FIRST gigs, huge gigs, controversial gigs, gigs where you just had to be there, except if you were nobody would ever believe you that it sucked:
Bob Dylan, Manchester Free Trade Hall, 1966
A gig famous for its attendees not enjoying it. All those folkies who’d gone to see the ‘spokesman for a generation’ booing because they were getting some Rolling Stones blues crap. Always an innovator, Dylan pioneered terrible sound quality, unintelligible lyrics and an audience genuinely unsure what song is currently being played, and is still doing it now.
Woodstock, 1969
The apex of 1960s counterculture was traffic jams, food shortages, bad acid, a hellish storm and scheduling so lax that Jimi Hendrix performed at 9am on Monday morning. At the back of a crowd of 460,000 hippies, the rock legends strutting their stuff were tiny stick figures with not a video screen in sight. No wonder boomers are now so bitter and angry.
Live Aid, 1985
A massive transatlantic fundraiser which opened with Status Quo and managed to go downhill from there. At Wembley Stadium, so if you needed a piss or a hot dog you’d pop off for a minute, find it took 40 and now you’ve missed Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Sting. Led Zeppelin’s performance was so bad they tried to suppress the footage.
Sex Pistols, Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall, 1976
A gig so bad it inspired the entire audience to form bands on the basis that f**k it, they can’t be any worse. One of the attendees was Mick Hucknall, so even that was wrong. So early in the Pistols’ careers there wasn’t even the thrill of notoriety. They were just a not-very-good band spitting.
The Stone Roses, Spike Island, 1990
The culmination, and thankfully the death of, Madchester. Spike Island saw a band use their one decent album they produced to organise a mass gathering of gurning wankers on a site of chemical pollution. The music was inaudible over the wind howling down the Mersey estuary. Still, that meant not having to hear Ian Brown live.
The Libertines, someone’s flat, 2001
A guerrilla gig by the next big thing? Intimate, personal, thrilling? Think through the practicalities of a rock concert in a living room. Stifling heat, ear-bleeding amplification, the space of a battery farm, and a single toilet constantly occupied by somebody shooting up. As much fun as a rush hour journey on the Northern Line where you’re arrested at the end.
