30milesormore invited me to the Royal Albert Hall yesterday evening to see Prom number 44. He didn’t offer to pay for me to get in, or anything like that, it wasn’t a date, we weren’t trying to impress each other, it was just a good, honest, straightforward evening out, just a couple of mates, no funny business, to see the Budapest Festival Orchestra. What could be more normal than that? I’ve been to the Proms before, but I’ve always splashed out on seats; yesterday we queued up at door 11, paid a fiver and made our way to the standing-room-only section. We were probably standing exactly where Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks used to twat each other convincingly around the face and neck,when wrestling bouts used to be staged here. No wrestling occurred last night, but only just; the place was rammed (Stravinsky really packs the punters in these days) and the majority of people had decided to sit down on the floor rather than stand up. Sitting humans leave a far greater floor-footprint than standing ones, and one of the ushers, realising this, decided to try and get everyone to stand up and move forward. “Stand up and move forward,” he boomed. Hilariously, as the audience mainly consisted of Radio 3 listeners who don’t respond at all well to authority, everyone just carried on sitting there, thinking “well, I’m certainly not moving just because a gentleman in a red jacket tells me to.” “Stand up and move forward,” he boomed another 4 times, and eventually people actually started moving, wheezing and moaning. “Pay another 7 bloody quid for a seat next time, you stuck-up bunch of goons,” I screamed at them, not really.

I’ve not stood up for an orchestral concert before. Concerts I have stood up for include the Dog Faced Hermans, Pregnant Neck and Archbishop Kebab, but never the Budapest Festival Orchestra. They kicked off with Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes, of which there were 5, although it lasted 11. Then a fat man with a beard came onstage and played Bartok’s Piano Concerto No.3, and why not, it’s a free country. As the piano lid was lifted, the audience shouted “Heave-ho”, which apparently is a Prom tradition, and one which I found hideously embarrassing.

During the interval I mused on my own orchestral experiences. I used to play bassoon in the Bedfordshire Youth Orchestra, which isn’t something I include on my CV, but it gave me my first overseas touring experiences (Cyprus 1990, Russia 1991) and ate up portions of the school holidays which I’d only have spent setting fire to municipal buildings or stealing neighbours’ cars. During the Bartok Concerto, I noted that the percussion players had a technique for putting down their triangles and cymbals to avoid them crashing on the floor during a quiet bit. This took me back to a moment when I played in a performance of Carmina Burana at the Albert Hall. I had to switch between contrabassoon and bassoon – both bloody enormous pieces of wood, I hardly need tell you – during a very quiet bit. Of course, I dropped the contrabassoon loudly on the stage, ruining a subtle choral moment. I kept my head down for about 3 minutes, and only then looked up nervously at the conductor, who was STILL looking at me, his eyes communicating to me that I was a clumsy, stupid little shit, which of course I had already realised. Brrr. Nasty.

Feeling like a clumsy, stupid little shit, I went with 30milesormore back into the auditorium to watch Rite Of Spring, and apart from being nowhere near loud enough (they should really have pumped the whole lot through an enormous PA, the subwoofers moving the trousers of the assembled throng) it was marvellous. Well worth a fiver, and what can you say that about these days, apart from half an hour on a parking meter in Soho?