Why I love gigs

The anticipation of the gig

One of the unwanted results of doing a master’s degree is that the things I used to do when I was younger are no longer as accessible.

These include nights out, those days where you did absolutely nothing at all, and gigs.

For those of you who don’t know, gigs are awesome. They basically serve as a focal point for like-minded people to gather and listen to the music they love. They’re also a great way of meeting people. In High Fidelity, John Cusack’s character uttered the line, “It’s not what you are like that matters, it’s what you like”. A gig is evidence of this. You can have an audience of many different varieties but the chances are, everyone will get along.  

On 5^th May I managed to go to my first proper gig in a long time. The show was Alkaline Trio at the Manchester Academy.  

For those of you who do not know, Alkaline Trio are an amazing band from Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Anyone interested in alternative music will recognise, or at least have heard of, some of their better known tunes such as “Private Eye”, “We’ve Had Enough” and “Time to Waste”.

They are a band that I feel represent me. For instance, if you were to ask me, “if you were a band, which band would you be?” I would most likely say Alkaline Trio. Their songs deal with issues that I know and experience, love, addiction and are coated in a dark humour that definitely appeals to me.

So as far as a reintroduction into the gig world, this was about as good as it gets for me.

Now this is not to serve as a review of the gig, there are plenty of reviews of Trio gigs elsewhere. The gig was amazing, as you would expect any gig involving your favourite band to be. The fact the support act was Dave Hause, lead singer of the Loved Ones, doing an acoustic set, was an added bonus.

No, this post serves as a reminder to us all, and also to myself, of how great gigs actually are and how I shouldn’t just let them become a thing of the past.

Because, right now it seems as though from every angle I am being told to grow up, look for jobs advance my career prospects etc. As part of this, I neglected one of the things in life I truly love, music.

For it does seem to be the conventional wisdom that going to gigs was very much a “phase” that you went through when you were enjoying (or not enjoying as the case may be), your adolescent years.

There is an argument for this. Two years ago I saw Bowling for Soup at the Liverpool Academy. One of the support bands was a new band called Forever the Sickest Kids, made up of new kids on the scene with a new fashion. I felt like I brought the average age of the crowd up by about fifty two billion years. It made me wonder whether I was getting to old for this shit.  

The Alkaline Trio gig at Manchester Academy convinced me that this was most certainly not the case.

At the gig there were people of seemingly all ages (well, all ages that could be expected at the gig of a band that rose to prominence in the early noughties). But, crucially, there were many of my own generation, eager to see one of the bands they had grown up with, just as I had. I spoke to some of them, one in particular in the smoking area and as mentioned above, got on with them.

As well as the people there, there was the undoubted thrill of live music. The adrenaline rush it gives you and, without sounding too clichéd, the joy it gives you.

Put shortly, watching a band you like can never let you down. It is not like an overbearing girlfriend/boyfriend or a football team that never bloody wins. It is an entertainment that has a certainty to it.

So, my advice to you, is if you are stuck in a rut and feel the pressure of the world building up on you, find a bit of spare money, save it up and go find where a band you like are playing.

It won’t let you down, because gigs are awesome.