bare in the videos he made: the early drugs like AZT could cause bloating, which you can see in 1987 (The Great Pretender), 1988 (the fantastically ridiculous Barcelona) and up to May 1989 (I Want It All). He even grew a bit of a beard to hide the weight gain, which nobody, I don’t suppose, thought was a sign of anything. By Breakthru he is still obviously in very good health but slowly the weight is starting to go. He gets slimmer, slowly, as each video goes by: The Invisible Man, Scandal and The Miracle, by which time he’s certainly looking slender, but still not ill, as such. But, by February 1990, when he made his final public appearance at the Brits, where the band were to receive an honorary award, the truth was naked for all to see. Clean-shaven, dressed in powder blue silk, he looks frail and sick, a completely different human from the master of Live Aid, 4½ years before. And it would get a lot worse.

There had been no video for Innuendo (released in January 1991) and the rumours, among those who knew what they were looking for, began to mount. So the band must have thought, fuck it, let’s just make videos and let history record the truth. The video for Headlong, filmed in late 1990 but released as the third single, concealed nothing but he was still energetic, at least. Then, the monochrome I’m Going Slightly Mad, filmed in February 1991, with Freddie in wig and make-up, also hid nothing (though he was certainly very mobile and expressive). The Show Must Go On, the next single, released in October, had no clip to sell it; Brian’s lyrics are among the most defiantly moving I’ve ever heard, while the vocals were recorded in one take, incredibly. The final video, These Are The Days Of Our Lives (written by Roger, vocalising impending loss and death in the most tender way), was filmed on May 30th, though it was released in December. Finally, there it all was, out there in public – no denying it now. It shows the truth: a man in the last months of his life who can barely stand; it had to be filmed in black and white because the colour rushes were just beyond words, almost impossible to watch. I still find it painful to watch the original video, and when writing this I got in and found the link as fast as I could, choosing not to watch it, because it tends to leave me in tears.

For me, it was a very confusing time, because on some level I think I knew something was wrong (or maybe I really was in complete denial), but I had no knowledge of AIDS; in the very early 90s, most people didn’t know what was really going on, and teenagers certainly had less information and education on these things than most. We had no idea of the entire generations of men being taken in their 20s, 30s and 40s. The tens of thousands in London and San Francisco and New York and countless other cities wasting away in front of their families and friends. The hundreds of funerals friends of mine went to, one after the other, every week. Freddie Mercury was simply one of the 39 million people who have died since the epidemic began. It wasn’t like governments cared: Reagan famously didn’t even say the word AIDS until 1985, by which time thousands were dead. Only gays though, who didn’t vote for him anyway, so it was hardly a surprise that his administration openly laughed at people even asking questions about it as thousands lay dying and in need of medical attention.

The tabloids have pretty much always been filled with craven, judgmental, misogynist, homophobic invective. But what they would find fit to report today is a cakewalk compared to how they treated Freddie Mercury as he had a few months of life left. Instead of going to die in Switzerland, a place he had a beautiful home in, right on the lake in Montreux, he wanted to spend his last days in England, his adopted country. I always saw him as this rather posh, endearingly reserved (very few filmed interviews exist, but in them you can see he was as shy as he could be outlandish), very English bloke, and didn’t know at first he was actually born on a small island (then called Zanzibar, now part of Tanzania) off the coast of Africa and grew up in India, educated in a boarding school (hence the posh accent), before his well-off Gujarati parents fled a revolutionary uprising (to glamourous Feltham, Middlesex) in the early 60s. Mind you, as Zanzibar was an England protectorate he was a British citizen from birth. There was nobody more English in spirit and persona than Freddie.

So, as he wanted to die here, the tabloid press embarked upon a sickening game of hide and seek, as they tried to catch him out, the lying queer, and out him as a sick man, punished by his own promiscuity. To what end? Sales, I suppose, and it became quite the game of cat and mouse as he left home briefly in the early autumn for doctors’ appointments and the like. The final photo caught him on Harley Street less than 2 months before he died – he didn’t leave his house after that. The vernacular they used to sneer and speculate about his health was deeply unpleasant and would never be employed now, even by a piece of shit rag like the Daily Mail. He had no right, it seemed, to live his remaining days in peace. The paparazzi camped outside his Kensington house, where the curtains had to remain drawn for fear of a last, profitable, photo. He had never sought sympathy, and never complained about his lot; he just got on with it. When he told the band, who immediately closed ranks around him, he had said, paraphrasing, “rumours about my health are true but I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to make music until I fucking drop”. That’s what he was like, very matter of fact, unrepentant, and without a shred of self-pity.

