Jacket

So, this is one of those ‘twenty five years ago’ type things – a silver gig anniversary if you like. Think of it as a companion piece to the Loop-referencing blip from t'other week. I went to that gig with my friend Cathy, and indeed there were loads of gigs around that time that I went to with her and That Crowd, whereas there were also loads of gigs that I went to with my mate Rob and Another Crowd. This is one of the ‘Rob’ gigs. And I mentioned that I used to be young, impressionable, read the NME and thought I’d have a go at writing gig reviews for the student newspaper. It was a good deal, they got you on the guest list, and all you had to do was turn in a few hundred words or so afterwards, and if you really wanted to you could rock up to their office in the students’ union building, find a spare typewriter and type it all up yourself and then hand it in personally to the music editor for a real feeling of self-importance. And, obviously, not everything you wrote actually made it into the paper come publication, but it was all good fun and when you did make it into the paper I’ve got to admit that my 19/20 year old self did get a little feeling of satisfaction, excitement and accomplishment. Why, it was almost like 15 minutes of fame, but on a fortnightly basis, and within a very small ‘fame’ circle at that.
 
As well as the writing, if you said you’d take photographs at the gig then you’d get a plus one on the guestlist so a pal could get in for free too. I had an old Praktica MTL3 SLR that I used, the photography department would give you a 400 ISO roll of Ilford black and white to take away and then when you handed in the finished film they usually developed it there and then for you so by the time you’d finished sitting there typing out your review they’d knocked out a contact sheet and a couple of prints for you to look at and take away with the negatives once they’d decided what they might need/what might actually be decent enough to use in the paper. By the end of my time at university I had quite a collection. And of course I still have them all – of course!
 
Anyway, Saturday night, Sheffield Leadmill, 25 years ago today, The Blue Aeroplanes. And I went with my mate Rob who was also one of my housemates and also a big fan of the band. Plus, he liked going to gigs anyway, especially when they were free and there was a late bar. Here’s a link to some proper documentation from the evening (I know that no static and misterprime are interested anyway…) and this time along with the photos there’s even the hand-typed review. The review for the recently-featured Loop gig didn’t quite make it to these pages (although it did get in the paper at the time), it was all a bit full of itself with some rather unnecessarily barbed comments about Manchester (it was the times, it was the times, a trans-Pennine thing…). This one, well, it’s straightforward enough but like I said earlier, I did read the NME religiously back then. Every single word.
 
Hangs.