A Review Of Thursday Night

Thursday night was the worst night of my life. I am the kind of person who shies away from most social situations. A room full of pissed-off teenagers is my worst fucking nightmare.

Or shouting at an empty room to give me my deposit back. That’d be bad too. But let me run you through a list of the things that had gone wrong in our oh so altruistic venture to bring ace alternative live music to teenagers. The Indelicates were snowed in. When Julia said someone had died in a nearby village I thought ‘Fair enough, don’t die before the upcoming album, I want to hear that.’

And Town Bike were coming down from Liverpool, which made me think that my favourite current bands were annoyingly un-local. Unless we had been doing this is the seventies. The Who were in my locality – My mum’s cousin was married to the bassist. Anyway, aside from problems of being born thirty years too late, there were a million things yet to be done, most of which we would only realise we needed to do when it was too late.

So The Indelicates thing. Them not being able to play is NOT just forty or so minutes of me trying to remember the words to Sixteen and breaking down into hysterics. A gig without them is very scary and very likely to go horribly wrong. They will be the nicest and most helpful people in the music industry that I will ever meet and I need them. It’s more like your parents not turning up for your first football match, or in my case debate (pretentious? MOI? Au contraire mon ami…).

So people who bought tickets to see them and don’t give a fuck about other bands, who possibly might read this blog entry. If I could have choppered them in then I would have. I would have moved heaven and earth to just get Julia and Simon Indelicate with a crappy guitar and a child’s keyboard to Bush Hall, but alas I lack the forearm strength. Sometimes God just hates you.

Arranging another band to play the night before a gig is probably a concert promoter’s worst nightmare. And replacing The Indelicates (I like them. Have you caught on yet?) is not like replacing a warm-up band. Oh yes, let me just dig out a fantastically wonderful band who are just a tweet away and make the music industry seem as cuddly and comforting as your favourite teddy bear. I’ll just be a sec.

There were points when it appeared that the issues yet to be sorted out were as impassable as the feet of death grade snow besieging Lewes. There are not enough lolcats in the world. We found a band. No time to do proper listening on my part but they would be there. Better than me banging a stick.

We had a poster and tickets which both said The Indelicates in rather large writing. After several cans of Simon’s Mountain Dew we had sorted out the poster. Then Jo and I went to Bush Hall. I couldn’t find it. We were twenty minutes late. One of the bands was there already. Sophie had texted to say she would be even later than us – after a ‘please-don’t-kill-me’ text from me. I bet if I was a good Catholic then there would be a sign saying ‘This way to Bush Hall Lydia, thanks for believing in God’.

As soon as The Woe Betides, Town Bike and Frank & Duncan had arrived all seemed a semblance of ‘alright’. As I could hear the fantastic sound check of Town Bike, I began to be less nervous and fewer panic attacks occurred. People came. Our on the door sales were way beyond our expectations and I had so many people coming up to me saying ‘You must do another one of these’ that I wondered why I had ever contemplated it being anything but a great start to a successful venture.

I think we can stop teenagers going to see The Jonas Brothers at the O2 for forty quid. But young people need to do it. Because if there is anything I have learnt from this experience it is this: Teenagers don’t care what adults say, they’ll do whatever they want and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Oh and we should all hail Mountain Dew as our Messiah – maybe Christ shoulda tried turning water into citrus-flavoured soft drink, eh?

Lydia