Some AIDS activists attacked him for remaining so silent about his illness (and for leaving everything to Mary Austin, his lifelong confidante and partner for six years in the late 60s/early 70s, rather than the man he lived with, who she cut out of all arrangements even as he nursed Freddie to his end; it was a different time, as we say a lot these days) but he didn’t owe anybody the grim details of his health status. The press hounded him to his grave anyway. The Daily Star, and this is the one I really remember, put out a cover a few weeks before his death. It said: “Why are you hiding, Freddie?” The private business of celebrities being in the ‘public interest’ is not a new phenomenon, but that was way over the line. The Sun’s “Tragic face of Freddie Mercury” cover was just another example of his treatment. The same paper, in 1987, had bought a tell-all interview from his assistant Paul Prenter (everyone in the band suspected him as a snake from day one, but Freddie was a trusting type and it broke his heart when Prenter betrayed him; he was paid £32,000 for his betrayal, I hope it was worth it) with the charming headline: “AIDS kills Freddie’s 2 lovers”. He was 45 when he died, which to me seemed ancient at the time. Now it seems like no age at all. To see this virile, masculine, vibrant, tough, resilient, brave, proud man, so full of life, taken down to a bony husk is, to this day, a painful thing to even think about, let alone express out loud, like I’m doing now.

If I sound appalled and ashamed of the tabloid press, I am. He deserved better but there were papers to be sold, and you can’t imagine the virulently homophobic fear-mongering that took place back in those days, with John Hurt’s words on that TV ad terrifying the life out of everybody. I remember the final turn of events like it was yesterday. I was supposed to go and see a Senser gig with my parents on the Saturday night, November 23rd 1991, and for some reason I had started to feel nervous about the news, probably because of the tabloids and their coverage. I was checking Teletext obsessively and up it popped, clear as day: I have AIDS, says Mercury. Even now, in my mind’s eye, I can see the words, in capital letters, on the TV. Frozen in time, in horror, forever.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. I didn’t want to go out, so I just kept reading it over and over. I spent Sunday in shock, watching videos, not knowing what was to come, and so soon. I wondered how long he had left, months maybe? On the Monday morning, November 25th, dad knocked on my bedroom door, came in and sat on the edge of my bed and told me he had died. I refused to go to school and spent the day crying, watching the morning shows and their tributes, my youthful innocence destroyed and turned to ash. Mum bought me the Sun’s commemorative issue. I hadn’t realised the gravity of their treatment of him yet, and I had to read everything. I went to school the day after and this bitch, Laura Edelson (she was quite the entitled cow; her dad was a millionaire businessman and director of Man United), backed me up against a wall by the lockers and laughed at me, remarking that I was stupid because I was upset about a stranger dying. Everyone at school knew I was two things: a City fan and a Queen fan. She didn’t understand how anyone could be upset about losing someone they’d never met. So much for empathy – I hope she’s a nicer person now than the bully she was then. I escaped and found a friend of mine, Louise, who was the only other Queen fan in the school, as far as I knew, and we had a cry together.

I was a fan club member by then, I’d joined at least a year before. Every week the club president, a lovely lady called Jacky Smith, who has been interviewed for Queen documentaries and wrote the band’s official biography, would leave an answerphone message for fans to listen to with the news of the week (oh, the pre-internet days!). I had called the number a few months before and she picked up; we ended up chatting every few weeks for a couple of months after that. I remember so clearly asking her if she thought I would ever see the band live. She said she was sure I would. And I can’t help think of that conversation now, as 24 years later I finally get to see them live, in whatever form. She took time out of her day to comfort a worried teenager, I now think, because she must have known that he didn’t have long left. Though not public knowledge, then, it was, I am certain now, obvious to ‘adults’ exactly what was wrong. I did get to see ¾ of the band live actually at the tribute concert in April 1992, having made a pilgrimage to the fan club offices to get my tickets the day before. That was a special day, one I’ll never forget. There was a great sense of closure, of saying goodbye, and that the whole world was watching and we, Queen fans, must do him proud and sing as loud as we could to make up for the inadequacies of most of the singers attempting to sing his songs. Nobody can ‘be’ him, as that gig proved. A few vodkas, a couple of cigarettes and some vocal exercises was as much as he ever did for a pre-gig regime. There were no half-measures, he was just ready. He was born to do it.

