Hot Gigs

Last night I was one of the lucky 200 people crammed into Camden Barfly to witness Laura Marling’s intimate Fly presents show. It was great, thanks. Truly mesmerising, and the audience were observant of near-total silence throughout.
But that’s not why I’m writing this, cos that’d be boring.

You see, there was one other noise rattling away for the duration of the show, and it came from directly above our heads. That sound was the creaking of the air con unit as it struggled to deal with a room crammed to bursting – as you’d expect with an artist who is more accustomed to selling out 2,000 capacity venues. It was hot. Very hot. Very, very hot.

And although the heat didn’t ruin the show, last nights nadger-latheringly sweltering experience got me thinking about the hottest gigs I’ve ever been to.
First, I remembered seeing The Pigeon Detectives at The Garage in 2006. Second, I realised that that sentence is one of the least inspiring moments in the history of music journalism and that if my anecdotes don’t improve, I’m gonna be the worst Granddad ever.

So instead of telling you about that sweatbath (it had been the hottest day of the year, and the air-conditioning was broken, reducing the entire venue to a heaving, slippery mess of people with bad taste in emerging indie bands, myself included – would you like a Werthers’ Original by the way?), I am going to tell you all about Delia.

Delia was not this woman’s name, but instead the name that I have attributed to her in the aftermath of the event. She left such an impression that I have had to do so, in order to preserve any tangible mental evidence that she existed.

As far as I can remember, it was 2005, I was at the Legion in Old Street, I think for a Sonic Cathedral club night. The Legion is a tunnel-shaped venue with wood-panelled walls that – at the best of times – give it the sense of a railway arch that’s been transformed into a giant sauna; but on this particular night the coals were cranked up to 11.

After waiting for a long time for the headline band to come on, sitting through a shitty support act (I’ve no idea or inclination to recall who, they didn’t make as much of an impression as Delia did) the already warm venue filled with people, raising the temperature to something like the ambient core heat of the sun.
By the time that the headliners waded onto stage, there was a full-on heathaze hiding their legs, and, three songs in, it was so hot that I was about ready to pass out. I’d removed most of my outer layers of clothing, stopping just short of stripping down to my pants and vest (I don’t wear a vest but stick with me, I’m still working on the anecdote thing) and was considering just getting the hell out of there, finding the nearest manhole, and diving down into the cooling sewage below.

So imagine my surprise, then, as I turned to survey the wilting throng of gig-goers and found that, blocking my exit, was a demented, pogoing mass of wobbling womanhood. She was quite a dumpy lady in her mid-to-late 20s, wearing a dark blue Delays poncho, and was, most off-puttingly, as wet as a fish. On closer inspection, I realised that the “poncho” was in fact where her violent exercise routine in these pressure-cooker conditions had caused her sweat patches to take over the majority of her t-shirt. Quite clearly she was off her face, and looking at her violent arm-waving nearly made me pass out.

And the band who she was freaking out to? Norwegian masters of plodding shoegaze, The Radio Dept.
It’s still the most bizarre behavioural mis-step I’ve ever witnessed.