Too Grumpy For Gigs
The doors officially opened at 7.30pm. We arrived half an hour later and joined the queue.
And my, what a queue it was.
It stretched down the road for about 200m, and it was going nowhere fast. We spent nearly thirty minutes standing in the street queuing up, the line barely moving at all, before we finally got in. It seems the venue had decided to check everyone's bags and perform random pat-downs, but failed to provide enough people to actually carry out these checks. You'd think this would be pretty basic stuff for a professional music venue, but apparently not.
Once inside I joined the queue for the bar, along with most of the rest of the audience, having failed to realise there were two more bars in the next room. When I eventually found them they were fantastically quiet, which made it pretty clear no-one else knew about these bars either. A sign or two might have sorted the problem out, but again, the venue just didn't seem bothered.
We positioned ourselves towards the back of the room, having little interest in fighting for space among the crowd closer to the stage. We weren't there for long before we found ourselves inhaling the unrelenting fug of BO from an infestation of teenagers dancing nearby. Really, it was awful. It smelt like they'd just climbed out of hibernation in a buffalo's armpit. We moved on from that spot pretty sharpish.
As the room filled up, and the space we'd carefully chosen started to look as busy as the rest of the place, we watched with dismay as tall people kept standing in front of us. Par for the course at any gig, and it didn't try our patience too much. But then, just after the band came on, a man appeared before us who seemed enormous in every dimension. As our hopes of seeing the stage vanished, we realised that the worst was still to come.
This giant wanted to dance.
His limbs flailed like leviathans in a tempest, his broad shoulders blotting out the entire room before us. Surely, surely we cried, this must be the nadir of our evening.
But no. We wouldn't get off so lightly. The girl to the side of this dancing hulk whispered something in his ear, and he promptly bent down and allowed her to climb up his back to the great plateau of his shoulders, from where she surveyed the room with such immense glee that she broke out into some kind of spontaneous shoulder dance. Just to rub it in.
By the way, if you've ever been to a gig in Bristol, I know what you're thinking. But no, this man wasn't Big Jeff. This was an entirely different big person who likes to dance at gigs.
Mercifully, it didn't last long. We had a reprieve when a security guard wandered over and asked her to get down. This also became the catalyst for them to move closer to the stage, and our vision was restored. Time to start enjoying the music.
Two people filled in the spot vacated by the giant. They didn't seem that bad. A little tall, but nothing to complain about. Until they started talking.
Everyone talks at gigs. It's normal. It's fine. In moderation.
These two egits had never heard of moderation. They nattered away, doing their best to ruin one song after another, forcing us to listen to their mindless twoddle that slipped from their tongues like a cascade of antagonistic filth. Bastards.
We managed to move a few feet to the side, which proved just far enough that we could blot out their dreadful verbiage. Having escaped this tedious duo, we then realised we had moved too close to yet more unstoppable twitterers, who were possibly even worse. This time it was a gaggle of moronic blonde waifs who communicated in a torrent of high-pitched screeches, a language intelligible only to certain species of dormouse, the cast of TOWIE, and the pipistrelle bat.
Eventually, amongst all of this, we found some space without the elbows of ogres in our faces or the shrieks of banshees in our ears, and spent a little time focussing just on the music. We were there to see Toots and the Maytals, one of my favourite reggae groups. I'd been to see them some years ago and discovered that Frederik 'Toots' Hibbert, a man in his sixties, was jumping around the stage like he was forty years younger. He was one of the finest frontmen I'd ever seen, and the whole band were simply superb.
Then, in 2013, Toots suffered a head injury at a gig when some young numskull threw a bottle at him. He spent a long time in recovery, and finally in 2016 they embarked on their first tour since. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see them again.
Toots certainly doesn't leap about the stage quite as much as he once did, perhaps because of his head injury, or perhaps because he's now seventy-two. But he hasn't lost his stage presence, and still the microphone hums with an immense energy every time he sings.
I may be too grumpy for gigs, but I don't care. When a performer is that good, it's still worth it.