This all cuts so deep with me, reminding me of my own loss of innocence, of that first feeling of losing a stranger and it mattering, and it’s all about to come to a head this weekend. I feel like I’ve waited my whole life for this gig. I know exactly what it’s going to be like. I know exactly how I will feel. The tribute concert was an odd, overwhelming occasion, but it did not, for a second, feel like what a Queen show must have felt like – because it wasn’t trying to be one. It was something else. This show can’t really get close to how it would have been to see them for real, but it’s as much as I will ever get. How different the outcome of this band could have been, but this is how it is now. My only chance is here.

Tags: Queen, Freddie Mercury, Adam Lambert

Photograph: Gaelle Beri/Redferns via Getty Images

I was a slightly odd teenager. I know, not a big shock. Fairly sheltered, I didn’t go to friends’ houses nor did they come to mine (they lived too far away, we had no car) and I spent the weekends with my grandparents, and from 1990 onwards just gran, who really raised me as much as my parents did. I didn’t go out partying until I was nearly 17 (which I turned in October 1993); gran would visit London and I’d be left to my own devices in her flat, where adult merriment was had. Before then, in the more innocent late 80s and very early 90s, I’d spend time watching old movies and mountains of music videos. Pop promos were the big thing in those days; they actually mattered to a career and defined bands and their songs. I taped the videos for new singles onto VHS and played them until they wore out and watched the more niche clips on TV shows (like ITV’s Raw Power) that ran well after midnight. I remember staying up late to watch the premieres of Madonna and Michael Jackson videos on Channel 4: a new pop promo was a huge deal in those days and warranted great fanfare. I didn’t have MTV, so I would tape hours of it when I went down to London to visit my aunt and uncle and their little ones. The MTV rock show Headbangers Ball was a fave, I was really into metal in those days. Anything slightly weird and/or outside of the charts caught my eye and ear, functioning alongside the musical education I was receiving from my parents. I haven’t watched MTV in years but I don’t think they put much music on now, and the videos they do put on are simple – pedestrian pop music with ladies in various states of undress. Anyway, one night I was watching 120 Minutes, their flagship alternative/indie show. It was late 1990, I was shortly about to turn 14, and this video came on.

I had never seen anything like it. It looked like what would now pass for an episode of American Horror Story. A band with big backcombed hair (and not in a Motley Crüe kind of way) and plenty of poorly applied foundation and red lipstick (men in make-up had been my thing since childhood; as I said: odd kid). It was a big dark pop tune, with an unusual voice selling it to me. The video told a tale of a carny sideshow. I had never seen anything like it. Last night, I got to hear that song, Never Enough, 24 years after I fell in love with that pop group, The Cure. I got the ticket by chance. With the closure of the essential Scarlet Mist, a face value ticket exchange, which I have benefitted from so very many times, I’ve been on the lookout for a new ticketing marketplace in order to avoid being ripped off by touts if my admittedly famed ticket-getting karma fails me. The most reliable source now is Twickets, an app (no use to me, my phone purposely has no online access) and Twitter feed. For no particular reason I was browsing my feed and a post popped up offering a ticket to see The Cure at the Hammersmith Apollo. Less than a minute had passed and I was the first to reply. I had no time to think, I just did it. Be ready to take your chances, I always say. A lovely Scouse girl had a spare, and was coming down for the show. Several excitable texts later and the ticket was mine. I met a friend at the venue and tried to prepare, for I had been warned by friends, you see, to steel myself. I already knew that they play long shows. I mean, Springsteen long. The night before they’d done a 40-song setlist. Forty songs. Ok, this is not The Grateful Dead, and their 15+ minutes of meandering solos. These are short, sharp, perfect pop songs. But still, that equated to quite the marathon, and I ain’t as young as I used to be, so my standing ticket was going to be a bit of a challenge. Wisely, I suggested we go over to one side, just behind the disabled section (where a fight nearly broke out later, due to a drunken idiot, but that’s another story) and perch by the wall, so we could lean on something. Very smart move, it turned out. For I was to get 40 songs too, and the longest gig I’ve ever seen by a single band (the previous record was Bowie, in the same venue in 2002: 33 songs and 2½ hours or so).

