I go to a lot of gigs. I started going to gigs in 1995, and my records (incomplete before 2003) tell me that I’ve been to over 850 gigs/festivals, and have recorded that I’ve seen approximately 2,500 sets. Bearing in mind I saw quite a bit at Uni in London, I suspect the number is closer to 1,000/3,000 (at least).

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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Not all gigs are great, of course: indeed some of the most memorable ones are the ones that weren’t good. But I’ve talked about my own gigging experiences before, and here, I’m looking at the experience of live music in song.

I wasn’t exactly sure I was going to get enough suggestions, but my friends are a resourceful lot and turned up with a bunch of fascinating suggestions (as they always do). So take this as a look at the various elements of live performance: from playing songs, to the people that attend the shows, to the people that keep the show on the road, and much more.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/The Beatles
/Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
/Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

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We start with The Beatles – the most suggested band in my suggestion threads, but one I don’t always use because, well, they are the easy option. But here? It feels like the right place to start. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a wild album – just five years on from She Loves You, remember – that benefitted from the band’s decision to no longer tour for the most part, instead putting their energy into expanding their sound, and how. The title song and lead track from the album runs with the idea of a fictional band playing their songs (and freeing them from just doing what the Beatles did), introducing themselves and playing a short song that sets everything else up. Somehow, a song that merges vaudeville and psychedelia works, and after that, all bets are off.

The video I’ve used for the playlist comes from Live 8 in 2005, where Paul McCartney opened his set with this – to the evident joy of the enormous crowd.

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/Arctic Monkeys
/Fake Tales of San Francisco
/Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

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Twenty years ago, I was relatively new in Sheffield, and the Arctic Monkeys were just blowing up (although they’d been a big thing in the city’s music scene for a year or so already). This was the song that first caught my ear: a gloriously catty character sketch about local bands playing in small venues, and the people in their orbit, both good and bad. There’s the terribly fashionable bands trying to be cool (and, of course, from somewhere else), there’s the bored people at the back, there’s the people desperate to get the fuck out of there. The best line – and frankly the best couplet Alex Turner ever wrote – comes later in the song:

“Yeah, but his bird said it’s amazing though, so all that’s left
Is the proof that love’s not only blind, but deaf”

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/Billy Joel
/Piano Man
/Piano Man

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Billy Joel had already begun to break through with Captain Jack, but Piano Man became his signature and best-known song very quickly. Perhaps, because it’s a song from personal experience: trying to get out of a record deal, and playing as the often-ignored “entertainment” in a Los Angeles bar at the piano, and observing the patrons that he gets to know after playing there for months. Joel’s feelings on the song are fascinating, and amusingly his main problem is hearing other people play it for him (or people constantly badgering him just to play that song)…

It’s a song imbued with the frustration of playing the same old songs time and again, where you are really the soundtrack rather than entertainment as such: as we found when in a (remarkably expensive, even by our cocktail standards) Geneva bar the other week, with a jazz band doing that thankless work (although playing Wonderwall was our cue to exit!).

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/Motörhead
/(We Are) The Road Crew
/Ace of Spades

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The obvious choice would have been the mighty Overkill – the perennial set-closer for Motörhead until the very end – but I’ve used that before, and I wasn’t short of other choices. So the bluesy, heavy rock of (We Are) The Road Crew was the best alternative, especially as it turns the attention to the crew that assist live bands, the often unsung element of live music that make sure everything actually happens. The stage set, the sound, the lights, making sure all the equipment actually works and likely a good more besides. I have friends who have long worked in this area – and as COVID proved, it can be a pretty precarious lifestyle – and most are now “lifers”, having toured and toured for a great many years.

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/Manowar
/Kings of Metal
/Kings of Metal

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From one very loud live band to…reputedly the loudest of all (reputedly they hit 139 dB in 2008 at a soundcheck!), not to mention the band who’ve played the longest set ever, at just over five hours. Kings of Metal basically reminds us that Manowar are louder, better, and more Rock than anyone else – as are their fans in their “jeans and leather“.

