I'll never be a muso

Went to see MGMT last night; overall, a fun gig. Certainly better than the last I went to which, if I remember rightly, consisted of a girl with flowers in her hair warbling loudly while a young, deceptively normal-looking chap played spaghetti, shards of pasta showering the audience as he, er, strummed. No, I didn’t go to art school and no, I didn’t manage to suppress my giggles. I digress.

MGMT – and Florence & the Machine, the support, for that matter – have a gloriously OTT vibe. I wasn’t sure they quite fitted in the down and dirty Astoria – their rainbow-shiny hippy-star pop-a-delica should be reserved purely for hazy fields under Indian summer sun so that the artistes aren’t the only ones who can wheel about and jump and shout as we would have liked to have done last night, whilst wearing, not Impeccable Interview Outfit but my pale wide leg flare jeans (which are definitely having a moment) and bare feet. Instead we were reduced to shuffling to and fro, time and again as fellow audience members with the navigation of moths attempted to hurl themselves through our group and down a set of non-existent stairs.

That’s the thing about me and live music – I don’t think we’ll ever be besty pals. We haven’t grown up together. An outrage when you consider my father was in about twenty-six bands and my Mother couldn’t have looked more like Marianne Faithfull if she’d tried *. I just manage to feel slightly annoyed that I like any one band enough to actually queue to go to a venue to see them, wait 45 minutes, drink beer I don’t like, and then bop along to said tunes next to some kid who manages to spill beer in my pocket. This is all the stuff that gig aficionados romantically refer to as ‘part of it!’ Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy these affairs – I just can never quite shake the feeling that the lunatic girl dancing next to me in a bikini top (these bikini girls must be following me) is having a way better time than me and I really ought not to be there.

*Gotta love poetic license