I’m not someone who’s super-obsessed with live music, probably because I’m also not very good at staying where I’m put. Even if I’m having a good time, after about forty-five minutes I start thinking “That’s very nice, thank you for all the loud sounds, but I’m kind of up for being somewhere else now.”

There have, however, been moments when I’ve truly got what the whole thing is for. Here’s a few of them. And there is a point to this.

GUN, The Astoria, 1991

One afternoon thirty six years ago I was wandering around the massive HMV that stood on the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London — the city’s mecca for buying music back then — and heard a song I instantly loved. I scurried over to the desk to find out who it was (no Shazam in those days, so you had to be on it) and walked out with a copy of Taking on the World, by a new Scottish rock band called GUN. Played it to death, and soon my pal Howard was hard into them too. We heard they were playing the Astoria (a storied, intimate rock venue only about a hundred yards from where I’d bought the CD) and went along to see them.

I still have very clear memories of how that gig started, well over three decades later. The band strode out on stage like a switch being flicked, immediately rocking at full swagger, and the hairs on the back of my neck went up. I remember thinking — “Golly. Rock and roll has broken out in front of me. Rock and roll is literally occurring.”

I’d seen a bunch of live bands by then but never experienced a gig kicking off with the same livid sense of “Fuck me — it’s on.” This isn’t that concert but it’s the same tour and a similar-size venue. Starts strongly but kicks up even harder at 17:30 in (with Better Days, the first song of theirs I heard). If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing because you’re busy bringing about world peace or whatever, then at least watch from the 39:00 minute mark to get a glimpse of the experience — and make sure to stick around for the manic cover of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” at the end.

I honestly think they were the best live band I’ve ever seen, in terms of pure fuck-it-let’s-do-this vibe. This was rock and roll as she is spoke, loud and rowdy lads ready to take on the world — and they were better musicians (and songwriters) than Guns N’ Roses and a ton of other far more celebrated bands of the time. They even had two styles of lead guitar going on: fluid whole-neck pentatonic pyrotechnics from Baby Stafford contrasting with harder, simpler, double-stopped crunch from Giuliano Gizzi. That first album was awesome and the follow-up Gallus (1992) is one of the definitive rock albums of the 90s. Writing this piece has pulled me right back into listening to both records after a long time away, and they stand up very well indeed.

We saw them kill it live again in 1992 on the Gallus tour, accompanied by my book editor, surprisingly. Then came Swagger (1994), which has its moments but… I fell prey to an intuition there might be problems ahead. The album gave them UK Top 10 chart success in the shape of a cover of Cameo’s “Word Up”. The problem (for me) was this had previously been a bit of fun during live gigs, when the band would segue out of one of their own tunes into a succession of high-energy covers of surprising songs while singer Rankin went crowd-surfing for an unpredictable length of time. “Word Up” was one of those. It was a joke, playing cross-genre for the fun of it. And if that — rather than one of your own songs — becomes the thing that breaks you into the mainstream… I dunno. It felt creatively ominous. Things went quiet for a while…

… and then in 1997 they re-emerged with an absolutely unlistenable album called 0141 632 6326 [seriously]. I don’t even know how to describe it. From hard rock they’d taken an incomprehensible wrong turn into kinda… dance pop, or something? Utterly dire.

Then they vanished. I have it on reasonable authority from someone who was around the Glasgow rock scene during that period that truly massive amounts of cocaine and ecstasy were coursing through it, and this might have been the problem —a poor quality video I’ve recently found of the last night of the Swagger tour is, shall we say… patchy, with Rankin in particular presenting as something of a shambles and sporting both cropped blond hair and leather trousers, which is never a good sign — though I see that their website cites internal divisions and record company hassles as factors.

Either way, a majestic band was no more. For quite a while I checked in to see if they’d re-formed but saw only sporadic signs of activity and a revolving door of replacement band members. In recent years, however, the band — with only Giuliano and Dante Gizzi left from the original line-up, the latter having (fairly successfully) switched from bass to vocals — seems to be getting back out on the road, and even produced a decent album (Hombres) in 2024, in which Giuliano still on occasion delivers the kind of punchy no-fucks-given riffs that I relish.

Of course every creative (and non-creative) person hates to hear “You were better then”. Like AC/DC without Malcolm, Phil and Cliff, however, for me it’s never going to be the same without Mark Rankin, Baby Stafford and fresh-faced drummer Scott Shields (who, I also recently discovered, somehow went on to play guitar for Joe Strummer and is now a notably successful composer of music for TV and film).

And also… well they’re much older now, and so am I.