The support act was terrible, though the hardcore at the front seemed to like them. I didn’t realise there were still lead singers who took themselves that seriously. A bit of Ian Curtis crossed with Jim Morrison and the talent and presence of neither. A bit shoegaze-y and a bit goth, you could see why they’d been chosen. Interminable though. I remembered there’s a reason why I usually spend the minutes leading up to the headliner in the pub. They were called And Also The Trees and, as it turns out, having just researched them (they’re The Cure’s pet project, I’m unsurprised to learn), they’re ancient. That makes it worse somehow. A new band being so derivatively naïve you wouldn’t mind, you’d think it was almost sweet. Now I see they’ve been around for 30+ years – get a new act. Please. You don’t do gloomy torch songs well, move on.

The crowd seemed arranged by age: young sweet alt kids at the front; in the middle, the fans in their 20s, out of university and letting their hipster flag and luminescent hair fly. Then, in the good standing spots, the rest of us in our 30s and 40s, being sensible and not wishing to get pushed around. I’ve been each one of those groups; now and then I dip in and turn the clock back but mostly I’m the one near the bar these days, nodding and singing along; mentally, and subconsciously, noting everything. I know as much about The Cure as I do any other band from the 80s and 90s I’ve loved for years, because even though I’m certain they make new albums, I don’t pay attention to them. I’m not sure anyone outside their fanbase does. But I knew they had an august reputation as a live band, because I have a couple of friends who adore them. Strangely, I’m scooping up all the classic bands at the moment, not entirely accidentally or on purpose, and this felt like another one to tick off. See ‘em before they pop off, Leah said to me a couple of years ago, after we saw some ancient pop star I forget the name of. She’s right. It sounds a bit doomy but we’re living in an age where nearly all the great rock stars of the 50s are gone (Fats, Little Richard, Jerry Lee and Chuck are clinging on, that’s it really) and the ones of the 60s and 70s are about to start dropping like flies (the brilliant Joe Cocker left us as I was travelling to this gig). In the next decade we will lose people that… well, let’s just say I’m glad my mother won’t be here to see it. There’s a reason Lou going hit so hard, the great unspeakable truth of it is too much to contemplate... Those parts of your life since youth, those artists and iconic figures – they taught you, you made yourself out of them. They won’t be here forever.

Of course, Robert Smith is 55 and his lifelong bandmate Simon Gallup (as always, a hot tattooed quiffed rockabilly goth) is 54 so I don’t refer to them. I mention it because in 2015 I’ll be seeing a bunch of old geezers do their thing. Queen (and the terrifically entertaining Adam Lambert) in January, a band I’ve waited for a quarter of a century to properly see. The first band I loved. In March, The Who. In June, Fleetwood Mac (waited 18 years for that one). Then, ridiculously, Bette Midler in July (which will be a highly entertaining old school vaudeville throwback). Then Santana, the week after. Of all people! Rock history, right there, dad has persuaded me I must see him. In between all that, yes, I’ll see Tune-Yards and Flying Lotus and FKA Twigs and who knows who else, but I’m going on a 2015 tour of rock history (including two acts who played Woodstock, for goodness sake). So in that spirit, The Cure, as one of the favourite bands of my teen years, found themselves on that bucket list of bands to see.

And I have to say, it was one of the great pop concerts I have ever seen. Most gigs follow patterns, delineated by the material – new, old and/or obscure (deep cuts, B-sides, remember those?). The flow of a concert will be consistent with a new artist (like the aforementioned FKA Twigs, say), as everyone’s there to hear the new album. Someone with a few records under their belt (like Arcade Fire) will play half new/half old setlists, with the temperature hovering around a simmer, going up to a boil for the songs everyone loves. The Cure somehow managed to keep it at a consistent boil throughout with the occasional wild mad energy jump for the biggest hits. Even the songs of theirs I didn’t know, and there were plenty, felt familiar and were a joy to hear.

