Last week a teenage dream of mine was realised. I know that sounds a little geeky and blah blah, but as a sulky, awkward and socially enept teenage girl I had very few wants in life. One was to be in a rock band and the other was that I wanted to see one of my favourite 3 bands play live.
I was a huge fan of rock, riot girl and heavy metal. My favourite 3 bands were Garbage (before they went all pop), Veruca Salt (with the original line up) and Sleater-Kinney. Thinking back my mother should have seen the gay thing coming really…
I would jump around my room, air guitar in hands, sometimes air drums, depending on my mood, and wail away to the few albums I’d managed to find at our local indie music shop (which I totally hope is still there). Oh yes, no illegal downloads back then, unless you had fancied a weeks wait (and an explanation to why your phone bill was sky high to the parents) for one track! It would take a good few minutes to even get a highly compressed blurry image of your favourite band…
Anyway, I’m getting away from the point.
So for the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been getting more and more excited. Regressing more and more into my teenage self. By Tuesday I was positively 14 again.
The actual gig itself was a bit of a blur. We got to The Albert Hall, in Manchester around 8:30, we queued for overpriced drinks from plastic cups and then found ourselves at the back of a huge crowd of 20-somethings – forty-somethings and began the slow journey to the front of the crowd.
The band opened with Pricetag, the opener to the new album No Cities to Love, and the foot tapping began, from there on it was a mash of old and new songs, thankfully all of my teen favourites were in there, Dig me out, Ironclad, Oh!, Entertain, Jumpers, Modern Girl, i wanna be your Joey Ramone amongst a peppering of the new ones, Surface Envy, Bury Our Friends and A New Wave.
Carrie Brownstein was on top cool-kid form, lashing out heavy riffs and finger-picking goodness, whilst looking incredibly hot. Corin Tucker too was on fire screaming out lyrics (which the day after I regretted singing along with) but the biggest surprise of the night was the fact that Janet Weiss can still whip a skin for an hour and a half like an absolute machine. Seriously amazing drumming.
We ended the evening in a self made mosh-pit instigated by my good friend Gez. Why it happened so late on in the show I don’t know but you could see the relief on peoples faces when it finally happened, followed by admissions that people had waited over 10 years to do that.
The biggest regret is that I only had my iPhone to take photos, I wish so much that I had been able to take my 6d in with me 🙁
