Drove to Norwich with Gareth and Owen last night, to see Marillion playing live at the UEA.

I'm normally not much of a fan of live music. For a start, there's the inconvenience. It's invariably a total pain to get to the gig you want to go to, including figuring out how you'll get home if it goes on until after the last train; when you get there, you typically have to stand up for the whole time you're listening, which gets tiring pretty quickly. Plus it costs more to get into a one-off gig than it does to buy an album you can play over and over again; so given all that, I tend to feel that a gig had better be a mindblowingly wonderful experience to be worth the aggro. Which they're usually not: the music is often so loud my ears max out and I don't get to hear it properly, the sound balance has a nasty habit of sucking royally so that the instruments (especially the drums) drown out the vocals, any feeling of awe at being in the same room as a famous band in person is rapidly outweighed by annoyance at the sweaty punk next to me elbowing me in the ribs constantly, and if there's anything worth watching going on on the stage then I can pretty much assume that someone's head will get between me and it at the crucial moment. I find live gigs are particularly bad when the band is one I haven't heard before; on the one occasion I tried this, I came out with very little more idea of what their music is like than I had when I went in.

Despite this, I still go to gigs on occasion; I think I've now been to … um … between seven and ten, depending on which borderline cases you count. Mostly I'll only go if it's a band I like a lot and I expect to recognise a lot of the music played, because then my brain can fill in the details when all I can actually hear is a vague thumping noise in roughly the right rhythm.

And just occasionally it is worth it. Marillion's gig last night had an actually sensible sound balance, so that the music actually sounded like music played by Marillion; but it had more feeling and more energy than hearing the same songs on studio albums. The first half of the gig was from their latest album ‘Marbles’; I had already heard several of these songs coming out of Gareth's CD player and had largely felt that I could take them or leave them, but the same songs coming out of the live band did a much better job of grabbing me by the throat and making me enjoy them. Then they went back over their earlier stuff (i.e. albums some of which I actually own) and managed to make my spine actually tingle a few times, which generally takes some doing because I don't tingle easily. As it were.

I think the real low point for me was when they encouraged audience participation in ‘Cover My Eyes’, because the audience were utterly not up to the job. (A sharp contrast with the last NMA gig I went to, at which the band played the opening riff to ‘Poison Street’ and let the audience roar the whole first verse back at them unaccompanied, and it came out in time, with intelligible lyrics and in a clear consensus key. Evidently some bands have talented fans, and others don't.)

But overall, an enjoyable evening. Now all I need is to find an extra hour or two of sleep from somewhere (it didn't finish until 11:30 and then I had to drive back to Cambridge and drop off my passengers)…