As the chorus goes: “Other bands play, Manowar kill”

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/Wild Cherry
/Play That Funky Music
/Wild Cherry

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So, what happens if you find yourself playing a particular style of music at the wrong time? Seventies rock band Wild Cherry found themselves in exactly this position as Disco began to explode in cities across the USA, and the story goes that inbetween sets in a majority-black venue in Pittsburgh, the lead singer was asked by a patron when they were going to “play that funky music, white boy?” It turned out to be a lightbulb moment for the band, as they wrote and released this very white-boy take on disco-funk.

It worked, though: two-and-a-half million sales later, they were quids in. Let us never talk about the Vanilla Ice take on the song (which was, remarkably, the song that Ice, Ice Baby was originally the B-side to), though. Ever.

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/Scene Queen
/Mutual Masturbation
/Hot Singles In Your Area

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Backstage, things are getting weird. Scene Queen has long been commenting – in song and in interviews/online – about how they get treated very differently as a performer simply because she’s a woman, constantly having to justify themselves. Sadly this is nothing new, and indeed various women of my acquaintance talked about this in great detail some years back.

But Scene Queen has some fun with the concept, describing just how strange it is for dudes backstage to be obsessing over every last detail, and dismissing the women around them, just to make themselves sound more important: turning it into an uncomfortable circle jerk. And like a great many Scene Queen songs, the chorus is an earworm you may not want to sing out loud at work…

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/dEUS
/Memory of a Festival
/In A Bar, Under The Sea

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There are few songs that really grab the feeling of the chaos that surrounds you at a music festival, but this short blast of a song from dEUS – from their recently re-mastered/re-issued second album In A Bar, Under The Sea – has the distinct feel of experience. The poor choices of drugs, nearly losing your friends, being oh-so-overwhelmed by everything. Been there, done that – and had a fucking blast doing so.

This song was one of the handful omitted last week in London, at their quite wonderful show where they played most of both Worst Case Scenario and In A Bar, Under The Sea. I’m getting to the point where there are now few dEUS songs I’ve not heard live, and it’s always one of the highlights of any year. Tom Barman hinted they’ll be back next year, which suggests there might be new material on the way…

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/Frank Turner
/Four Simple Words
/Tape Deck Heart

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For some time now the regular set-closer at a Frank Turner show, this is a song about the experience of live music, both from the perspective of playing it, but also experiencing it: as it’s easy to forget that many performers are fans of music too. As I’ve written about a number of times before, Frank’s shows are a joyous reminder of what live music can be: inclusive, friendly, a place where you don’t have to be self-conscious, and if you want to sing (or indeed dance) along, that’s fine – and indeed encouraged.

Frank has been out on tour with the Descendents (one of his formative influences) in the US recently, and this week on the last night of the tour in Chicago, they invited him to join them onstage to perform Rotting Out, which looked like all of Frank’s Christmases came out once being able to sing it with his heroes. Such is the power of music.

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/Half Man Half Biscuit
/Bad Review
/Voyage to the Bottom of the Road

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Once upon a time, when I was younger, I was a brutally caustic reviewer. I fell out with a few friends over daring to suggest their bands weren’t very good, after one festival my review being shared resulted in an almighty ruckus on social media thanks to (maybe in retrospect a bit harsh) comments about a couple of bands on the bill. I try to celebrate the good in music that I listen to and see – and I certainly don’t write half as many reviews as I used to – but there are times when I’ve been reviewing a gig, and my heart just sinks as I realise the band I’m watching are just fucking terrible.

At that point, it’s the consideration of how I find something nice to say (to at least cushion the blow a bit), or whether I just open both barrels and truly go for it. Sometimes, the latter is truly and utterly deserved. Maybe they are misogynistic trash, have made questionable comments, or the songs are fourth-rate Oasis-lite (I’ve seen all of these).

But whatever I say, the band in question might read it, and let me tell you, some bands have thicker skins than others…