Intro

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My life has changed quite a bit in the last few years, I made the ultimate prison break (graduating from school), I lost ties with some friends, deepened ties with others and made new ones, I got the chance to work on some amazing documentary projects, I became a certified adult and got my first debit card, letting me go where I want when I want (no you can’t have the 3 magic numbers on the back).

But one of the biggest shifts for me has been picking up the habit of enjoying live music, specifically the music scene of London town, also known as the city of London (not to be confused with the City of London), the Greater London region or for the sake of everyone’s sanity just “London”.

_{London’s skyline - A view from the North side of the city embankment (picture edited by Massi)}

When I was a kid I spent almost all of my time in 3 areas: At home, in school and on the walk between those 2 places; School doubled as a place for work and for socialising so when I had “me time” I spent nearly all of it at home, whether that was talking to people online, watching videos or playing games.

Now that’s far from the worst existence out there, but it did mean that my world was very insular, when the COVID pandemic hit those 3 areas narrowed to just one, school was beamed into my home and there was no commute to get to it, this was just as I was reaching my last years of being a teenager, when I should’ve been able to broaden my horizons, instead the government made it illegal to go outside, oh well.

But of course that eventually changed, pandemic restrictions lifted and in 2021 I finished my exams, suddenly I had a lot of freedom in my hands, no schedule to follow, just choices.

Formal education wasn’t an experience I wanted to carry on with, so university was off the cards, that left me taking a gap year.

A lot of that was, again, spent at home, doing the same old things, I branched out into collaborating with Massi which gave me an avenue for productivity, working on passion projects, but that was still “work” from home.

Socialising in school became socialising in the pub, and I definitely had some fun nights at that time, but I still wasn’t exactly ending up with broad horizons.

But near the end of the year, November, a friend of mine invited me to come with him to see a band live, Kid Kapichi, at London’s SCALA venue, an old cinema converted into a big gig and club spot.

Put simply, it was a great night, the band was amazing and the 2 warmup acts supporting them, SNAYX and PROJECTOR, stood out in their own right, having an excuse to go outside my home town was also a plus.

Then 2022 rolled around, in February I was invited to another show that some others in our group weren’t able to make, then there were 2 more gigs, in April a SNAYX headliner, May - Kid Kapichi again, but from there things changed.

I had been drifting away from my old social circle, partly because many of them went off to uni and partly because I didn’t really feel like I fit in, and that meant the end to these gig outings only just as they were getting started.

But then, fast forward to July, 2 things happened that put me back on the trail.

First, on the first day of the month, tickets for Kid Kapichi’s album launch party (set for September) went on sale, even though it was in the coastal town of Bexhill, absolutely nowhere near where I live, I snapped up a ticket.

Second, after a day trip to visit one of my old friends who was living in London at the time, I got stranded as the last train home was cancelled, I ended up meeting a similarly stranded metalhead and kept her company while the train company called in taxis to get us home, in the waiting we got to talking about our music tastes and the rock duo Nova Twins came up, she was going to a show of theirs that was coming up in November, at the time I wasn’t, but I quickly jumped at the chance to hear them live and got a ticket the next day.

September rolled around and I got to be one of the first people to experience the new album live, it was electrifying, something less electrifying was the fact that I hadn’t got the money for a hotel, so I had to wait out the hours until the trains started running again with not much of a plan, first I took shelter in a local pub, then had a wander, then ended up lying under a bus stop for a bit, not exactly my proudest moments but I didn’t regret it, it was my first and so far only gig outside of London.

The Nova Twins show was thankfully closer to home, but it was also filled with energy, a large venue, fire shooting out of the stage, an iconic duo bringing the house down with their riffs, I loved it!

But still I wasn’t quite bit with the bug, I had lots of work to do, our major documentary series MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide was in pre-production, the script was partly written and I was going off to Germany to record it, there wasn’t the time for more concerts.

But fast forward to late March 2023, after that recording process was done with and I was back in the UK, I discovered the pop-punk artist Girli, as someone who had been raised by my dad on the punk of the Sex Pistols and had built up a taste for pop over the years it was the perfect blend, I got hooked.

A month later in April I ended up bingeing nearly her entire discography, and days after that I got myself a ticket to the last stop on her “F**ked it Up” tour, once again at London’s SCALA.

