6 March - Gossips & Shikari

Am not old. The morning after I moan about the high heels – had worn them to expensive dinner (my how we’ve grown up, a quick £100 dropped in an hour of catching up before a show, just two of us), forgot that after the restaurant I’d have to stand for about 2 hours all told and the last walk back to the car was v. painful, joints not blisters so just old bones really -am on the net listening to artists mentioned last night by some people I run into. A riot of fast guitars and 120,000 Myspace hits greets me on the page of someone you’ve never heard of and their debut album is not out yet. I notice their two forthcoming Hammersmith Palais gigs at the w/end are at 5pm. How sweet, so they can go back home and ready for school tomorrow. Youtube is full of cheap videos to their songs. And the surprising thing is I love this stuff. It's just great, shouty kids rock. How can I love stuff made and consumed by 15 year olds? What kind of name is Enter Shikari? Some Japanese Manga hero? I can’t tell you, I simply don’t know. My friend invites me to their show on Sunday. Then the following day says not prepared to really break the sanctuary of her Sunday evening for this kind of stuff. Am torn between wanting to see something at the beginning of the magic journey into Top 10 and also wanting a night in. We’re over 40. The night in wins. But it’s not Sunday yet so things may change.

Whilst on the net I also watch the video for the Gossips ‘Listen up’ and excitedly write to a friend (47 this year) that she’s be incensed that they took the entire backbone of the song from rhythms found in our favourite NY band’s album, The Rapture (not that they themselves didn’t crib them from a host of 80’s UK indie bands). Am sure she’ll reply just as incensed. Surely these should not be our concerns, but those of her kids for example but said kids are all in their early/mid twenties and are probably busy trying to get jobs, move on from Uni and so on, or actually, in the case of her eldest, trying to stay awake after being exploited for 12 hour days every day. Perhaps it’s fitting that it should be us concerned with utterly non world shaking events as these. We love the Rapture, we were not even the oldest ones there at Koko six months ago or so an feeling all protective that in a year they had moved from smaller halls to this large one but still not cracked the charts.

Does this happen all the time in theatre too I wonder. You go see a new play by a new playwright and come out going ‘but he copied the entire second act from Ibsen! Just threw in a bit of Marber and thought we’d not notice? And that other new guy we saw a play by last month, he’s better than this, why is no one going to see his stuff?’
What would it be like to walk into a theatre audience of 18 year olds and feel old as I do at ‘rock’ concerts? It never happens that you’re greeted by too many young faces as the theatre is expensive (allegedly, no more than Brixton academy or Wembley but there you go).
I’d be an embarrassing mother, wanting to go to all my kids’ fave gigs. Well not all, perhaps but enough.