Always Save Your Stubs

For quite a few years now, I've had the fanciful idea of making a comprehensive list of all the live gigs I've been to and all the bands and solo acts I've seen. I don't know why. It's something to do, isn't it? And it'd be of interest to me if not to anybody else. 

A decade ago it would have been an extremely patchy record indeed. I'd have had to rely on my memory, which has never been good and only gets worse with age and time, plus any ephemera I might have lying around in the form of ticket stubs or concert programs.

I am a pack-rat by nature and inclination. One of my mantras, borne out of personal experience, is that I've never regretted holding on to anything but I've often regretted throwing something away. Present me can't pretend to know what future me will need, so why take the chance? Also, we have plenty of space. It's not like we have to crawl through tunnels of old newspapers to get to the fridge.

Even so, ticket-stubs were never something I held onto. Mostly I'd have chucked them in a bin on the way out of the hall or left them in a pocket to be thrown away later. 

I did keep a handful of stubs I thought had some significance, like the one from when the Who played Swansea FC's ground in 1976. That's still in the clutter on the mantlepiece in the front room, where I put it when we moved into this house thirty years ago, although ironically, that's a gig I have no trouble remembering without a small square of cardboard to prompt me.

As for programs, I stopped buying those quite soon after I started going to gigs. They were expensive. And anyway, you only ever saw them at concerts in actual concert halls. I started off going sse bands in big, formal venues like that but after the mid-70s, most of the bands I saw played in cellar clubs or the back rooms of pubs. No-one was selling program for any of that and it was all long before the time every last tiny indie band arrived at the venue with a wagon-load of "merch" to sell from a table by the doror.

A better record of what I'd seen would have been the ubiquitous fliers handed out before every gig by representatives of the venue, people running fanzines, members of other bands and anyone with some kind of event to promote. I knew people who collected those but I just used to take them, glance at them and drop them on the floor, like almost everybody else. I kinda wish I'd kept them all now, which proves the truth of my mantra, I suppose.

Apart from the odd item that somehow survives, like the satin scarf I bought outside the venue when I saw Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 1975 ("Best Years of Our Lives" tour, supported by Sailor.), about the only concrete evidence that remains are the mentions I made in the apazines I published during the 'eighties and 'nineties and the letters I wrote to my then-girlfriend, now ex-wife, in my first year at university, when we were maintaining a long-distance relationship by post and payphone. 

She was kind enough to give me back my letters when we split up but I've never re-read them. They're in the loft, which is also where I'm hoping the rest of my apazines are. I might try to force myself through the tiny trap-door later today to see if I can find any of them. [Edit: I did and they weren't there. Then I turned the house upside down looking for them and finally found them safely tucked away in folders in a cupboard downstairs. Still, it was interesting to go in the loft again...] If I do find them, maybe I'll learn about other gigs I went to and immediately forgot, like the  Urusei Yatsura/Prolapse one I was talking about the other day.

Just as an example of how weirdly revealing that might be, I was looking through one of the zines I have been able to lay my hands on just yesterday, when I came across this statement as I looked back on my cultural year of 1997:

"I saw a few live acts - not as many as I should have, as usual. They can't have been that brilliant, 'cos I can't remember many. Unexpectedly best was certainly Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra..."

Who?! Seriously, who the fuck were they???

Man in the Moon 

 Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra

Them, apparently. Geez! That was the highlight of my whole year? No wonder I stopped going to gigs soon after.

I do now have the faintest recollection of seeing a band that reminded us a bit of Bjork, playing in the back room of a pub. I could not have told you what they were called, though, and I very definitely have no lasting memory of it beaing a... well, a memorable experience.

In the same 'zine I also mention going to see Pregnant, one of Gareth Sager's many, largely unsuccessful projects. I had no memory of that gig, either, although, as always, I do now, since the organic AI that runs all our memories has had the time to hallucinate one for me. 

I do at least remember the band, one of whose albums I own on CD. Gareth Sager, who used to be in the retoractively-seminal The Pop Group, moved through a number of excellent bands during the eighties and nineties, several of which I saw and all of which I rate pretty highly. Pregnant was perhaps the last of them I paid attention to, mostly because a year later I wasn't paying attention to music at all any more.

 

Moodmaster - Pregnant

That, as far as I can tell, is Pregnant's one and only appearance on YouTube and it's on Gareth Sager's own, extremely frugally stocked channel. He's put up precisely seven videos to represent his near-fifty year career. 

Pregnant were good, as I think the tune above proves, although not as good as Sager's other band with the same singer, Head. How good or bad Pregnant might have been isn't the point, though. The point is I saw them and I'd forgotten about it. I mean, I saw Head and never forgot about that and I didn't even like them at the time. (I came to love them later...)

