25 of the greatest gigs ever (part 2)
Erykah Badu
Brixton Academy
July 2001
Amy Winehouse
I was about 16 or 17 when I saw the Mama's Gun tour, when Erykah was promoting her second album. It was exciting for a couple of reasons: it was the first time I'd been to the Brixton Academy and, more important, the first time I'd seen Erykah Badu. So excited was I, in fact, that I didn't eat all day and got told off by a friend. Then, at the gig, I passed out, which I'd never done before or since. I still remember people milling around me and my friend, Nicky, having to pull my tongue out of my mouth, just in case I choked. Then a security guy carried me to the sick bay, where this St John's adolescent was holding up my legs to try to get the blood back into my cheeks. Which wasn't funny: I was wearing a short skirt.
As for the gig itself, I can remember thinking what an amazing showwoman she was. She had fine timing and this great sense of drama. During 'On and On', which was perhaps the highlight, she threw back her head, took off her turban and - rather than the locks we were expecting - revealed that she was actually sporting a bald head. And while her voice hasn't had much impact on mine, I feel privileged that I had the opportunity to see her live.
I saw her again last year and again she was superb. But I'll never forget the first time, not least because of everything else that went on.
David Bowie
Free Trade Hall, Manchester
1972
Paul Morley
This was one of those times when everything seemed to change. Bowie was pretty much a one hit wonder for 'Space Oddity', a cult album artist, just beginning to play around with his image by appearing to come out in a notorious Melody Maker interview. He began the year releasing 'Changes', off the back of the arty-fairy December 1971 release Hunky Dory, and spent the rest of the year changing by the day as if profoundly offended that it wasn't a hit, that he wasn't yet a superstar, forcing everyone around him to change with him, to keep up
Bowie willed it to happen that year, he was a force of tarted-up nature, and on 21 April 1972, in Manchester, he was at the absolute theatrical peak of his hyper-ambitious powers of persuasion. I was 15 - fresh innocent fan putty in Bowie's hot, shameless 25-year-old hands - and it was only something like my fifth live gig, and there's nothing quite like seeing a fully made up codpiece-sporting man-thing inspired by Clockwork Orange, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, Marc Bolan and Iggy Pop suddenly burst into dead, drab Manchester and set your life on fire. Even better, he pretended, or actually believed, that he was a skinny alien pop star called Ziggy Stardust keen on mock-fellating his silver-suited guitar player in strobe-induced slow motion. This was what you wanted a pop concert to be - sort of a dream of sex turned into loud, fierce rock and roll theatre, every song a desperately sensational story about feeling weirdly alive and possibly immortal. He was already trashing his way through the life story of Ziggy Stardust. There were only a few hundred denim-clad earthlings in a theatre that could hold a couple of thousand, early fanatics inspired by fishy sightings of Bowie in orange hair and red plastic boots smooching with Mick Ronson on The Old Grey Whistle Test while playing music that seemed to fuse Led Zep with Liza with a Z, the Who with Dali. Acoustic Hunky Dory songs were the dippy-trippy soft centre for some impossibly exotic hard core Ziggy fantasy. I was in the eighth row of the stalls - a 60p ticket nabbed the morning the box office opened - a couple of rows behind an adoring Angie Bowie. Bowie, as single minded as any performer I've ever seen, was some kind of demon acting like some kind of superstar ignoring the empty spaces in the hall, committing himself to turning us on, so he could turn himself on. By the time he returned to a sold-out Manchester Hard Rock in September later that year he had become the dramatic superstar he promised he would be. Fans were already dressing like Ziggy. The Free Trade Hall show was the spectacular sighting of something strange, wonderful and slightly sinister speeding towards its fantastic entertainment destiny.
· Paul Morley is OMM's critic at large
The White Stripes
Glastonbury Festival
June 2005
KT Tunstall
I was playing the Other Stage and the night before the White Stripes had headlined the Pyramid. For two people to do that and totally kick arse was incredible. The weather was terrible, but that didn't matter. The set included songs from Get Behind Me Satan, complete with marimba; but the best song was a cover of 'Jolene'. Jack White just screeches in pain when he sings it. Their performance raised the bar for me. If Jack and Meg could do that, anything was possible. Hell, maybe we could do the same ...
· KT Tunstall's new album is out in the spring
The Frumpies
Nathan's house, Arkansas
2000
Beth Ditto
I grew up in Arkansas with the first Gossip drummer Nathan. In 2000 the Frumpies played their last ever show in Nathan's basement, and a very early version of our band supported. The Frumpies were a riot grrl band made up of ex-members of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. People travelled from all around to cram into this tiny house. The atmosphere was pure youth energy. One of the big letdowns when I moved away was realising that not all shows were like that.