If I wasn’t a devoted fan before, after that show I was committed, not only did she start becoming one of my most listened to artists but after a few months I decided to become a supporter of hers on Patreon. I then learned that she would be the headliner of an upcoming festival called Gotobeat Festival, hosted in a brewery. It was a 5 act show with DJ sets in between, my thinking was I was getting one artist I knew I was going to love and 4 more as a bonus.

And some bonus it was, every act shined and brought their own style to the event, I got to enjoy hours of iconic music and see the hype build act after act as the crowds got bigger and bigger, each time I found my way to the front until act No.4, the wonderful Beth McCarthy, where despite waiting right at the shutters for the stage to open up I still somehow ended up behind several rows of people.

It turned out there was a side entrance where people had been camping out to get the best spots ahead of everyone else, I learnt my lesson and took up a place there in the wait for Girli’s set to kick off. Due to technical hitches in the soundcheck that was a longer wait than expected, but I enjoyed my time chatting with other fans and letting the enthusiasm build, everyone knew it would be worth it.

And of course it was, by now I had been listening to her music for months and the lyrics were wired into my brain, after seeing 4 new artists being able to go up to that stage and sing every word back as it was being sung felt like a superpower.

That show felt like one of the best nights of my entire life, after grappling with drifting away from my old group I had often felt lost, lacking in self esteem and self confidence, it was exactly the tonic I needed.

I had also been experiencing stress from my work on the documentary content, where production had extended much further than I originally expected, here I had been surrounded by kind people all enjoying themselves and I had gotten to share in that energy, a wave of positivity washing over me where I could just let go of life’s worries and enjoy a night out.

I even had a symbol of that feeling to take with me, one of Girli’s main colours for her motif is pink, and I told one of the friends I’d made at the show that they matched it a lot better than I did, in my generic black jacket and blue shirt.

She gave me one of her pink rings and I got into the habit of wearing it a lot, I later told another a friend about this and she encouraged me to never take it off, as a reminder of “that step taken and to not go back”.

Now I wear it every day, with “for the steps taken and not to go back” being the mantra it stands for, which I tell myself when I put it on in the morning.

Anyway, after such a fun night I knew I wanted more of this, I was bitten by the bug. I booked another show to see King Nun, a band who had supported Kid Kapichi in their May 2022 show, in the lead up to Gotobeat I had also booked a headline show from PROJECTOR.

When that PROJECTOR show kicked off one of the support acts, Pleasure Dome, mentioned they had their own headliner lined up for a few days later, I liked them so much I got a ticket for that one too, it all spun off from there, after Gotobeat I ended up seeing 14 more shows that year, for 2024 the number is 35 and counting.

Why gigging?

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So now we have the “how” of me picking up this habit, what about the “why”?

Well, as I mentioned before, it’s a great excuse to get outside and go places, these are also nights where I can let go of everything else going on and just enjoy myself, disconnecting from my job and my passion projects, really helping with forming a work life balance which I previously didn’t give myself.

On top of those reasons, I just fucking love music, it’s a form of media I experience way more than any others, videos come close, video games a fairly distant third, TV and Movies aren’t even close, I find myself listening to music for hours at a time every day, and whenever I’m out and about I love to have a bit of a soundtrack.

But live adds another dimension to that experience, it’s one thing to hear music, it’s another to feel it.

A never ending cycle

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In my experience almost all of the support acts have been amazing and well worth coming early for, these are extremely talented bands that stand out in their own right, sometimes they even shine above the headliner (I won’t give any examples there, lest I hurt any feelings).

The norm I find is 2 support acts for a gig, for 3 bands total (sometimes it’s 3 support acts, just 1 or rarely none at all), this means when I’m going to see a band I already know I’ll discover 2 new ones along the way, and because I’ve heard their sets I already know if I like them before I check out their socials.

Much more often than not, I do like them, which leads me to more gigs as I find events they’re headlining, or sometimes they’ll be supporting another headliner I’ve never heard of, the first examples of this were SNAYX, Pleasure Dome and King Nun but there have been plenty more since!

That makes for a never ending cycle of discovering new artists from the old, letting Spotify toss recommendations into my earphones is great, but this is way better, it’s also a means of discovering far more niche bands, many support acts have such small followings that you’d never come across them by chance.

The Unheard

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One thing I underestimated before going to so many live shows is just how many bands have none of their songs on streaming platforms or only a select few, where a band might have 1 or 2 tracks out on a platform like Spotify, they might be playing 5 or 6 tracks on their average setlist.

