Ticket Tales: Rocking (Almost) All Night

  For 2016 I plan to do a few things differently with this blog. For starters, I want to post more original content rather than just adding snarky captions to album covers. 
 I like adding snarky captions to album covers and I like to think that I'm not bad at it - but I also think it's about time I started stretching myself a bit. So here we go with something I might turn into a regular thing if people like it. 

  I collect things. In fact, I can't seem to stop collecting things. There's a pile of music magazines in the bottom of my wardrobe, a dozen boxes of comics stuffed into available crevices, my fridge is disappearing under fridge magnets and  I have an entire shelf full of Spitfires

  The collection that takes up the least space - but is at the same time most precious to me - is the small, jumbled pile of photo albums under my TV unit.

 Because that's where I keep memories. 

  Not just photos. I have all sorts in there: faded clippings, postcards from places I've been and friends I haven't seen in years, crumpled flyers from nights out -  and of course tickets from gigs.  

  I don't have a ticket from every single concert I've seen. I wish I did but small bits of paper are fragile and don't always take kindly to going through a washing machine. Pinning them to a board in direct sunlight doesn't do them any favours either.

  The tickets I do have though, all capture a moment in time and just looking at them brings back memories.

Let me tell you about one particular ticket and what may well have been the best night out I ever had.

 It started with an advert in Kerrang magazine.

  I really wanted to go. The Friday Rock night at Pitchers Tavern was all very well but if you got 6 people on the dance floor somebody was getting a flailing elbow in the face  and  I had a yearning to try something a bit more Big City.
 Once I'd raised the subject with my brother (henceforth called Lil Bro, mainly because I know that will piss him off.) he was up for it as well. That was handy. Not only was Lil Bro great company, he owned a car and Nottingham was a long way away from Stafford...

Money was posted off and a small bit of paper came back in return. 

 
  When Friday the 29th of November finally rolled around, the two of us climbed into Lil Bro's prized Capri and set off for an evening of beer, loud music, curious hotdogs and mud.

  Something I always used to love about Rock nights was that feeling I got when I first walked in.  Outside in normal life, I was an outsider, a weirdo who needed a haircut, but here I was walking into a room where my kind of music was playing and nobody was giving me evils for my shoulder length hair. "Yep." I'd think "Here's where I fit in."

 I'm pretty certain that night I was grinning ear to ear like a deranged Cheshire cat.

 What I didn't know was that the Rock/Metal scene was about to undergo a big change.  Nirvana's "Nevermind"  had just been released, you see.
  Some people will tell you that the Hair Metal bands and that whole culture became obsolete overnight as everybody started listening to Grunge instead.  I was there and I disagree. It was a lot more gradual than that,  but there's no getting around the fact the music I was listening to that November night got pushed aside in favour of newer, darker sounds.
 Within a few years I would walk into a "Rock" night and be right back to feeling like an outsider again.

  Sod it. Let's get back to talking about the All-Nighter.  I'm going to break it down into little snapshots from the night. They're more or less in chronological order - but it was 25 years ago and I was fairly drunk,  so don't expect perfect recall.

The Girl In White

  When Lil Bro and I took our seats in the balcony, the dance floor was empty. Imperfect memory keeps telling me that it was this vast space but that can't be right. Nottingham Rock City isn't the size of a football pitch.It just isn't. 

   I definitely remember people standing all round the edges in small clusters, waiting for somebody else to be brave. 

  When I looked up again, a young lady in a short white dress had hit the floor and started rocking. I think it might have been this song: What You Say

  Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the way the lights hit her dress but I swear that she was glowing like a firefly and every bloke in the room was entranced. People began trickling onto the dancefloor  - one, then three, then a dozen - and from that moment on, it never emptied. 

 I still wonder who she was. I still wish I'd said hello. 

Things Get Messy

  Lil Bro and I spent the next hour or so drinking beer and headbanging to the best Kerrang-friendly sounds of 1991. Metallica's Black Album featueed a lot. So did Skid Row, Warrant, Firehouse and Aerosmith.

  At one point my brother got dragged onto the dancefloor. What's interesting is that it was by a bloke.  