Eric Clapton, Royal Albert Hall, 1990

As a wannabe guitarist the three influences of my teens were Dire Straits, AC/DC and Eric Clapton. I’d spent years listening to the latter when it was announced that he was going to do a residency at the Royal Albert Hall (a tradition which I believe continues to this day). Howard resourcefully scored a pair of tickets, and they were great seats — to the side, but close. We were so blown away by seeing Clapton live (and bare yards from us) that it took several minutes to realize his rhythm guitarist was Mark Knopfler (who I stanned even harder) and Phil Collins was there on drums.

It… was not shit. To this day we’ll reminisce about the moment where, during a long solo on a slow blues, Clapton appeared to be about to launch into another series of licks but paused, held the moment, then languorously whipped his fingers up the strings instead, producing a lack-of-notes that was exactly right for the vibe. When music is played live by real musicians it’s very different — and if you haven’t heard Eric Clapton live, then you haven’t heard him play. I’m choosing White Room here because it’s the one I recall being most blown away by on the night we saw him, though the band is different in this video.

A lot of my early musical tastes — from Elgar to Dixieland jazz — were acquired from my father, so I shared the Clapton experience with him via giving him a copy of the 24 Nights CD. Dad became such a fan that we wound up going to a later iteration of the residency together, a deeply treasured memory. Howard and I also saw Clapton play with B. B. King, in the same venue. Trust me, he can play.

Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Islington, Dec 12, 2012

I was introduced to PCO by my friend Nicholas Royle — one of the many off-beat things he brought into my life when we were hanging out in the 1990s. As a musical outfit they’re hard to describe… mixing classical, Philip Glass-style rhythmic repetition and avant-garde experimentalism… go look them up on YouTube and have a listen. One of their best-known tracks features a telephone dial tone and someone twanging an elastic band. Turned out many years later that my wife’s father liked them too, and when there was a chance to hear them live… we went. Wonderful night.

This is my favorite track of theirs. As wistful and romantic as a love affair in sepia.

Dire Straits, Wembley Arena 1985

I could write forever about how good Dire Straits were live, but I’m probably already trying your patience. I saw them twice, including at Wembley in 1985, possibly this very gig, and here they are playing what’s probably my favorite of their songs.

Watch the crowd of young people dancing to the superb six-minute outro solo, and recall that once was an time when a band could bring out a live album and it be one of their most commercially successful, as Alchemy was for Dire Straits. My son listens to a range of music and some of it’s great but none of it puts the actual instruments at the forefront. The past is another country. We listened to different things there.

Yehudi Menuhin & Wilhelm Kempff, Royal Festival Hall

I’m going to have to guess at the date, but I was about thirteen or fourteen. I went with my parents. I’m not sure what drew them to this particular concert but I was spending my teens diligently mangling various Beethoven piano sonatas, so that may have been part of it. There had always been a lot of classical played in the house, but I remember thinking that a whole evening of it might try my patience.

I was wrong. The three of us were transfixed. One of Beethoven’s crowning achievements played by two of the greatest classical musicians of all time, whose personal friendship was evident on stage.

Unbelievable. What a privilege to have witnessed it.

My dad afterwards acquired the CD set of them performing these sonatas and for the next couple of years when the family traveled in the car — especially during one long European camping expedition — this was generally what was playing.

Tempus keeps on fugitting

There have been other great gigs — finally seeing The Stones last year, and them being far better than they needed to be; seeing Bryan Adams in the 90s with Paula, where the band disappeared from the stage two thirds of the way through and then popped up on a dais in the middle of the crowd to spend the next half hour being a jukebox of other people’s songs, prompted by shouted requests from the crowd — but these five were the stand-outs. Each ties hard into friends and family.

Possibly because I had a significant birthday recently — I am now, apparently, allegedly, sixty — this bout of nostalgia has left me feeling… I’m not even sure what the word is. Very aware of time and its progress and predations, certainly. Deep-diving back into GUN in particular after a quarter of a century away has made me realize how much this is now, not then. The raven-maned guitar-hammering rock god from that gig is now bald. Rake-thin Knopfler is an avuncular and comfortably-girthed seventy-five years old. Clapton’s eighty, and suffering from both peripheral neuropathy and disappointing political stupidity. Apart from me, everyone involved in the Beethoven concert experience — my parents, and both musicians — is now dead.

I don’t mind getting older (not least because, as the saying goes, it sure beats the alternative) but some things do make you acknowledge anew that time keeps on passing and it’s only ever been going in one direction.

So I’ll stop writing and just say: seize the day, my friends. Seize the fucking day.

And also, tell us… what have been your banger gigs?

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