Scream to a Sigh
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| Is there any left? |
The worst behaved audience I ever saw at a gig was for
notoriously curmudgeonly, painfully shy, obsessive, singer songwriter Ray
La Montagne.
His support act was a
pair of Texan sisters in print dresses with close harmonies and matching quiffs
whose entire family had flown over to visit
with them and were picked out by the
spotlighter up in the Gods to much waving and displaying of American dentistry.
They were the highlight of the night.
The last time I had been at the Olympia was in the 90’s to see the Manics, just after the disappearance
of the bould Richey Edwards, who had
famously carved 4 Real into his own
arm and bled all over the gaff while the shocked NME journalist looked on in
disbelief and the photographer almost wet his pants. A few weeks later his car
would be found parked at the Severn Bridge with the door open and the keys in
it. He had been drawing £200 a day from
his bank account and there were unconfirmed reports that he was seen at a beach
party in Goa.
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| I'm outta here |
That night I appear to have thought it was a good idea to go
with 3 mad men, one in the ravages of alcoholism that he would die from and who began drinking
cans of Tuborg before the train pulled out of the station and another who would
fall down the wide steps in the balcony,
tumbling head over heels the whole way, knocking people trying to scooch along
to their numbered seat flying, clutching 2 plastic pints of Heineken that still had the head on them
when he was extricated from the tangled legs at the front.
“Never spilt a drop
boy” says he with some considerable pride as he staggered to his seat.
He had also predicted the set list and painstakingly and
drunkenly made notations on a small black notebook while people were screaming La Tristessa
and jumping up and down and screaming to a sigh and generally behaving like
maniacs at a manic rock concert.
Which we were.
After being refused entry to every single pub in the Temple
Bar area - in the bouncers defense when the sanest soberest best dressed member
of a group is ME, then there is a poor
lookout for the rest of them. They took in the motley crew at the door with one
glance, our wild eyed stares, the haircuts, the cut of us, and the fact that
one of the group who had asked for a plain burger in McDonalds was now asking
for a rub of someone else’s and told us to move along.
No runners lads, no jeans lads, no drunken maniacs with wild hair and
teeth, move along there lads, nothing to see here. Take your spikes and your
needles and your cans and your notebooks and fuck off with yourselves as quick
as yee bleedin’ like.
We ended up in a local off O Connell Street, where the
brassers and the gougers drank, and spent the night watching the noble calls
from oily haired men in rumpled suits and the demented tail end of a christening battle it out at a
lock in on a Karaoke machine.
| ........"Go on, now GO.... walk out the door" ............ |
The Germans next door complained to the manager in the hotel
and we were shushed on a number of occasions and threatened with eviction on the last. The
night porter smoked a joint and drank a couple of cans himself in the room with us
before he mentioned we were on our last warning or we were being hoyed out. The
next day while repairing to a hostelry to recover and recoup before the train,
we made up new names for the band, the winner being the Frantic Street Sweepers,
which caused us to laugh intermittently and at some considerable length until
we got to Enniscorthy.
Nothing about Enniscorthy makes one laugh, unless it is the relief
of the road out of it.
It may reflect a progression in my life that the next time I
was back in the Olympia it was in the company of women, one who drove up
wearing a cardigan that the Fonz might have worn if he was a college football
star - with lipstick so red she was mistaken for traffic lights by confused
drivers and a little blonde broad in the passenger seat who berated and
lamented every ex she ever had while
fervently asking the Universe to bring her another. She has had a new baby
since so it is apparently vital to be careful what you wish for, and where you
send your conscious thoughts, which are magnetic, alledgedly.
I lay in the back
seat, pretending I couldn’t hear them talking over the noise of the speakers
blasting Northern Soul, and the traffic, and the open windows where the white
smoke was escaping into a trinity of trailing streams behind us on the motorway. My phone rang a
lot if memory serves, and it was with some delight that I informed all and
sundry that I was heading to the big smoke to see a tall handsome bearded man
singing soulfully about trouble, and Jolene, and a picture of you, holding a picture of me, in
the pocket of my blue jeans.
| Has anyone a light? |
We went to Fibber McGees for a bottle to let the worst of
the queue gain access to the beautiful old theatre and spent an hour flirting
with hairy Dublin men, whom we gave the eye back to as fast as they gave it to
us. And then we went in and found our seats, up in the nosebleed section where
if you leaned forward you would topple to your certain death down onto the
crowd below. If the fall didn’t kill you, then the crowd certainly would. They had taken on their own
identity at this point and were behaving like a remake of Lord of the Flies, gearing
up for an evening’s entertainment by buying pints and consuming them as if they
were Mothers Milk. Sitting in confined spaces with strangers has always wrecked
my buzz, the size and shape of them, the smell off their heads, necks and
oxters, the rocking of the seats, the closeness of unknown thighs pressed
warmly against your own, the fight for the elbow rest, the interminable excuse me, excuse me, excuse me as the
entire row has to stand clutching their coats, glasses and genitalia as you
progress slowly along clutching your own.
It is true that one only rents beer and the Texan Siblings
were barely into their stride before I realized I needed the loo post haste and
in trying not to get the eye on me as I held onto the walls in the pitch dark,
almost walked off the balcony to plummet to the floor below, and had to grope
my way back up fondling the flock
wallpaper like a blind man reading Braille. First I had to pretend I was
looking for someone beneath and spent a number of agonizing seconds listening
to the laughter as I squinted into the darkness.
