No Sugarcoating & No Bullshit: October
Written by Jo Hayes
Sunday, 13 October 2013 03:30
Hello again Uber Rockers and welcome to your monthly dose of blogging nonsense. So it’s October, the year is whizzing by like someone has pressed the fast forward button on a crap cassette player, and it’s stuck! (Well, that’s what it feels like for me.)
So in my usual brainstorming for this blog, tonight I put my headphones on, and pressed play on my laptop (no vinyl or CDs for me tonight), and The D4 – ‘Mysterex’ came on. This got me thinking of one of the best gigs I’ve been too, The D4 at The Concorde 2 in Brighton.
After the gig, an over-excited, and probably drunk, sixteen year old me went up to Dion (D4 guitarist), and said very loudly: “I think your band are fucking amazing!” He seemed a bit shocked, and said that no-one had said that to him before, and signed the gig flyer. I think he maybe was being nice to get me to go away.
In my usual connect-the-dots-in-some-way approach, this got me thinking whether the music scene is as it used to be. Obviously “how it used to be” depends very much on when you grew up or when you started going to gigs (either or), but I’ll use the scene I was involved in as an example.
I started going to local gigs in Burgess Hill when I was fifteen, as a friend of mine started putting local and Brighton Punk gigs on at free monthly gigs. After going to these for about a year, my band played a gig at the summer all-dayer. I remember having to do the gig in my break, then rush back to work 
afterwards. I was really shy, playing guitar, and whispering to the singer if I wanted to say anything to the audience – what a wuss.
The scene was more than just playing gigs and watching them, it was a small community, and a great social life. Eventually everything spread down to Brighton, with these free monthly gigs coming to an end. There was one other night each month in Haywards Heath, which I can’t remember the name of, but I can remember it was run by Christians, and one particular band tried praying with the audience after their set – funnily enough the venue emptied pretty quickly.
After about five years of good times and goodness knows how many gigs, it seemed things died down, people in the bands went to Uni, got degrees and/or a family, then it seemed to be the end of the rock ‘n’ roll road for them (and that shouldn’t mean an end to it).
I guess all good things come to an end, and due to health reasons I’ve gradually become more and more removed from my local music scene over the past few years, but it seems that any time I do make the effort to go and see local gigs, it disappoints me.
If I were older than twenty six, then I could get away with saying: “been there, seen it,” but despite risking people much older than me shouting at me, I’ll still say it. The excitement has gone and there doesn’t seem to be much of a spark anymore, at least in how the scene used to be, and maybe because the same people don’t make it up.
Maybe I just overdid it with gigs, using up a lifetimes quota in five – six years, and it’s my fault that nothing amazes me anymore? Saying that, I think there’s some sort of garage scene going on in Brighton I should check out, but at the same time, as I really have seen a lot of bands, and had a good time been part of a music scene, I’m in no rush! (Fussy and lazy…)
For me now an ideal music scene would be something in the vein of Glunk, bands sounding like Hanoi Rocks, and later bands such as Backyard Babies (Total 13), Turbonegro (Apocalypse Dudes) and Buckcherry, maybe it’s happening somewhere – aside from in my head!
One thing that annoys me about gigs is now I’m more likely to drive there, and therefore be sober, I find people that I wouldn’t find irritating when pissed, really bloody irritating, and when people try and mosh – which I can’t stand even when I’m drunk – it hurts more when they bash into you. Maybe the good years of going to gigs was one big drunken haze, and the answer to enjoying local bands again, is to get pissed on cheap cider, and act like a fool with the rest of them.
The last gig that really pissed me off I got punched by some guy, as he pushed into me when attempting to mosh (surprising that he might put his shiny leather jacket and poseur hair in jeopardy), so I pushed him back into the mosh-pit, which wasn’t aggressive either, then he punched me in the jaw, I was too shocked to do it back. I walked out, and had a look in the room at the pub where it was, and he seemed to be pissing off others too. Maybe this was another situation I should’ve been pissed in?
Anyway, before I trail off too much, maybe interest in being a prolific gig goer comes and goes in waves, much like the fashion of music styles I guess, so I might get my gig-going mojo back soon. Hopefully your local gig scene is thriving and you’ve got plenty of good local bands to see (and if it’s in the vein of Glunk, boast to me and make me jealous).
Until next time…
Jo
