There’s beer in my hair. I’m a little hoarse. My calves are tight from pogoing (I know. At MY age) and I’ve had half the sleep I’d normally require on a Thursday night in order to function on a Friday.
In short, I feel great.
I went to a gig in Dundee last night: The Brothers Fife. They were tremendous. Go watch The Party Don’t Stop on YouTube. And if you don’t think it’s the best Christmas song ever, well you’re wrong, frankly.
It’s the first concert I’ve been to since before the pandemic.
And the fact it didn’t seem like such a big deal to plunge headlong into a sweaty crowd of silly revellers a year after Omicron put the hems on our second festive season in a row…
…Well that probably is quite a big deal actually.
This time last year I’d no more have stepped unmasked into a venue full of booze and strangers than stood on stage and sung myself.
That’s if it had been allowed.
The Scottish Parliament’s Covid timeline (a comedown if ever there was one) tells me that on December 21 2021, the Scottish Government announced the return of one-metre physical distancing in pubs and clubs from December 27, as well as limits on the numbers allowed to gather indoors and out.
Remember the gloom.
Covid was still hanging over us, an insidious mutating threat.
Licensed premises were warning they might not bounce back from this latest setback, almost two years into the pandemic.
The words “new normal” suggested we were destined for a world far more changed than the one we’ve settled into.
And it was okay for me, I suppose. I’d had my fun.
But for all the young dudes, whose after-dark adventures were only getting started, it would have been a tragedy.
Brothers Fife gig was latest in a long line
We are sociable creatures, us humans.
And music has been the thing that has called us together since our 35,000 year-old ancestors first assembled to hum and nod appreciatively, while that pal who always wore his pelt with a bit more panache than the rest of the tribe bashed out a tune on the mammoth ivory flute.
My own awakening came a little later than the Stone Age. But coincidentally, it owed a lot to Terry Hall, whose death this week prompted such an outpouring among music fans.
Hall’s band, The Specials, spearheaded the multicultural Coventry Two Tone scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
It was a million miles from what I knew as a pre-teen girl growing up on a farm in deepest, whitest Perthshire.
But his music gave me the first stirrings of a social conscience and a taste for lanky boys in Harringtons with very short haircuts.
At school discos, we shuffled unrhythmically to A Message To You Rudy and I discovered the heady joy of raising the roof with a rowdy roomful of like-minded souls.
A couple of years later, my dad drove me to my first ‘real’ concert, Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Edinburgh Playhouse, little realising what he’d started.
The party didn’t stop
Since then I’ve seen my favourite artists perform from Belfast to Bergen.
I’ve enjoyed gigs I’ll never forget, nights I barely remember, and until Thursday’s The Brothers Fife gig in Dundee I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed it.
It’s the same compulsion that drove music fan Junko Tsukada to make an 11,000-mile round-trip from Japan to see Dundee rockers The View make their live comeback.
The Tokyo superfan, who had never been to Scotland before, travelled 15 hours by plane to take in all four of the band’s sell-out shows at the O2 Academy in Glasgow, before returning to Japan.
I bet she doesn’t regret a moment of it.
And while I’m not sure I’d go that far, I do salute her dedication to the cause.
I’m older, if not wiser now. And I’m not going to lie, I do like a seat these days.
But Thursday night reminded me that good music, good times and good pals will always add up to one of life’s great joys.
So let’s thank the gods of going out and getting messy that gig-going has survived.
And let’s take a moment to appreciate that this new normal isn’t so different from the old one after all.
Conversation