Tonight I went to a music gig, a proper one. Like I did when I was sixteen lots.
This is lucky, as everyone else there seemed to be about sixteen. This surprised me as I’d have thought the bleak melancholy beauty of Jeffrey Lewis would attract an older audience, of perhaps mid-twenties men wearing trousers with a greasepatch in a bad crotch position.
But no, just me.
Myself and my friend Jo I think consider ourselves to be cool people, she has dreads and me a cardy. But tonight we were so very uncool…and also rather old.
The Jeffrey Lewis band were the support band, the headliner was a chap called Adam Green, I’d never heard of him, but that’s nothing to be said about him, I haven’t heard of lots of people.
In writing this years Edinburgh show I’ve been thinking lots about going to gigs when I was sixteen and horrified to work out exactly how long its been since i went to see bands… a fucking decade. Then I think I worked out why, several people in the queue could have still been aborted.
I found it idly depressing that seemingly everyone was getting ID’d, until they saw my disheveled face and I was waved right in.
The Scala was packed and I was fairly worried I was the oldest there, until I saw someone in their thirties and I pointed and laughed.
Jeffrey Lewis was sublimely excellent, and possibly my new favourite music person ever, he set as horribly short. But making way for a headliner that I therefore presumed would be just as aces. Or, just a arrogant american singer chap with some nicish songs but nothing to write home about… except the young audience were going crazy like I thought that age group only did with Shane from X-Factor, being so out of touch in this indie type environment made me feel older than ever.