· Beth Ditto is the Gossip's singer
The Cramps and the Fall
The Technical College, Glasgow
1980
Bobby Gillespie
The gigs I used to go to as a teenager were nearly always at the Glasgow Apollo, where there was a 15-foot high stage. This one, you were in the thick of it. The stage was about two foot high, no safety barrier. You could reach out and touch the band. It was just so intense and powerful. Inspiring.
The Cramps were playing stuff of their first album - 'Garbage Man', 'Drug Train'. The Fall were doing stuff like 'Fiery Jack' and 'Rowche Rumble'. It was wild. There's a dark energy they both have, and a fierce intelligence. It just blew my mind. There was a guy in a wheelchair right in front of Mark Smith, and all us maniacs behind him going insane.
When the Cramps came on, we caught a glimpse of Bryan Gregory, then he lay flat on his back for the whole gig, playing his Flying V. There were chairs flying at the stage.
Poison Ivy just played and chewed gum, and ducked from time to time. So cool. Immovable. Lux's top came off, and everyone was trying to tear off his leather trousers. One guy said he put his hand down into Lux's trousers and felt his balls. Whatever, you know. It might be true. It was that sort of gig. It called up the spirits. And the demons. It was rock and roll as I'd never heard it before: weird, mysterious, dark, a mess of power and magic.
I saw the Fall last year and they were just as raw, exciting and intense. And mysterious. Both of those groups still have the spirit of rock and roll in their music and attitude. And in their mystery. That spirit is going. It's leaving the planet right now.
· Bobby Gillespie sings with Primal Scream
Ella Fitzgerald
Civic Auditorium, San Francisco
1993
Johnny Dankworth
I conducted Ella's last symphony performance in San Francisco in 1993. I was resident conductor for the San Francisco Symphony, and we did our own shows with my wife Cleo (Laine, 'First Lady Of Jazz') as well as any visitors that came to town. Ella was one of those visitors. We knew her from a very long time ago when we first played at Birdland in 1959. Nobody knew it was going to be her last symphony concert, it just turned out that way.
At that point she was technically past her best, but still a fantastic entertainer. She certainly had a very special presence, although at first it may not have appeared that way. She would stand with one arm hanging limply like a swan's neck and the other down by her side, and she'd sing away to nobody in particular. Somehow that was her image, and it really was mesmerising.
A standing ovation is like feeding a cream bun to an elephant. But this night we got them standing on their seats, shouting themselves hoarse. We weren't allowed to run into overtime as we'd have to pay the orchestra umpteen thousand dollars. And as I led her off she asked: 'Do you think we could do another one?' I said: 'I'd really love to, but they've threatened me.' She said: 'Oh well, that's OK then.' But I could tell she really wanted to play an encore. I should have thrown caution to the wind and told them to 'go stick their $18,000', but I'm afraid that was one of the weaker moments of my life. It still smarts a bit.
· In 2006, Johnny Dankworth became the first British jazz musician to be knighted
Bob Marley and the Wailers
The Lyceum, London
1975
Neil Spencer
Everyone who was there seemed to have an experience close to epiphany. The album of the event still ranks as one of the greatest live performances ever captured and also delivered a hit single. The shows were hypnotic forays into a music that none there had experienced before, led by a shamanic genius of a performer whose ascendancy to superstardom was happening right there, right now.
Even that summary doesn't do justice to the impact of Bob Marley's two nights at London's Lyceum. The July weather was suitably tropical. Inside the Lyceum, the sweat ran in rivulets down the walls, despite the retractable roof being open. Up beyond, the night sky glimmered dimly beyond a haze of heat and smoke.
Outside on the streets of Covent Garden thousands of ticketless fans, mostly black, milled around trying to get in - two fire doors were trashed - and fought running battles with the Met's notorious Special Patrol Group, a dress rehearsal for the Notting Hill riots 15 months later.
The mood inside crackled with danger and expectancy. This was an audience that had never seen itself before, an amalgam of white hipsters, recovering hippies, crisply dressed black youth and lofty Rastas. It was a multi-culti crowd that would become familiar during the Rock Against Racism years, its ranks swollen by punk rock recruits, but here, on this steamy fecund night, was its inception.
Everything that evening, and everything around Marley at that time, was new. He had a new band, a new manager, and a new sound. Built around the tight but buoyant rhythm section of the two Barrett brothers, Family Man and Carlton, the group had acquired a swaggering US blues guitarist, Al Anderson, and - a masterstroke - the vocal choruses of the swaying female trio called the I Three, roots reggae's answer to Ray Charles's Raelettes. Behind the band was stretched a huge Ethiopian flag, along with portraits of Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie.