I'm kinda curious to find out how many bands I can remember seeing and how many specific gigs I can nail down. Not for any reason much other than to have a list. I really like lists and this is one I've thought about making for years.

And it would be, if not easy, then at least easier than it would have been before various people far more obsessive about record-keeping than I started posting itenararies for their favorite bands online. It's still a very patchy record but it's something. That's how I can say with certainty that the Cockney Rebel gig I mentioned earlier took place on 23rd March 1975. Before I checked the web I knew it was the mid-70s but that was about all. (Also, just as an unecessary caveat against trusting our would-be AI overlords, even as I picked the correct link from the search results to find the exact date, Gemini's AI summary at the top of the screen was confidently informing me there was no record of any Cockney Rebel gig at the named venue during the given year...)

I thought I'd be on safer ground with the first gig I ever went to, which was Hawkwind. I remember quite a lot about that one, probably because a) it was my first and b) I was too young to get served at the bar so I was sober. Without looking anything up I would have said it was either 1972 or 1973 and I know it was at The Locarno in Bristol. The support bands were some German crew I don't remember the name of and Fat Mattress, the band Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience trucked around Britain with little success after Jimi died.

The German band, literally the first live rock group I ever saw, were dull and very easy to forget even a week later. Fat Mattress never showed up, their spot being taken by comedy-folk singer and local hero Fred Wedlock, a replacement that could only have made sense in his home-town. He went down a storm with the  hippies, space cadets and proto-metalheads that made up most of Hawkwind's regular audience. Hawkwind were thunderingly loud and as mesmeric as you'd expect from them in their pomp, it being the classic line-up with Lemmy on bass, Stacia dancing and Liquid Len doing the psychedelic light show.

Before I started this post, I tried to pin down the exact date. I knew the venue and the approximate year so I thought it would be easy enough. It turns out Hawkwind played the Locarno no fewer than three times in 1972-3, on 10 July and 19 November 1972 and then again on 28 June 1973. They were a hard-working bunch of hippies for sure, although throughout the seventies it was common for the same bands to play the same cities several times a year, often in the same venues. Nobody talked much about tour fatigue in those days, let alone considered cutting back on the dates for the sake of their mental health.

To figure out which of those three it was, I can triangulate with my second-ever gig, which I remember even more clearly. That was Yes at the Hippodrome in Bristol. They played the double-album Tales From Topographic Oceans, in its entirety, even though it hadn't yet been released. TFTO came out on 7 December 1973 and the gig I saw was on 18 November 1973. I can even tell you the setlist, thanks to this website, and I can bloody well remember it, well, now I see it!

• The Firebird Suite
• Close to the Edge
• Siberian Khatru
• And You and I
• Close to the Edge
• Tales from Topographic Oceans :
• The Revealing Science of God (Dance of the Dawn)
• The Remembering (High the Memory)
• The Ancient (Giants Under the Sun)
• Ritual (Nous sommes du soleil)
• Heart of the Sunrise
• Roundabout

As you can imagine, if you've ever heard any of their work, it was a very long evening. Don't take my word for it - here's a bootleg of the actual gig, from the start of Topographic Oceans to the end. That an hour and forty minutes and there was at least half an hour before that.

I sure as hell didn't go a whole year between my first and second gigs so the Hawkwind show I saw must have been on 28 June 1973. I would have been fifteen, which makes me a tad older than I've always thought. I went with my friend Pat, who'd certainly been going to see rock bands since he was twelve or thirteen. Having a Hell's Angel for an older brother will open those kinds of doors for you, I guess.

The upshot of all this is that it's a project that might take me a while but with which I could conceivably have some partial success and in the process Imight learn a thing or two about myself as well. Not least that I once had worse taste than I like to admit. (Not looking at you, Yes or Hawkwind. I'm still happy to include both of you in my CV. The Jack Magic Orchestra, though...)

If I do ever get around to putting the list together, you can rest assured it will end up here. So there's something to look forward to for all of us!

 

Notes About AI Used In This Post

The header image, generated at NightCafe using Google Imagen 4.0 Fast on default settings from a prompt using an exact quote from the post: "The German band, literally the first live rock group I ever saw, were dull and very easy to forget even a week later. "  

I was hoping for something a little more abstract but the first image was a black & white "photo" of some very dull-looking men. I then re-ran the prompt with "Line art, color, magazine illustration" appended and got the image used in the post. It was weirdly tinted yellow for some reason, though, so I ran it through Paint.net to turn it sepia. 

It's funny how the drummer doesn't have any sticks.