Feel

21 Feb 2010

I’m a soft, marshmallow creature. No, I am. I am weirdly intimidated by the oddest things.

Not, I must stress, but that many. I am not scared of cabbages. I do not feel a frission of fear from fromage. I’m coul with clowns. A friend of mine vouchsafed yesterday that she is physically sick if, when jogging, someone comes and runs behind her shoulder. That’s quite an unusually strong reaction.

I used to be scared of wasps, but that was before I lived for 10 years in a flat infested with the stripy bastards. They used to pop out of the air vents every morning and fly around your face, or wander happily around the kitchen floor as you wandered in bleary and barefoot looking for the weetabix. It’s amazing how you can go from spotting one on your curtain rail and being rooted to the spot in fear, to chasing them round with a huge rolled up newspaper screaming “die muthas!*” It must be a general principle that a lot of things aren’t quite as terrifying as they first appear.

Except telephones. Yikes.

So it was that I went to a stadium gig on Saturday. I’ve never been to one before. The biggest crowd I’ve been in was Glastonbury, the claustrophobia of which is nicely counterbalanced by the open sky (or as open as a leaden, rainy murk can be). There were the Nuremburg Rallies, but I suspect that was an hallucination brought on by watching one of David Cameron’s speeches. But yesterday I trooped off to the O2 to watch Depeche Mode. I was a little terrified.

There’s something a little pathetic about a Londoner struggling with crowds but I only really notice the day-to-day crowds of milling tourists, commuters and other meandering psychopaths when I’ve been out of the country for a while. At such points I oscillate alarmingly between wanting to run and hide and being tempted to swing my bag around like a mace** and try and destroy them head first like something out of a zombie film. Of course, I choose the middle way, which is to mutter constantly about how stupid everyone is as I walk around and occasionally think about stepping on the back of someone’s foot if they’re being really annoying but never actually do it.

I had no idea what kind of ticket I had. This was because it wasn’t really my ticket. It had been bought for a friend of a friend, but when the original gig date was cancelled because of Dave Gahan’s ill health, her pregnancy became a more significant factor than it would have been, so she cried off (or her baby did for her). It was then offered to Jude the Obscure, but he was busy polishing some masonry in an analogous south west regional capital and taking his children down off the backs of doors, so it was offered to Moby Dick, who was well up for it, except he had a bearded lunatic stuck to his side and therefore would have needed an extra ticket. So they offered it to me.

It turns out I had a seat. No moshing, jostling or getting elbows in my face. Just a good view, some music and a nice sit down. Fuck, I’m old. Though people older than me were doing some very disturbing things in the aisles. At one point Gahan’s ability to make 50,000 perform embarrassing bodily movement in near synchrony made him seem like Billy Graham in a sparkly waistcoat. One man had clearly lost his friends, and kept wandering up and down the stairs. But he was enjoying the music so much that every few seconds he had to break into a happy jig on a step. A woman in front of me pre-empted Dave’s demand that everyone start waving their arms from side to side like the little blue aliens in the “I’m Blue” video by a good three minutes, making her look like some sort of deranged Aunt following an exercise regime on her iPod whilst everyone else is watching opera. Everyone*** eventually joined in though, so no doubt she walked out of the stadium feeling like a cutting -edge trend-setter, rather than just a mother of nine having a nervous breakdown.

To put aside cynicism for a tiny second, it was truly great. From the opening of I Feel You to the rocked up version of Personal Jesus, I had a great time. Jude and Moby, tough shit.

S.

* I'm all for wasp rights, but they leave them outside the window when they break into my flat.

** is it a mace? is it a morning star? Whoever tells me the answer has played too much D&D

*** except me of course. You're not surprised, admit it.