Marley had likewise reinvented himself. Scrubbing metronomically at his Gibson guitar, writhing in screwface anguish, imploring, gesturing, skanking his knees to his hips, hurling his bountiful dreadlocks to this side and that, he was both rock star rebel and fiery Rasta prophet. And, let's not forget, sex symbol - as he arrived on stage a throng of women rushed the stage, screaming wildly.
This, the compere assured us, was 'the Trench Town Experience', these booming, sinuous rhythms, these songs of slavery and redemption, police road blocks and empty bellies, sweet sex and kinky reggae, all wreathed in ganja smoke and biblical mystery. It was heady stuff. 'Every person who was there decided they were Rasta that night,' observed Marley photographer Dennis Morris later, 'from there the movement just spread.'
The white audience made of Rasta what it could, or what it wanted, but the movement's mood of millennial expectancy was infectious, while in Marley, there was a new hero. Rock music had reached an unappetising point of bloated self-importance and creative exhaustion. In contrast to the remote rock millionaires and Californian cowboys came Marley's mystique and moral authority, not to mention his electrifying stage presence and musical innovation.
I'd witnessed them all just two weeks earlier, when on assignment from NME to interview Marley in the US. The Wailers had a week's residency at a small Boston club, Paul's Mall, where he drilled the group in their repertoire. In fact, the Boston shows (two each evening) still seem sharper, more musically focused than the delirious Lyceum shows.
The group were staying at a motel in the 'burbs, an arrangement that allowed them to bring an in-house cook and to play endless games of football. In the cabin where I interviewed Marley, a vast pot of fish curry was in preparation, while a tracksuited Bob talked, open and relaxed, the antithesis of the possessed performer.
The talk was of reggae, dreadlocks, football, Bob's previous time in North America - at 21 he had spent a few months on the night shift at a Delaware factory - and of the knotty mix of experience and theology that underpinned what was already an extraordinary canon of songs - 'I Shot the Sheriff', 'Concrete Jungle', 'Burnin' and Lootin', and, of course, 'No Woman No Cry', whose rendition at the Lyceum was to supply Marley his first international hit single. The crowd sang along en masse.
Much of the performance didn't make it onto Live! at the Lyceum London - a languid 'Stir it Up', an angry 'Slave Driver' and a 'Rebel Music' that loped hypnotically for a small age. What did soak into the grooves was something of the extraordinary atmosphere, the hair-raising exultation of 'Get Up Stand Up', the audience's knowledge that they were part of something stirring, historical.
· Neil Spencer is The Observer's roots music critic
Oasis
Earl's Court, London
27 September 1997
Serge Pizzorno
This was the first gig I ever went to. I was 16 and went with my mate on a National Express coach to London. We were two innocent little scamps and we spent all day getting pissed. We had never been to London before and were in a state of near-hysteria.
Richard Ashcroft walked onstage and the atmosphere was electric. Then Oasis came on and it was more electric still. They made me not just want to be in a band but to play that venue. I'd seen what I wanted to be. I can still feel the drums rattling my rib cage, and as for seeing Liam in the flesh ... well, it was like coming face-to-face with Marlon Brando. My mate and myself moved so far into the crowd that, despite being parched from constant sweating, we couldn't get out to fetch ourselves a drink. All we could do was try to drink the warm water that was sprayed into the audience.
Much as I loved Liam, though, Noel was the biggest inspiration. I saw what he was doing and how he was, his manner, and knew that Noel was who I wanted to be. He was the group's Pete Townshend, so cool, and made me want to play guitar.
Every gig after that proved very different. I'd seen the superstars of my generation, and other groups had a lot to live up to, I found. Now I'm friends with Noel and Liam, and I've mentioned the evening to them. But it's not the kind of thing you talk about it really, is it? It would be a bit fucking embarrassing.
· Serge Pizzorno plays with Kasabian
Marvin Gaye
The Venue, London
1982
Pete Tong
Marvin Gaye was enjoying his biggest international hit in years with 'Sexual Healing' from his comeback album Midnight Love, a record made in Europe after he had fled his problems in the USA.
Seeing this complex and restless man perform his greatest hits with renewed confidence at close range was inspiring. Never have I seen a singer control his voice and the microphone with such technique.
Marvin radiated sex appeal, passion and pain and had the coolest voice I have ever heard. His tormented life was well documented; the previous decade had been bitter with marriage break-ups and drug problems. So this gig had an extra edge; the chance to see one of the world's greatest vocalists in a small comfy space was a very special one.
