Noise gig
Last Monday, I went to see my favourite noise boy play. Snow and ice still covered the pavements in London and the traffic outside my house was standing still. The weekend before, my sister had told me she is pregnant. I was so pleased I could barely contain it. I felt close to crying: crying with joy, crying with excitement, crying that she was doing something I never can. I rang her to check she was OK and gave up waiting for the bus and walked down the hill to the tube. I didn’t slip, which was a miracle.
I took the tube to Liverpool Street and then walked up to the venue. I went inside, bought a glass of lager at the bar and asked where the gig was. The guy told me upstairs and I went up the spiral staircase to find dusty wooden floor boards, twenty people, someone doing a painting and a guy setting up. I leaned against the wall, the cold, exciting feeling of the beer creeping up the back of my neck. The guy played a droney, guitar and reverberated-screams set with unintelligible images playing against the wall behind him. I relaxed into another secret-life night, feeling anonymous and lovely and alone.
Then, the guy who had just played came up to me said, “Hi Ruby”, and it was an old acquaintance I met in Leeds who also has a solo acoustic project and numerous punk bands. We swapped our bands’ CDs and talked about making music.
Noise boy got stuck on the motorway and didn’t turn up, so I set off home in the snow, reading David Foster Wallace’s essay about David Lynch and getting that nervous, opening-up-of-intellectual-possibilities excitement.