I'm With The Band

Los Angeles

I went to a gig at the Troubador last night. It was local band night at the famous old place which meant not only was it easy enough to turn up and get in but happily there wasn't a cover charge. It's a great little venue, like a scaled down version of the old Leeds T&C but with a decent sized stage so there was plenty opportunity for the bands to indulge in various crowd pleasing antics. The place was full of young looking guys wearing black hoodies and my Doves t-shirt attracted a fair bit of attention although no smart comments. Perhaps they all clocked me for being genuinely British and decided to let me off being a bed-wetting indie nerd, seeing as I wasn't pretending to be British like most American indie fans.

The crowd had all come to see Saosin who were actually on third out of five bands, possibly so their fans could be home in time for bed. They were in the vein of Taking Back Sunday and played pretty loud, although I decided to have a beer instead of buying a pair of earplugs. From where I was loitering at the back I got a good view of all the crowd surfing and stage diving. The done thing was to surf your way to the front, dance around on stage for a bit, then run and dive back onto the rest of the crowd. Dozens of people did this, and the very chilled out security guys didn't seem to mind, which certainly gave a bit of atmosphere to the show.

Almost everyone buggered off after their set, much to the annoyance of the next band Supermodel Suicide. The singer had some issues about this, and between every song launched into tirades of abuse against everyone who had left, everyone who was still there and emo music in general. They were a pretty generic sub-Hives kind of rock and roll act and, although their playing was as tight as their t-shirts, they weren't much to write home about. Before the last song he looked me in the eye then implored everyone to "get the fuck on stage and fucking dance, you fuckers" so I decided it would only be polite to join in and clambered up round the back of the band. To say my performance was half-hearted would be overestimating it somewhat, but then I've never been much of a dancer. Just as well that by then there were more people on stage than in the crowd.