It doesn't feel like eight years. It feels like a hundred years, yet simultaneously only six months. It feels like another life, but one that I could still reach out and touch with the tips of my fingers.
The 2009 rock/punk-pop scene was my home. I'd never felt more comfortable anywhere else than I did at a gig from 2009 to around 2014. Those were the days when my friends and I had a gig on average every three weeks. Sometimes we had weeks where every single day we would be gigging, different bands and different cities, five days a week and almost keeling over by the end of it. How we afforded it all I still don't understand. Our parents only rarely paid for the tickets, so on our meagre spending money (back before we had jobs) we somehow managed to buy gig tickets, train tickets, sometimes even gifts for the band we were going to see.408Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxGZj1J6q8y
On the 30th September 2009 I went to see All Time Low for the first time. It was my first proper gig, and a group of six of us went along. We were thirteen, on the verge of fourteen, and I could swear that the world was at our feet. I still remember it so vividly. Something was sparked that night in all of us. We would go on to see All Time Low several more times, and though over the years I lost my love of them, they'll still always be special to me. They'll be special because in February 2010 they played the Kerrang Tour, and because they were playing we bought tickets. Also on the lineup were The Blackout, Young Guns and My Passion.
The Blackout and Young Guns would, unbeknownst to me back on February 4th 2010, shape my life in ways I couldn't even begin to imagine back then. I bought The Blackout's first full length album in November 2009 (I remember the day so clearly) and by February I was so excited to see them that it rivalled my love for All Time Low. As for Young Guns, my friend and I had a bet. Since Young Guns and My Passion were alternating on who was on first each night of the tour, I put my bets that Young Guns would open. She said My Passion, but I won the bet.408Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDSEuPP0uFV
They opened with Winter Kiss. The lights were blue, and as the first notes began and the shadowy figures of the band came on stage, I remember turning and grinning and saying "I won".408Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcXOVIV4ePO
It's because of The Blackout and Young Guns that my major love of rock bands began. They were heavier than All Time Low and Paramore, and as my love for bands like them along with Kids in Glass Houses, Blitz Kids, We Are The Ocean, Lostprophets, Deaf Havana, Yashin, Funeral for a Friend, Don Broco, Lower Than Atlantis etc etc grew, things began to change. The friends I went with altered slightly, the volume of gigs increased and the distance we were willing to travel increased with them. I remember the thrill of getting on the train and going to a foreign city, getting lost finding the venue and staying in hotels. When we were fifteen and sixteen, it was so deliriously exciting. It felt so grown-up, and pouring rum into an empty Oasis bottle and taking it along to Liverpool, drinking in the hotel before a festival and curling our hair was exhilarating.
Most of those bands are gone now. Of that list, only three are still going. Last night I saw Young Guns again, and after almost eight years I am still so completely in love, but that love has changed. The Blackout have gone; I watched their final show and farewell documentary DVD last night, at 2am when I got home from Young Guns, emotional, nostalgic and little bit drunk. The British rock scene was so all-encompassing, so wide yet comparatively small. It often times felt like being part of an exclusive club, when we'd go to see Kids in Glass Houses and see Jono from Blitz Kids in the crowd. When the people in the queue would be faces we'd see at most gigs. When the members of the band remembered your face, hugged you and thanked you from the bottom of their hearts for turning up. I remember the first time I met the members of Young Guns. It was a school night, but we'd stayed out afterwards and Fraser and Ben and John and Simon came out. Simon hugged me so tight my back cracked; I remember the smell of the alcohol in the cup Ben was holding (I didn't know it at the time but now I recognise the smell as that of rum and coke). I remember a group of us - most of them people I'd met only hours before - laughing with John. When Fraser went back inside, he came back over to us, put his hand on my shoulder and said goodbye. There weren't many waiting outside. The venue itself was ridiculously tiny.
The second time we met them it was at another All Time Low gig. They were the support act, and whilst waiting in line (because we got there about seven hours before doors opened because that's just what we did back then) we wrote them a note and pinned it under the windshield of their van. The third time we were at a festival in Liverpool. We met the whole band and got a group picture. Then after their set we were calling Ben's name from the barrier, and the security guard laughed and told us there was no chance he was going to come out. Yet he did. He came to see us and brought with him his drumsticks and a signed setlist. He took a picture, but when everybody else on the barrier asked him he refused, saying he had to go. We felt so special, so lucky.
I remember Dottie, a girl we met through these bands, buying us beer when were seventeen, and we sat outside the venue at 2 in the afternoon drinking, surrounded by people that, like us, had been queuing for hours already. We'd been there since 7am, been in Wolverhampton seeing them the night before and only got home at 1am. I remember seeing The Blackout on my seventeenth birthday. They did a signing, and all six of them wished me a happy birthday. Sean Smith hugged me. I don't think I'd ever been so happy.
Times change, and though most of the bands that shaped my teenage years aren't around anymore, I still remember so clearly those days when we'd stand freezing in the cold, waiting outside a venue ten hours before doors open. I remember wearing UV face paint because Aled from Kids in Glass Houses said it would be cool to have fans with UV painted faces at the gigs because they had a UV light. I remember wearing shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of December and taking no coat, and somehow managing to not get ill. I remember crying the first time I met the members of Lostprophets. I remember sobbing as they sang Last Train Home, not knowing it would be the last time I would ever see them perform again.
As Oasis once said, don't put your life in the hands of a rock and roll band. When Ian Watkins was arrested as a pedophile, I think a part of the scene died. Swiftly after that, band after band broke up. Because Lostprophets had paved the way for those such as The Blackout and Kids in Glass Houses etc. When Lostprophets imploded, something died in the UK music scene. Perhaps that something has been revived now, but I don't believe so. It made us all realise that our heroes, the men that stood on stage and sang songs and made us so, so happy had their demons. It made me, personally, grow up quickly. It wasn't drug abuse or anything we'd expect from the typical rock star - it was an abhorrent crime that made my stomach turn. I'd give anything to go back to the days before that December in 2012, when it made me grin like an idiot when the members of my favourite bands would tweet each other, when they would hang out outside of playing gigs. Because it seemed like they were all friends outside of their jobs, and it seemed like the scene was a hub of happiness and youth and potential.
I remember the smell of the smoke machine, the glare of the strobe lights and I remember the feeling of being in a room in February 2010, singing the songs I'd been listening to on repeat for the past six months. I remember the neon pink of Sean Smith's microphone, I remember the brightness, the vividness and the vitality of it all. I remember screaming at the top of my lungs the words "I don't care what you're thinking, I don't care what you're saying. When everything is gone, we'll still be begging for more"
And last night, when Young Guns played songs they said they'd not played for seven years, I wanted to cry for lost youth. The lyrics "I sing the same old songs, a hymn for all I've lost" never felt so apt, and perhaps I've still got more rum running through my veins than blood, but I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the 2009/10's Brit rock scene, the scene that shaped who I am and made me feel at home when I was fourteen.
ns 172.70.127.128da2
and then Add to home screen.