Be Excellent To Each Other

If you've gone to a gig, and particularly one where the tickets cost quite a lot of money, in a large, seated venue:

1. Shut the fuck up while the band is playing, rather than constantly talking;
2. Stop yelling out the same fucking track that you want the band to play, because they ALREADY HAVE A SET-LIST.

Thank you.

(Luckily, the Bad Seeds were pretty good, if at the noisy end of their spectrum last night.)

Once, at a gig, the guy sat behind me spent a good while shouting out seemingly random heckles to the band, really loudly, and annoyingly. After a short while of this I turned around and asked him if he wouldn't mind shutting the fuck up. He did, but it transpired later he went off to complain about me. Nothing came of it, and it was only a small bar gig.

There are morons wherever you go, sadly.

I was at a Counting Crows gig once*. People kept on yelling out songs all the time, to the point where Adam bent down, picked up the piece of paper and said something along the lines of, "This is a set list. This is the order in which we play the songs, no matter how loud you scream."

Though it was in a jokey fashion, and didn't make him sound like an ass.










*Yeah, I know...

I went to a counting crows gig at the NEC. It was a bit boring, and felt a bit tired, so we went home halfway through.

Mclusky, similarly amuse me on a live set I have of them.

'Don't worry, we'll be deliberately playing all our best songs. We deliberately just play the best ones, and not the ones we don't like. We call it... a set! Ah? Ah?'

I got to go up on stage with 65daysofstatic the other month, I even mashed the keyboard!

I was wondering if Nick Cave would do that. He seemed in a pretty surly mood, and was pretty dismissive of the poor roadies last night (who had their work cut out, since Cave kept knocking things over). Also, who's the mad bushmen in The Bad Seeds these days? A strange violinist with a massive, massive beard?

STREETS OF LONDON!

Yeah, do Streets of London!

Anywhere at any price. Even if it's a few quid to see a local acoustic folksy type or a small time indie band - kindly shut the fuck up. Even if you don't think much of 'em, people might be. It's been getting worse in Cardiff in recent years. I went to see a jolly nice line up at the Welsh club and there was a young lass talking quite loudly to her friend all the way through the majority of the sets. Towards the end the normally placid Graff confronted her, asking her to please be quiet as people were trying to enjoy them.

"I wasn't talking that loud."

"I'm sorry, but you were," said the even more placid Gary. She shot him a look of pure poisonous hate.

If you want to go out for a beer and a chat, ffs go to a pub or bar that doesn't have live music or, y'know, use the interludes. Selfish pricks.

I also wish people wouldn't sit down at gigs. It seems all wrong. Talking whilst the band is on is unforgivable. Shouting out track names is fine if you ask me. Possibly helps encourage the band to do those tracks another time. Probably not though.

Talking at gigs is a pet hate of mine, too. When I went to see Damien Rice at the Shepherd's Bush Empire (I think), just as he was getting popular, there were sooo many people stood near the back just chatting away loudly throughout the entire gig. Now, for the most part Damien's songs are pretty damn quiet, so we couldn't hear shit, and it was clear that he could hear them all chatting away. He actually got in a bit of a strop and moaned that if being popular meant his gigs attracted wankers who talk throughout the whole set then he'd rather not sell any more records.

That seemed to split the audience somewhat, but I was with him!

Was that the one in 1995, and were you the wanker that kept on shouting "Courtney" at Adam Durtiz?

No, '98. I would have, though, were I there. Possibly.

The fat fuck should've just shut up and played 'Holiday in Cambodia'.

Depends on the gig. Should Wire do a London gig this summer, I'd want that to not be seated. However, we saw Sigur Rós in Brixton, and that was utterly hateful as a standing gig. It's not just to jump around to, and we couldn't see the stage, and could barely see the projections; the seated Apollo gig was massively superior, just because it was seated. Personally, I think the Apollo's got it right—offer both.