50 Year Old Man

It was my birthday yesterday, and by happy coincidence The Fall were playing five minutes' walk from my front door, so that was the evening's entertainment taken care of.

Going to a Fall gig is always a gamble; they can be truly great or deliberately, insultingly bad depending on the whim and chemical intake of Mark E Smith. For example,  in 1996, we travelled all the way up to London to see them at the Astoria; unfortunately the gig coincided with the infamous England-Germany game of the Euro 96 tournament, and many of the audience didn't arrive at the gig until after the match, when there was a sudden and unwelcome influx of pissed-off footie fans (Germany had trounced England.). Mark E Smith took a very dim view of their disloyalty to him, in putting a football game before his lovely gig, so to make a point he swanned off to the dressing room with his mike, and performed his vocals from there. And on the way home, our car got set on by a bunch of very unhappy England 'supporters' in Trafalgar Square because it was a VW Golf. A fine evening.

But we've seen The Fall so many times before and since that you learn to take the rough with the smooth. And as it turned out, the Fall's performance last night was not the 'rough' component of the evening. No, that was the unbelievable smell of the audience.

You know by now that a Fall audience will be 90% male, 80% over forty, and 60% bald. That's just their demographic. What had I'd never noticed until last night - and it hit me as soon as I entered the building - was the smell that emanated from their massed, packed bodies. The venue smelt like a pet shop, and one that Trading Standards might have been interested to visit. It might have been that every audience member had a hamster strapped under each armpit, and that several of the poor creatures had already asphyxiated. It might also have been that most of them now just have the one 'gig t-shirt' left that they can get into, and that it doesn't get a wash between outings. Either way, the stench was medieval. And to add to the carnival atmosphere, there was a constant. almost competitive stream of community farting. A great, dense, evil miasma penetrating the already poisoned air. I have been going to gigs for over thirty years, and I have never smelt anything like it, from the Guana Batz to the Meteors to bloody Motorhead, all of which can be sweaty affairs. This wasn't the healthy, excited sweat, though, it was rancid old pants filtered through wee-drizzled denim and tinctured with sticky bum. If most of those men are single, they damn well deserve to be, and if they've got partners, they must all have had their noses removed. Give me fag smoke over that any day, even with the inherent health risks. Any man who allows himself to smell like that should be deeply ashamed.

I remember well, in the days before male grooming (for which include 'regular showers') took off, how atrocious many British men smelled. All those journeys on the Central Line with my nose pressed into some malodorous, stained armpit, almost dislocating my neck as I tried to avoid the puffs of halitosis from the mouth-breathers. Grimy black-rimmed fingernails casually inserted into nostrils for a bit of public exploration and extraction. There might have been an excuse for it then (though I never thought so), there isn't one now. Farting all the way through a gig for which you have arrived smelling like a dead rodent isn't rock'n'roll, it isn't big, and it isn't clever. If you think not washing is a statement of class solidarity, you've really missed the point, lads. And you'll never get a girlfriend.

And what were the band like? They were...Ok. That's all.

©Ishouldbeworking 2011