It just didn’t really occur to me that getting in the studio to record an album or an EP costs a lot of money, and that’s money some bands either don’t have or would rather spend elsewhere.

There can also be other reasons too, one favourite act of mine, Francis Wolfe, mentioned not wanting to put out recordings unless they were just right, and although that might be frustrating for me as an audience member who hears a track and wants to listen to it again and again right after, not weeks or months later when the next show comes up, as a creative I understand wanting to keep your work behind the curtain until it’s in its best form.

As a result for many bands their songs stay in their minds and on their stages, that’s something very unique and until I got into this gig circuit I really didn’t realise just how much of a world I was missing out on, in the past “listening to music” for me was synonymous with “Spotify”, if a song existed outside that space, YouTube or at a stretch bandcamp, the chance of me ever coming across it was near zero.

Not that there’s any shortage of music going around, but opening the doors to that whole new world was something special.

There’s also the more positive side to unheard tracks, which is the sneak peaks, bands who do put their music out on streaming often love to play it to a live crowd first and it’s always an amazing feeling being in the first group of people, or one of the first, to ever hear a track for the first time outside of the creator’s bubble.

I was surprised by how often this happens and the gap between these sneak peaks and the broader releases, sometimes months will go by between a band sharing their music with a live crowd and sharing it with the wider world, one of the examples of this that I remember best is the PROJECTOR headline show, I went there expecting old favourites only to surprised by a large chunk of their debut album 4 months before it came out, most of the setlist was all new!

A different sound

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Sometimes I listen to a song on Spotify and think it was decent, but nothing too crazy, then when it gets played live it’s a whole other world, it blows me away and I feel like I’m listening to the greatest song of all time. (The opposite, loving a song on Spotify and then it turning out to be crap on the stage, is much rarer.)

And that’s for an obvious reason, what you hear on Spotify is just one take of a song, recorded in one specific environment with one set of instruments, a snapshot of time, when you see bands live the venues will almost always switch up and sometimes the instruments will too, for me I might not always understand why a track sounds so different in a particular instance, but I notice that it does.

There are also the times when things change for more chaotic reasons, the strap on a guitar breaks and a replacement has to be fished out, sometimes a spare and sometimes one from another band.

And sometimes circumstances mean you just get different numbers of people on stage too, there’s a band called Lemon Power I heard for the first time when they filled in for an act that couldn’t make it last minute, then it turned out most of Lemon Power couldn’t make it either, so while they’re described as a 5 piece on their Spotify bio I first heard them as a 2 piece, the next time I saw them it was as a 3 piece, their lead singer told me that sometimes they’re 2, sometimes 3, sometimes 5 and sometimes even 6, you never know what you’re going to get.

I find that chaos really fun, even though bands tend to get worried about screwing things up I find it’s usually hard for them to actually ruin a song that’s great at its core, even when they knock themselves for messing it up I find myself loving the show, although obviously it’s a very different perspective, I’ve not been with the song from start to finish, I’m not twigged to every element and how it’s supposed to be, I’ve only heard these tracks when they were ready to be played, so I don’t have so much of a strict sense of “getting it right”.

An audience member will always have a different POV to a creator, when writing scripts for our documentaries for example I often agonise over exact terms or phrasings, either to make sure I’m communicating the ideas as clearly as possible or to make sure the structure makes for writing that’s nice to read or narration that’s nice to listen to, I imagine if I showed some of the choices I lost hours of my day to sometimes to an outsider they wouldn’t see much of a difference or why it matters either.

The Scene

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Of course many artists are a constant, if I like a band then odds are solid that I’ll follow them and go to another show, but when going to different bands I also noticed the same venues popping up again like The Old Blue Last, The Lexington and The Shacklewell Arms, pubs with rooms set out for gigs in a side room, an upstairs or a downstairs, in the case of one, The Victoria, the room was behind a secret bookshelf door!

Then there’s the Signature Brew umbrella of breweries-turned-stages (one of which hosted Gotobeat) and, of course, SCALA.

The organisers also started to become familiar, Spotlight and Gotobeat being names that spring to mind, over time I realised I’d become part of a scene without even noticing, even though London isn’t my home it started to feel like one, a second home.

This familiarity is especially amplified when meeting artists, either being recognised and approached or telling them where you last saw them and being told “Oh yeah, I remember you!” sometimes they would remember who I was months or even years later, even though I was just another face in the crowd, that’s really gratifying.