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| Note to self - Don't walk off the balcony on the way to the jacks |
“Did you see me almost fall over the balcony” I said in
terror when I made it back and excused myself into my seat. The women were too
busy eating strawberry bon bons and staring at the couple in front who were so
drunk they were shifting. At this point, it crossed my mind that the crowd had
morphed into a cinema audience from the 40’s, eating crisps, sandwiches, pies,
and opening cans and bottles with their teeth, hurling pellets of balled up wet
labels onto the heads and stage, answering phonecalls and making them, tagging
themselves on facebook, taking selfies, hooting as they waited for the main
feature to begin. Everywhere was
pandemonium as people ran to the bar, jacks, and bar again. The drunken woman
in front climbed over the backs of the seats, standing on hands and shoulders
till she unceremoniously crashed to the floor having misjudged the drop, and
when the laughing stopped and she was helped to her unsteady feet by the
bouncers, wandered off vaguely in the direction of the toilets. Oh she is a
model to walk off the balcony herself now, I thought as I watched her weaving
down the steps in some considerable trepidation. And then a roadie came out on
to the corner of the dark stage and started to trick around with the guitars,
of which there were several.
And then without so much as a hello or a nod he launched
into one of his songs.
Is that HIM? I queried as we screwed up our
eyes.
There was no introduction, no engaging, no acknowledgement
of the audience, no connection.
In his shyness he made the mistake of assuming they would
afford him the respect an artist deserves, and listen rapt and spellbound as he
spun his words and melodies.
They did no such thing.
On the 3rd or 4th song, even the
drunks realized that this was in fact, Ray La Montagne, and this was in
fact the gig. There was no linking between songs, no info about how or where
the song was written, or why, no back story, no nothing. The band crept on in
the darkness and took up their instruments and joined in producing a sound that
although powerfully heartstoppingly beautiful
was ignored and heckled.
The audience feeling itself snubbed by the quiet Canadian,
drew in its collective breath and skirts, and ran amok.
He sealed his fate when he started to moan and complain
about the acoustics in the theatre.
We opined at length
and at some considerable volume from our eyrie perch that this was
A.
Disgraceful
B.
Outragous
C.
Futile.
And so bemoaned the fact that we had left
Fibbers at all and queried the existence or not of the remainder of any or all
of the strawberry bon bons.
| Just let me stay in the corner and sing |
We left early, and
legged it to a chipper in Crumlin where a dodgy pink chicken snack box consumed
in the pitch on the N11 forced one of the aforementioned women, who shall
remain nameless , to take a taxi to Dunnes for toilet roll and Andrews
Liver salts, in that order.
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| Does anyone want a bite of this? |
The most nervous audience I ever saw was in the Arts Centre
when Declan Sinnott was launching his first solo album. Sinnott himself, who despite having spent 40
years playing the most beautiful guitar and harmonizing with everyone that ever
stood up in shoes on a stage, was as nervous as a foal, and had called his
record company, Warner, the day before the launch to say he was not entirely
happy with the album and he would like to record it again.
They laughed and hung up.
| Who's tapping on the offbeat? |
On the night of the gig, while the audience sat in tiered
rows in complete silence, afraid to catch the eye of his infamous brother
Frank, swinging his pinstriped suited leg in the front row, Declan was in the
green room having a nervous breakdown looking for his shoes. Having driven from
the bowels of West Cork and being
frantic with the reception he may or may not get from his home town audience
for his first solo work, on an album that was personal, and traumatic , and
ultimately cathartic to recall and
record. I can only imagine that Vicky was helping him look as well, but in the
heel of the reel he arrived out in his bare feet and explained.
The room was so quiet you could hear the buzzing of the speakers
and the rumbling of stomachs. And then
he launched into his first song, which he sang well, albeit nervously, and
there was a polite spattering of applause and then immediately back to the
silence. I could not exhale. The nerves from the performer had become palpable
and were wrapping themselves around the crowd like spectral wraiths, like the
mists of time, like the white smoke from the car windows. Then, as a group we projected it back to the
lone singer on the spotlit stage until
it grew larger and the silence between
the songs as he tuned up became as thick as a peasoup fog.
I was sitting beside Maurice who wore his coat and hat
despite the close heat of the shuttered room on the summer evening. Name of
God, now is the time for Frank to open his mouth and heckle or take off his
shirt or throw a chair across the room in a fit of sibling rivalry, anything ……anything
to break the tension, to let us laugh and thus breathe out. And then
salvation came from an unlikely source. Declan had been keeping the beat with
his bare foot, slapping the wooden stage , the small sound travelling through
the speakers and it was at this juncture that I became aware of someone
slapping the ground behind me on the off
beat, thus confusing everything. I
turned around to glower in the darkness and spotted an unusual sight, a
multi-tasking man. He had his tongue in his girlfriend’s mouth and his hands
under her jumper, and his foot was beating the wrong time simultaneously.
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| Your man is on the stage |
Quite a feat when you are as drunk as he obviously was. Who
goes to a seated gig to shift someone?
(looks around room suspiciously)
Declan stopped playing and held a hand to his eyes and asked
who was making the noise as it was putting him off. “It’s the snogging couple behind me” I offered
to relieved hilarity, and in a split second, the 4th wall was broken
by the laughter, and we exhaled and sent a wellspring of love and peace and
abundance to the man in his 60’s who had left town as a teenager, with his guitar on his back, and
we welcomed him back as one of our own.
He nailed it.
I leave you with a quote from Jack Kerouac’s seminal work On the Road which explains my
attachment to, and initial attraction to
nutballs.
They
danced down the streets like dingledodies,
and I shambled after as I've been doing all my
life
after people who interest me,
because the only people for me are the mad
ones,
the
ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk,
mad to be saved
desirous
of everything at the same time,
the
ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
but
burn, burn, burn
like
fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding
like spiders across the stars
and in the middle you see the blue centerlight
pop
and
everybody goes "Awww!"
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| "Awww" |
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