WE did a very strange thing last week. We went to a concert.
It was Van Morrison, so it was always going to be a wee bit strange. He’s not the most engaging performer in terms of rapport with his audience.
He appeared on stage a minute before the official time for doors to open and then, without nary a hello to his expectant audience, proceeded to belt through a considerable repertoire with hardly a pause for breath in between, let alone chat.
His voice at the age of 76 is as great as ever and the band were fantastic. But after an hour and 40 minutes he’d decided it was time for bed. Five minutes through an epic rendition of Gloria, he shuffled off into the wings and failed to re-emerge to say goodbye, although it has to be said that the rest of the ensemble gave us a brilliant finale.
There was another aspect of strange to the evening. It goes without saying that being able to actually attend a gig after these Covid years took a bit of getting used to. But there was an additional weird factor. I have never known such a restless audience.
Loads of folk were super-late and then so many people were up and down and needing out of their seats to go to the bar or loo or maybe just to stretch their legs.
I note that last week there were calls for the return of the the film intermission at cinemas.
The audience at the Edinburgh Playhouse would certainly have benefited from several.
Have we really forgotten how to behave in public, or have we just become too used to being an audience on our own terms, consuming catch-up TV and radio and watching boxed sets?
Or maybe it’s us. I have to admit that, even before the restrictions of the pandemic, we were not exactly party animals.
Our concert tickets were a kind Christmas gift from our son and his girlfriend. Enjoying, as they do, the flush of youth, it does not cross their young, fresh minds that (a) we seldom venture out to socialise after dark; and (b) we certainly don’t whoop it up midweek. In Edinburgh! A whole city away!
But what fun we had, even if we did have to retire to our hotel room (sorry, but we felt just too mature for the late bus home to Glasgow) for a cup of tea and a rich tea biscuit straight after the concert.
Van Morrison has been a bit of a soundtrack to our life.
The first of his gigs we went to was in 1996 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Thinking back, Van the Man was just as grumpy then as he is now.
Back then, I was pregnant with the boy who, all these years later, gifted us our tickets for last week’s event. I still have the T-shirt from that concert, part of the Days Like This tour. It’s a little baggy at the front where a bump used to be.
That concert may well have been a lifetime ago, but I remember it with clarity ... and can confirm that the audience behaved impeccably and stayed firmly in their seats!
As Morrison sings, grumpy or otherwise: “When all the parts of the puzzle start to look like they fit it, Then I must remember there’ll be days like this.”
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