Round about somewhere close to the end of 1999 or the start of 2000 (can’t quite remember) Alison and I did one of those nights where we leg it as fast as we can into the middle of Nottingham on a week night where we don’t have any time and we arrive at rock city (one of the best live music venues in the country I think) just about when the main act takes the stage and for 90 minutes or 2 hours we watch live music in amongst a crowd of people usually younger than us and sweatier than us and moving more than us and we appreciate.
We appreciate the effort and the skill and the talent and the raw emotion and the humanity and all of those things that come which only live music can provide.
Our feet stick to the floor and we get too hot and too uncomfortable and our ears deafen and ring and our eyes flash and so we saw Tom Grennan just as he became famous, peacocking around the stage and revelling in what must feel absolutely extraordinary at his age to receive so much actualisation.
Fast forward 18 months or two years and we saw him again.
Our first trip back to rock city post pandemic and it was Tom Grennan.
A bit of a different Tom Grennan but only subtlety.
He still bounced around the stage with his top off (#jealous) and everybody still sang his words back to him in the most extraordinary way but he talks with humility about how badly the last 18 months had affected him and how grateful he was for the support he’d had from everybody in that room and in any other room.
He was not pandering to the audience, he was absolutely genuine in his honest assessment of what had happened to him in the past 18 months.
And so we bounced off people and had half a can of red stripe poured down my back and sweated and had a sore knee (because I’m so old) and sang as loud as I could and put my hands in the air and jumped as much as I can possibly jump.
For the moment at least life is back and so we can take a minute to appreciate what we lost and what we got back again and understand that life like that is truly beautiful.
Blog Post Number - 2875
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