 When he finally reappeared he explained what happened. "I recognised the song and I said. "Ooh, that's Helter Skelter by Aerosmith , that is" 

"Next thing I know this bloke lurched out of the crowd cried "Helter Skelter!" , grabbed my arm and dragged me onto the dancefloor. I think he was pissed." 

  Then time came for the evening's entertainment. Instead of bands, Rock City had decided to put on some Mud Wrestling.  And why not?

   Through judicious use of elbows I ended up in the front row. It occurred to me much later that in an event that involves mud, the front row is actually the last place you want to be. But at least I wasn't the poor sod who had to clean up afterwards.   

  I had seen adverts and clips for American mud wrestling before, and since they all seemed to involve  moonlighting bikini models, I had certain expectations. Why do you think I was in the front row?

  Well, said expectations were hurriedly revised once the wrestlers were brought onstage. At the risk of sounding horrible, the "girls" may not have won any bikini contests but I'd have put money on them to win a rugby match. I personally would not have wanted to take any of them on without a baseball bat and Kevlar underpants. 

 I don't remember much of the actual wrestling but it was fun and the crowd seemed to be really into it. All credit to the women involved as they gave it some serious welly. 

 Of course in the process mud got flung about with gay abandon. (I had two showers before I finally got it all out of my hair. )

 No wait, that wasn't the wrestlers. That was the girl standing next to me who decided to slap handful of clay in my face. I then got her right between the eyes with an overarm pitch, so honours were even, I feel.   

  After it was all over I went into the gents and there was a puddle of muddy water three feet across on the floor.  Right next to it was a  bloke checking his makeup in the mirror. I think those two sentences sum up what the night was all about. 

  The Incredible Shrinking Hot Dogs. 

   All that lager needed something solid and non-nutritious to weigh it down so the pair of us grabbed hotdogs: decent size, decent price and about as tasty as hot dogs ever get in that enough ketchup masked the taste of  meat mechanically recovered from pig nostrils. Good value, we thought.

Much, much later, when the crowd was starting to look little glassy eyed, and the catering staff were starting to develop a thousand-yard stare, I went to get another hotdog and even in my tired, rather very pissed state, I couldn't help noticing that the hotdog had...shrunk... somewhat.  

 In fact, what the crafty sods had done was hack a hotdog in half and sell it for the same price.

Worse was to come. 

Despite the event being advertised as 8pm to 8am, the bar shutters came down with a crash at about 2am. 

  I am convinced that they'd either run out of booze or run out of plastic pintglasses.  By that point there were drifts of shattered plastic piled up two feet deep in the corners. I have honestly never seen anything like it before or since. Metalheads like to drink but on that night everybody was really going for it. 

 The bar might have closed but everybody was tanked enough to keep partying. When the DJ put THIS SONG on, people were headbanging to it!  Drunk headbangers were leaping into the mudpit to settle scores and the toilets were getting nastier and nastier. 

 No aggro though. Funny that.  

 This Is The End

 Lil Bro went back to the car to get some shuteye at 02.30 ish. I hung around for another two hours or so but when I found myself falling asleep on the dancefloor I knew it was time to go. 

 I walked out of Nottingham Rock City tired, drunk and spattered with mud. As I came down the stairs I passed the bodies of the fallen. They had partied until they could party no more and  now their snoring bodies lay slumped against the walls and littered the stairs. I saluted them and staggered out into the darkness.

How the frig did I find my way back to the car? I honestly have no idea.

It was 5am. I was tired and everso slightly pissed. I was in a city I'd never been to before in my life and had no idea which carpark we'd left the car in.  I can only assume that drunk me has an amazing homing instinct. 

 We finally got home just before lunchtime the next day. Tired, stiff from trying to sleep in carseats, muddy, hungover in a way that would kill me nowadays and suffering from a complaint peculiar to metalheads,

The Bangover.  

Bangover:  A condition brought on by a combination of alcohol and excessive headbanging. Symptoms are a splitting headache,  ringing in the ears and the feeling that all the muscles in your your neck have been replaced by red hot wires.   

  

 It was worth it. 

 Best 

Rock

Night 

Ever. 

PS> If anybody else was at this one, I'd love to hear from you. Especially if you were the Girl in White.