Gigs: Behaving Badly

Let me tell you something. Blogging every day is hard work. Especially when I realise that I'm going to be away at a wedding all day Saturday and my computer is not. You have been warned.

Anyway, yesterday I was at Ally Pally for a Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem gig. Hot Chip were great. It's the third or fourth time I've seen them, I can find their records a bit feeble but they crank it right up live - one of my favourite live bands in fact, which is astonishing for electronica which too often is "two blokes in hoodies with a computer". Hot Chip are "six multi-instrumentalists with a dizzying array of personal styles" or in other words, the Madchester one, the hot one, the one who looks like that bloke out of The Office, the tax inspector, the one off Dragon's Den, and the one at the back. They're practiclly the Spice Girls. Plus their music sounds like New Order and Eurhythmics and Kylie. Thus, I was able to test out my new hairstyle for dancing. It held up well. Much swooshing without giving any of my neighbours whiplash.

Then on came LCD Soundsystem. I'm not a fan of the band, not in the sense that I don't like them - as it turns out, I do - but I only knew a couple of tracks before I went. The band were terrific, no complaints there. Like New Order and Talking Heads and Flaming Lips. (I just wrote 'Flamingo Lips'. Who wants to form a tribute band with me?) (Yes, I know flamingos don't have lips.) But the room (er, giant room-imitating tent thing?) got a lot more crowded and I got a LOT more annoyed. Do we seriously have to have the 'decent behaviour at gigs' conversation again?? I can just about forgive 'dancing like a lunatic and smacking me with his flailing arms because he was on drugs' man, because at least he was enjoying the gig, but 'pushed right into the moshpit* in front of me and then stood stock still with his arms up videoing the band on his crappy phone, subjecting me to wafts of terrible BO' boy can go to hell. Especially when his memory card ran out and he spent the next several minutes flicking through the photos looking for ones he could delete and replace with shaky out-of-focus images of tiny hobbit people on a faraway stage. Mate: you are not, in any significant way, experiencing this gig. Stay home and buy the DVD. And take a shower. Then of course there was 'chatting all the way through' couple and 'smoking indoors' bloke and 'singing along badly' girl - oh hang on, that was me...

*Do people still say moshpit? Do people still mosh? The front-of-stage dancing zone, anyway.