Gigs are expensive here in Helsinki. Touring bands routinely charge €80 for tickets, and if you want a good view of Elton John's upcoming concerts you'll need to pay him €109. (Well, hair doesn't transplant itself, you know..)
For me, that's a high price for an evening which may fade from memory pretty quickly. This got me thinking; out of all the gigs I've been to, which ones would have been worth that kind of money?
After a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that the most memorable gigs in my life have been those that have made the spine tingle, the hairs raise, and the heart race.
I've found a few videos from youtube to illustrate my choices. They haven't been from the specific gigs, but they've been from the same period, and from the same tours in most instances.
OK, here's my list of the six best gigs of my life:
1. AC/DC at the Monsters of Rock Festival, Castle Donnington, 1981.
No wait, don't go away, give me a chance to explain :) This was the first festival I managed to talk my mum and dad into letting me go to. I went on the bus with my friends John and Dave. It was a long, rainy day; there was a lot of standing around waiting for bands to come on, during which, to pass the time, some people were weeing into plastic bottles and throwing them spinning, high into the air above the crowd. (Ee, we made our own fun in them days.)
I thought that maybe I'd made a mistake in coming, but then, after a long wait, this happened:
I know; it's juvenile and a bit silly, but I loved it then, and to be honest, I love it now.
OK, moving swiftly on:
2. James Brown at some venue or other, London, 1985.
A few years passed and I became a student at the L.S.E. I was getting more into jazz, and used to go to the Wag club and Sol y Sombra to check out Paul Murphy and the IDJ crew. I hadn't yet become a jazz-nazi though, so when some tickets came up to see the godfather of soul, I thought it'd be rude not to.
I remember the red suit, and an awful lot of bigging up from the guitarist and MC. J.B. was clearly not in his absolute prime but it was still an amazing show. Incidentally, the support was a then largely unknown band, Simply Red. They didn't tingle the spine..
There were some more musical highlights during my university time: Lou Reed blasting out an encore of White Light, White Heat at Brixton Academy; stumbling upon Hugh Masekela playing to 15 people in a UCL basement; Queen at Live Aid.
The best one though was:
3. Fela Kuti, Fête de L'Humanité, Paris 1986
During my last summer at L.S.E. a friend bought a camper van and three of us drove to Barcelona. We had some adventures, busked in Las Ramblas, nearly died in a car crash, and then on the way home somehow found ourselves at Fête de L'Humanité. I was a left-leaning politics student, it was the era of French films like Betty Blue, Diva, and Subway, and simply to be in this communist festival held on the outskirts of Paris felt like the height of radical chic. It was a beautiful late summer evening, the fairground ferris wheel was lit against the darkening sky and Fela came on and played three songs. For two hours :)
I couldn't find a good live performance from this period, but here he is in earlier days..
Nearly twenty years later I ended up playing at the festival myself. It was a nice moment.
After I left university I decided that I didn't want to follow my friends into investment banking, the law, or MI5, and that instead I'd go where the real money was - jazz music. Through following one of jazz's many tributaries, I ended up going to see:
4. Frank Zappa, Brighton Conference Centre, 1988
His music combines the sublime and the puerile, and isn't to everyone's tastes. It's not always to mine, but that night hearing the band singing Louisiana Hooker with Herpes to the tune of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, it may have been wrong, but it felt so right :)
Here's some more juvenilia from the same tour:
Whatever you think of the sometimes dodgy lyrics, he was a wonderful, original talent, and I'm glad to have seen him live.
As someone trying to play jazz, I've obviously been to a lot of jazz gigs. Some highlights include John Scofield's band with Dennis Chambers, McCoy Tyner's trio, Branford Marsalis' quartet with Jeff Watts, the Zawinul Syndicate. All great gigs in different ways, but the next on my list is from a different genre.
5. Jimmy Cliff, WOMAD, Reading, 2003
I played at the Womad Festival in the UK a few years ago, and before and after our gig I got chance to see a lot of good stuff.
The pick of the bunch was this:
It had rained heavily so the song seemed strangely appropriate. It's a shame that on this Glastonbury version the same year the guitarist left his tuner in the dressing room, but the backing vocals make up for it :)
Also on the bill were the amazing Khaled, and the band who later provided the final choice on my list:
6. Ojos de Brujo, April Jazz Festival, Espoo Finland, 2007
This was one occasion when it was worth paying Finnish prices. As I said above, I'd seen them at WOMAD and knew they were an amazing live band, and they more than lived up to my expectations. On my Spinetingleometer (patent pending) they were a 10.
(This is a long clip, but please bear with it.)
Their mix of flamenco, dub, dj-ing, mc-ing, odd time grooves and musicianship ticks all my boxes. If this were a Desert Island Disks situation and I had to pick one gig as the best of my life, I'd pick this gig.
OK, so those are my choices. It's interesting to me that so many of them came from earlier in my musical life; perhaps the fact that they made more of an impression just means that I was at a more impressionable age. I'm pleased though that the best of them is the latest; it gives me hope that there are many more memorable gigs to come.
Right, I'm going to start saving up for Elton.
Chris "Rocket Man" Bestwick
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