There was magic that night on stage, a place that offered him a brief haven from a troubled life. Only two years later, he was dead, shot by his father.
· Pete Tong is a DJ and broadcaster
Jay-Z
Wembley Arena
2003
Dizzee Rascal
It was a few months before my first record came out and I was supporting him. Jay-Z is such an icon and he'd just announced his 'retirement', but he came and said hello beforehand and seemed pretty normal. But on stage he just had such energy. There wasn't much in the way of a show and the sound wasn't great, but he had command of that whole arena. I'm very energetic when I perform, bouncing up and down with the crowd. Jay has a whole different swagger. He's like 'I'm the shit'. And it's true. No one else can do it like him.
· Dizzee Rascal's new album is due in the spring
Joy Division
The Moonlight Club, London
1980
Sean O'Hagan
This, the third and final night of a Factory Records' showcase in north London, was poorly attended, even though the band had released their debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Curiosity rather than expectation was in the air.
The band arrived late after playing at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, and seemed oddly distracted as they took to the stage. Later, I found out that lead singer Ian Curtis had a seizure during the final song at the Rainbow. Guitarist Bernard Sumner said years later: 'We did some gigs we shouldn't have. We did the Moonlight and he was really ill and he did the gig. That was stupid.'
Back then, though, the audience, blissfully ignorant of Curtis's epilepsy or his bouts of depression, had come to see a group who seemed destined to be the most important British band since the Sex Pistols. And they were not disappointed. Most great gigs have stayed in my memory because of their sense of celebration and release but this was different; a performance suffused with a controlled power and dark intensity the like of which I have not encountered since. The group performed 'Transmission' and 'She's Lost Control', but it was the singer as much as the songs that held the audience rapt. He performed that marionette dance, arms flailing, eyes half-closed, lost in the surge of electricity coming off the musicians. The foursome looked unlike any rock group I had ever seen, their haircuts severe, their clothes utilitarian, their sense of purpose heightened by the concentration they applied to their playing.
The set was short, maybe five or six songs only. It ended abruptly and messily when Curtis seemed to twitch and twirl himself into a trance. As the music shuddered to a stop, he staggered back and fell into the drum kit. Tony Wilson, head of Factory Records, emerged from the side of the stage and helped carry him offstage. He appeared catatonic, as if drained of life by the sheer effort of singing.
Joy Division would play only five more shows before Curtis hanged himself. His death has lent this performance an almost mythic glow. Likewise the fact that two of the three people I went with would also die young, their promise unfulfilled. I still wonder if Curtis was singing to try to save his life. Or singing himself ever closer to the flame.
· Sean O'Hagan is an Observer writer
Jimi Hendrix
Isle of Wight
1970
Shostakovich
Royal Albert Hall, London
1971
Ed Vulliamy
It seems strange that Jimi Hendrix died five years before Dmitri Shostakovich (the voodoo guitarist in 1970, the composer in 1975). But then the Cold War planet of my teens was divided into two worlds - one high on Hendrix, the other still reeling from Stalin and the ravages of the Reich. By summer 1970, just 16, I was captivated by both but belonged to neither. Shostakovich gave voice and vent to tortuous adolescent political reflection but, though still living, was of another place. Hendrix represented everything that aroused but scared me right there on Portobello Road: life off the leash; ecstatic turbulence fuelled by sex and narcotics. But I hated hippie nonsense and was almost alone among my friends in having never taken drugs.
But I loved the music, and who'd have thought it, over one weekend on the Isle of Wight: Miles Davis, the Who, The Doors, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, while (gratifyingly) German revolutionaries tore fences down and Joni Mitchell proclaimed this chaos to be 'NOT another Woodstock'. And during the night between Sunday and Monday, the main act. I was near the front; Hendrix wore a volcanic flow of silk and I remember little about the running order apart from 'Sergeant Pepper' near the opening. No one jumped around; in fact, most sat, motionless, hypnotised. As though all 600,000 people had forgotten entirely about the other 599,999 along 'Devastation Row', entranced by this other-worldly creature. 'All Along the Watchtower' filled my eyes, 'Voodoo Chile' churned my soul. I promised I would go to America, explore this terrain and worry less about Shostakovich and the East.
Eighteen days later, on the number 31 bus home from school, I caught a headline in the paper. Hendrix had died in Lansdowne Crescent, a block away from where I lived (and my parents still do). I dressed in white, walked round the corner and peeped through the basement window. Curiously, there was no one around - no fans, press or police. I chalked a line from 'Moon Turn the Tide Gently Gently Away' on the pavement, and stood awhile, the Isle of Wight searing through my mind. A man emerged to wash the words away with water from a bucket, and I left to do my homework.
