It probably says something about the gently bobbling, slightly mundane life that I lead at the moment that the number of public posts on this blog has reduced to a trickle. Many people would have no qualms about regaling internet users worldwide with the news that they just tried to swipe a cucumber through the automated checkout at Sainsburys, but it didn’t work, and a shop assistant had to punch in the 5-digit code for cucumbers into the machine, which she knew off by heart. She’s wasted in the retail business, is Memory Woman (that’s the name I’ve assigned her, you see.) She should have her own 5-digit number-remembering-based chat show. Anyway, as often is the case when not that much is happening in your life other than painting skirting boards and browsing door-closers in Wickes, you start getting nostalgic. You know what nostalgia means, don’t you, that’s right, it means panicking that you’re getting on a bit and you haven’t lived up to your own expectations. The last post here was about the flat which I bought 10 years ago. More alarming was the realisation that this month is 20 years since I went to my first ever gig. (Actually, I’ve recounted, it’s 19 years, oh well, best press on regardless, eh.)

Most people see their first ever gig at Wembley Arena, or the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, and it’s usually The Cure, or U2, or, if you’re a peculiar human, Mariah Carey. I didn’t go through that particular rite of passage. It never occurred to me to want to go and see Status Quo. I was a well-balanced child, in that way. Dunstable was also, after the closure of the famed California Ballroom, not a town that ever appeared on the back of any tour t-shirts. The only performances at Dunstable Queensway Hall were by Hawkwind, or, on one memorable occasion, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, or, most often of all, Dunstable Amateur Operatic Society. But in 1987, after quite some time spent in a small bedroom listening to John Peel, it was the right time to attend my first Rock Music Concert, which was the Dog Faced Hermans, in Bedford. I’d been writing to them for a few months, impressed beyond belief by their spiky Scottish sound, so the news they were coming to Bedfordshire was greeted with great excitement by me, even if they were mildly depressed by the prospect. My dad drove me up to the gig, which was in a horrible little bar whose name I can’t remember. He stood at the back in a shirt and tie and amused detachment. The first band on were Bastard Kestrel, who were at the scratchy end of the Extreme Noise Terror / Napalm Death screaming brigade, and who were a bit too hardcore for me. I dunno, support bands, eh. I was going to ask (and I probably will, after I’ve got this out of my system) who the first band you ever saw was, and of course you’ll say the band you WENT to see, but invariably the first band you ACTUALLY saw were some dubious no-hopers who scraped their way onto the bill, went onstage before the doors opened and were completing a misconceived pseudo-rock-anthem to a hail of booing and slow handclaps when you walked in.

Anyway, DFH were marvellous, and in fact they went on to sweep across America in the way that only a scratchy 4-piece from Edinburgh can. More importantly, I bought my first ever fanzine that night from some hairy bloke from Retford, which inspired me to do my own. I’d never written anything up until that point, except bad essays. And look at me now. Writing bad essays. Anyway, who were the first band you ever saw? (Support or main, I don’t mind which. Extra points for obscure bands, your parents being there too, or anyone fainting through over-excitement.)