Patron of the Arts

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And of course one of the big reasons I love gigging is supporting the bands, listening to tracks on Spotify isn’t going to make them much money, streaming a song will make a fraction of a penny, even if you love a track so much you put it on loop again and again, they’re still probably not going to make more from you in a month than they would in an hour in a minimum wage job.

That’s not necessarily these streaming companies being all stingy and evil, in fact Spotify gives the vast majority of the money away to record labels, but that doesn’t mean without a label you’re showering in cash either, when artists are unsigned they might not have a label taking a big cut, but then they have to pay for and arrange everything a label would be themselves, the payoff is usually not worth it which is why unsigned artists tend to be the ones with the smallest followings, the ones still working on outreach, no matter what it’s really hard and when you’re at that early point trying to get off the ground it can be an intense struggle.

Which is why I like to do my part, going to gigs isn’t just a more direct way of experiencing the music it’s also a more direct way of supporting the artists too, that goes a long way, especially for the small support acts with followings in the double or triple digits, who can find themselves playing to empty rooms or venue staff, I try to always show up early to make sure that doesn’t happen, these small acts I’ve heard are usually seriously talented and deserve far better, but the market isn’t a meritocracy, it’s far more complex than that.

The upside of things though is that when an artist does get that richly deserved break, it’s a really exciting moment, PROJECTOR finally managed to launch their debut album after releasing tracks since 2017, Girli managed to put together a second album after being dropped by her record label back in 2019, the year she put out her first.

This second album, releasing later this year and already being heard on tour around the world, has a whopping 14 tracks (for comparison, the first had 9), I had expected a new album for some time but learning that she had “graduated” from small numbers of singles and EPs to a massive tracklist all under one creative banner was amazing, I was at the reveal party for that album, being among the first of the public to hear about it, and it was a really euphoric moment, these things are a mix of the stars aligning and hard graft, and it’s always wonderful to see things come together.

Of course, merch helps too, I’m not really in the market for t-shirts but my dad happens to be a lover of vinyl, so that tends to be my go-to, I can give a little extra and introduce him to my tastes at the same time.

But even just buying a ticket to a show goes a long way, which is something I’ve seen time and time again when acts make sure to thank all the punters who gave them the time of day, or when they say thank you on social media, I feel like they must have said these things to so many people so many times over but it still feels sincere because they know how much your contribution means, after shows I try to talk to the bands and compliment them when they’re not busy and I’ve had times where their members are shocked that I came specifically to see them, that’s how it can be for smaller artists even after years in the business.

That’s probably why I find myself going to smaller shows so much, there are obviously other elements to it as well like the cost and the fact that I can just show up on time and get a spot at the front rather than having to queue 2 or 5 hours ahead, but as a creative (although one in a very different field than music making) I get that there’s a cost of expression and a serious challenge to finding an audience in a sea of media as far as the eye can see.

Conclusion

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So, motivation to go out into the world, feeling the music, organically discovering new artists, solidarity with the talent still working at finding their audience, I guess that sums up why I love live.

It’s such a joy that’s changed how I experience music for the better and I’m very glad I stumbled into it, as long as I don’t go terminally broke or bankrupt (not necessarily something to bet on in today’s economy, but still) I think I’ll be at many pubs and clubs (and the odd arena too) for a long time to come.

I’ll end this with 2 little helping hands, the basic terminology of gigs and my rules of gigging, I don’t expect you to follow them, they’re my rules not yours after all, but it’s a little insight into how I go about this scene I’ve found myself in.

The Gig Lexicon

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Headliner - The main act of an event, they play last, after the supports

Support(s) - The act(s) before the headliner, they act as a warmup for crowd to get ready for the headliner

Doors - The time when the event venue opens (Eg. “Doors at 7” - The venue opens up at 7pm)

Set - The performance of an act, a setlist is the list of songs they’ll play

Elwood’s 3 rules of gigging

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1. To the best of your ability always show up for doors, this is so you can claim your spot right at the front and catch all the acts, support acts should never have to play to an empty room

   • (for really big events, several hours before, so you can beat the crowd)

2. During the performances give the acts your undivided attention, no going on phones unless it’s to film a set or take pictures

3. Never leave before all the acts have finished, if that means you’re stranded in the middle of nowhere with fuck all to do, so be it

   • Leaving immediately after so you can sprint like a wannabe Olympic athlete to catch the last train home is totally acceptable though

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Changelog

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Edit 1 - 30/05/24 - Fixed a typo, hyperlinked Massi’s contributor page