As a writer, Robert Smith knows well enough how to work incredibly hard and make it look easy. He’s so gifted as a creator of pop music; the songs are just unutterably pleasant to listen to even if they’re strangers to you. You manage to forget exactly how many, for want of a better word, ‘famous’ songs he’s written. With the exception of one of the great 90s pop tunes, Friday, I’m In Love, and Let’s Go To Bed they played everything any gig-goer could have wanted. The show was so compelling, so brilliantly executed, I forgot what hadn’t been played yet and the third and fourth encores were a blizzard of hits that genuinely surprised me. It was a special night. I made a quick exit as they played their last song and that was as the show ticked over to the three hours and ten minutes mark. I had so many moments where my brain went ‘Aw, wow, I forgot about this one!’ Like when they started the gorgeous Pictures Of You. I had simply forgotten it existed, so rapt was I by the performance. Every part of each song was delivered with care: not a note was wasted. Propulsive drumming (Jason Cooper, magnificent, drove the whole show), flawless keyboard parts (Roger O’Donnell, who has been in and out of The Cure for 27 years), Gallup’s winding, sonorous bass played like a lead guitar, and Smith’s voice sounding just like the records, strong and slightly whiny, but charming. No backing vocalists – it was all just him, though I admit I couldn’t hear a word of his between-song mumbling, though I could gather he was content and happy to be there. The chemistry between Smith and Gallup is always such a pleasure to watch, those two old stagers doing their thing for the 38th year in a row.

I also derived some amusement from the guitarist recently drafted in – our old friend Reeves Gabrels (note: their current absent long-term guitarist Porl Thompson is now a trans woman called Pearl, how wonderful). A lifetime, a century, ago (1999) he was fired by Bowie because of his coke habit. He’s obviously sorted his life out and it was quite nice to see him back, looking well, with Doc Brown-esque plug socket hair, and adding a great new sonic palate to another bunch of classic songs. Admittedly, he doesn’t seem stretched (jokes aside, he’s a gifted musician) but he’s a creditable addition, fits in nicely and kept the ridiculous guitar solos to a tolerable minimum. He gets to play legendary pop songs night after night; it’s not a bad job to have. Those songs, those towering songs… they just kept coming. They were judiciously dotted around the first 2 ½ hours of the set like gemstones sparkling at the bottom of a pool. A Night Like This, Lovesong, In Between Days, Just Like Heaven (which has one of my favourite first verses, what great writing), The Walk, A Forest, Three Imaginary Boys, Charlotte Sometimes and on and on.

It felt so good. Like a piece of my teenage years had come to meet me as I push 40 over here. I was obsessed with Lullaby in my youth. I listened to it over and over and transcribed the lyrics (with a pencil!) from the cassette tape, just because I wanted to read them (ah, the pre-internet universe!) The band were as tight as a drum, and it was a pleasure to see musicians enjoying themselves. They set about their task with great determination, stamina and style, for I can’t think of which other artist does shows like this, with such a wide scope of song choice and devotion to their audience. I suppose Springsteen is the closest, as he also plays marathons and plucks out album track obscurities for the delight of the hardcore fans and his own amusement. All pop/rock gigs are ‘a bit of what I want to play/a bit of what you want to hear’ but this one felt different, most likely because of the sheer length of the show. You felt like everyone was on this journey together, through our lives and theirs, and it built and built. People are used to 90-minute shows then schlepping home and worrying about getting up for work in the morning. Everyone just utterly lost themselves at this gig. A few filtered out, as they had trains to catch, but 99% stayed and revelled and hoped it would never end. And those songs, they kept on coming – Lullaby was extraordinary, greeted with such love. Fascination Street. Why Can’t I Be You? The Lovecats, Close To Me (incidentally, haven’t their videos aged incredibly well?!)… And of course, an oddly slowed down, but no less powerful, Boys Don’t Cry. Everything was spent, delivered, given to us. We gave our hearts back.


1. Shake Dog Shake
2. Piggy in the Mirror
3. A Night Like This
4. Push
5. In Between Days
6. Just Like Heaven
7. Bananafishbones
8. The Caterpillar
9. The Walk
10. A Man Inside My Mouth
11. Wailing Wall
12. Three Imaginary Boys
13. Never Enough
14. Wrong Number
15. Birdmad Girl
16. Lovesong
17. Like Cockatoos
18. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
19. Kyoto Song
20. alt.end
21. Want
22. The Hungry Ghost
23. One Hundred Years
24. Give Me It
25. The Top

Encore:
26. The Empty World
27. Charlotte Sometimes
28. Primary

Encore 2:
29. M
30. Play for Today
31. A Forest

Encore 3:
32. Pictures of You
33. Lullaby
34. Fascination Street

Encore 4:
35. Dressing Up
36. The Lovecats
37. Close to Me
38. Why Can't I Be You?
39. Boys Don't Cry
40. Hey You!

Tags: The Cure, Hammersmith Apollo, Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Reeves Gabrels