Hendrix dead, Shostakovich lived on. I made it to insurgent Chicago, but within a fortnight of returning, in September 1971, slammed straight into my other greatest gig:The Leningrad Philharmonic under the baton of Yevgeny Mravinsky giving Shostakovich's 5th Symphony at the Proms. I queued all day and this time stood in the very front row. The audience at the premiere in 1937 recognised the piece for what it was, a requiem for the Great Terror, and cracked with emotion. Now, here was the orchestra that played that premiere, and the same conductor. And, hanging on every note of pity and mourning, irony and defiance, pompously feeling myself as much part of Russian history as I had of American history last year, I cracked too, not knowing that war and resistance would come to play a part in my own life, and that I would see communism in Eastern Europe crumble before my eyes.
· Ed Vulliamy is an Observer writer
Manic Street Preachers
London Astoria
21 December 1994
Sarah Boden
The Manic Street Preachers turned me on to being a proper wayward teenager. At 14 years old I was pissed off at sharing a room with my younger sister, and at being stuck in a Southampton all-girls convent school that was a stifling mix of shiny-haired conformists and mini-skirted 'Tracies'. After discovering the Manics, everything made better sense. The floral blooms on my bedroom wallpaper wilted under a covering of pictures, and my Saturday job wage went on Japanese imports and gig tickets. Within the year, come Saturday night, I was hanging out in toilet circuit staple the Joiners Arms, shyly avoiding old punks snorting speed in the toilets; I'd run away to Reading festival with my best friend, and acquired a compulsive music press and home taping habit.
I liked the Manics because they were a funny mix of innocent idealism and bolshy arrogance. When they formed in 1988, fuelled by fantastical idealism rather than musical proficiency, they spray painted their mum's frilly blouses with slogans nicked from Situationism and literary provocateurs. They namechecked Guns N' Roses as their biggest influence (while the rest of the country was loved-up on baggy) and gave exquisitely ridiculous soundbites like 'I hate Slowdive more than Hitler'.
In 1994, my best friend Lizzie and I got tickets to the last date of their three-night Christmas residency at the London Astoria. For the Manics it was the finale to a testing year that later would take on a poignant significance. The mental state of Richey Edwards, the band's aesthetic custodian, had become so critical during July that he was hospitalised and later sent to the Priory to be treated for anorexia, self-mutilation and alcoholism. A month later the band released The Holy Bible, a sparse, 13-track onslaught of nihilistic brilliance with song titles such as 'Die in the Summertime' and 'The Intense Humming of Evil'. Most of the harrowing lyrics were penned by Richey.
In a droll attempt at festive cheer, James Dean Bradfield wore a Santa hat and played Wham!'s 'Last Christmas', but since their show was Holy Bible-heavy, the mood was emotional and oppressive.
As if trying to condemn their horrible year to historical oblivion, they sped through their set with bloody-minded fury, James exuding a bullish determination, the veins in his neck bulging, as he barked out Richey's gothic lyrics.
As for Richey himself, he was shrouded in shadows left of stage, a whip-thin vision of self-conscious posturing. Then, halfway through signature sign-off tune 'You Love Us', he trashed his guitar and amp, before hurling himself into Sean's drum kit. Without hesitation, his bandmates joined in, destroying £8,000 worth of gear.
Richey never appeared live with his bandmates again. He disappeared a few months later on Valentine's Day.
· Sarah Boden is OMM's assistant editor
The best gig that I walked out of
Everyone I've seen
Everywhere I've been
Damien Hirst
I've never really been to a gig I've enjoyed. I prefer listening to records, although I saw a Faithless gig on TV that looked like it was jumping; it would have been too noisy and out of control for me.
I did like Rolf Harris at Glastonbury when he opened with 'Satisfaction', and I've been on stage with Oasis and Pulp at Glastonbury. It was a real buzz watching the crowd but I was happier when I got back to the campfire and could do more drugs and talk shite.
I saw the Rolling Stones at Roundhay Park in Leeds but I ate too much dope and sat down and just saw legs, and the Stones didn't sound as good as their records. When I did stand up they looked tiny - they could have been stand-ins - and the screen was worse quality than my telly.
U2 are always great value for money, as are Primal Scream, but the favourite part of every gig I've ever been to is walking out at the end, or sometimes in the middle. Maybe my ego can't take it; I'm sure I'd enjoy it a lot more if I was stood on the stage singing to the crowd. I don't like football either.
· Damien Hirst is an artist