On a Monday at the end of May I went to see Charli XCX.
This is one of the events that Alison organised for my 50th birthday so that I could have 50 memories or 50 days to look back on.
Many of them are concerts, some of them were on holiday, some of them were just family meetups, all sorts of different things.
Alison and I would historically go to see tons of live music and our favourite venue is Rock City in Nottingham which is one of the favourite venues of many artists around the country.
Charli XCX ended her UK tour there and she’s an artist that has been championed by Radio 1.
Let’s get this straight.
I’m way too old and way too established to be in that audience, but I love to be in audiences like that.
As much as watching the show I love to watch the crowd and I love to see who is there and what they believe and what they want and what they do.
Charli XCX, mostly in my opinion, manufactured pop.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t sing everything, and she didn’t have a band, but she had two extraordinary dancers and visually the show was exceptional.
It’s not ‘live music’ as I understand it (but it is an extraordinary show).
It didn’t matter to the majority of the people there because they were just there to see one of their hero’s.
Charli is an icon who represents a section of young society where people feel disenfranchised and that is not, in any way, anything new.
When I was growing up, I listened to Billy Bragg and he was exactly the same only for a slightly different audience.
My Chemical Romance are entirely the same.
Pale Waves (who we saw earlier in the year at Rock City) epitomise this type of thing.
They have a tribe.
The difficulty with tribes is that you have to be in or you’re out.
So, as I stood at the back of Rock City where Alison and I usually stand now whilst my son and his girlfriend were rocking it down the front, I imagined how powerful it would be if the outsiders and the insiders could get it together for a little while.
I loved that feeling when I was young of doing things deliberately because they were counter-cultural to the older guys who were boring and straight and didn’t understand. I could never understand why my parents couldn’t understand Boy George and what he was standing up for or George Michael or even Billy Bragg or any of the angry young guys who fought their corner, much to the disgust of the established older generations.
The thing is though, as I now enter fast into ‘the older generation’ I kind of get it.
I don’t quite have the voice anymore and certainly don’t have any of the mandate to chat to people who are considerably younger than me, but I still get it.
I’m just more wary because I’ve seen so much go wrong and I’m scared for them because I want them to live their best life and not get caught up in all of the madness that we understand is so possible to get caught up in to make other people money.
There has to be some common ground doesn’t there?
It would be amazing if we could harness the huge amount of energy that exists in a disenfranchised youth with some of the hard-won experience of the battered old b@st@rds like me.
Blog Post Number - 3106
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