Live music is therapy you can dance to. I need it back in my life
It is 11 days before lockdown, and bubblegum punk-pop is pouring from the speakers in the top room of a north London pub. Nineties indie heroes Helen Love are on stage, and you wouldn’t mistake them for anyone else. Music is so many things, but here it is a time machine: I’m 12 again, in the car with my dad, and the band’s acerbic, absurdist Girl About Town has just crashed into John Peel’s Festive Fifty, turning us into instant fans.
That night in March is interrupted by bouts of laborious handwashing – the virus starting to creep into our lives – but it is also a wild and weird advertisement for why live music matters. As the crowd thickens, I feel part of a secret society. As the main act hit their stride, adrenaline gives way to nostalgia, and then to simple joy. The support acts include Mark Radcliffe performing earnest electronica accompanied by some slow-motion footage of a swan. If this isn’t living, then I don’t know what is.
I haven’t been to a show since, and it feels like a part of myself has been shut off. Live music isn’t merely some appealing adjunct, it’s a way I connect with my emotions, communicate with others, and periodically flee from ordinary life.
Gigs are sticky floors and expensive drinks, and the stress of deciding when to go for a wee. They’re bad support bands, and people shoving in. They’re the tiresome, transparent charade of the encore from an artist who came on an hour late (I remember Evan Dando arriving on stage after the supposed end time). And they are the injection of coruscating, otherworldly beauty into the everyday.
I think of Susanne Sundfør’s voice raining down from the heavens at the Barbican. Martha Wainwright contorting her body through Chelsea Hotel #2 to power the vocal pyrotechnics. And Bob Dylan singing Girl from the North Country in Hyde Park last summer, his heart in his hands, as if he wrote the song at 21 but it only just became true. Those memories are mine, shimmering between the day at work and the weekly shop.
So live music is escapism: a heightened counterpoint to ritual and routine. But, for many of us, it’s also central to how we deal with life. I rarely feel emotions as keenly as I did when I was younger: it’s like you burn through them at such a rate that you can’t ever quite get them back. But live music shocks me awake, moves me, exalts me. It makes me feel like I’m living. And it allows me to consider and process the emotions that were lying dormant beneath the surface. When I saw Robyn at Alexandra Palace last year, she responded to an audience ovation by bursting into tears, at which point I burst into tears as well. I’d thought I was fine. It was like therapy you could dance to.
More prosaically, live music is also my job: for the past six years I’ve run the press office at the Royal Albert Hall, one of the world’s roundest venues.
I miss the place. I’ve been past the Hall, since lockdown eased, but I haven’t been in. I know every inch of