June 19, 2011

Rock 'n' Roll

I basically booked tonight's gig on the strength of the support act. I'm not even a huge Wire fan, but y'know, I own Chairs Missing and know a few other tracks and they're rather cool in a vaguely nerdy post-punk kind of way. I'd barely heard of The Sonics at all -- which as it turned out (and as a femtosecond's reflection ought to have told me) put me in a vanishingly small minority in that audience.

So the first half was perfectly fine, though the Royal Festival Hall was half-empty when it began, with people wandering in randomly for almost the entire set and generally being really fucking annoying. The band seemed to take a long time to get into the swing and the first few numbers just got a bit lost, feeling sort of arid and drab and remote. It was Wire, after all, and so there was no getting away from the "middle aged men with guitars" vibe. But by the time they picked up enough speed and volume to shut up the loudly chattering fat berks in front of us it became reasonably enjoyable. And when the first encore was my favourite Wire song, the uncharacteristically chirpy Outdoor Miner, I was pretty chuffed.

That's as Kinky as we get.

Ray Davies himself introduced the headliners, and it was clear from about the second note they played that we were in for a fun time. I knew The Sonics dated back to the 1960s, but I really wasn't prepared for quite how old school their show was going to be. The elderly band members were like a perversely upbeat cross between The Blues Brothers and their movie nemeses The Good Ol' Boys, with music that was basically transplanted wholesale from the heyday of Chuck Berry. Their most recklessly modern tracks -- "this is another original song from our new album" -- could have cropped up on Led Zeppelin III or thereabouts. The whole show was like seeing The Rolling Stones in an alternative universe where they broke up in 1968 and only recently reformed, the intervening decades having never happened at all. Or, in the words of my companion Simon, they were the best wedding band ever.

In case that sounds snarky, let me be clear: the whole performance was utterly fantastic from beginning to end, hysterically funny in an entirely unmalicious and inclusive way. Where the Wire set had served mainly to amplify my innate misanthropy, filling me with bilious loathing for the hateful fuckwits around me (and some of them really were fuckwits), The Sonics blew that away with a great tidal wave of irresistibly good-humoured rock 'n' roll. They were absolutely shameless crowd pleasers -- the first encore was Louie Louie, for fuck's sake! It was awesome.

Most of all, I wish I could have gone around secretly filming the audience. It was a mixed bunch, but pretty much all of them were in one way or another rock 'n' roll nerds. The same annoying fucktards I'd spent the first act detesting for their cretinous yapping turned into admirable celebrants as they danced in the aisles. The crowd was predominantly white and somewhat less overwhelmingly male, but even so it was far from uniform. There were hipsters and losers, fat kids and weird kids, ditzy chicks, malodorous middle-aged rockers and painfully self-aware teenage trainspotters, and astonishingly many of them were transported into a utopian realm where they could just get on down with their bad selves, lank ponytails, pot bellies, ill-fitting specs and all. Documentary footage of these people's enjoyment would no doubt be acutely embarrassing for them as individuals, but it would be joyously edifying for the rest of us.

This is what music is for. (And tonight is what it means to be young.)

Posted by matt at June 19, 2011 1:32 AM