My Favourite Music Concert

"I have to get in there". Sunday night, the second of two drunken, roasting hot, July days at the 2005 Oxegen music festival. It had already been an action packed couple of days taking in bands of the moment like The Killers, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight and Kasabian but it was seasoned performers like Ian Brown, Snoop Dogg and Audioslave who stole the show for me. On the Saturday night, I chose The Stone Roses frontman in a marquee over Green Day on the main stage, touring their career defining American Idiot album. When Keane arrived after The Killers on Sunday evening, it was time to decide what headline act would bring down the curtain on our weekend. We debated among the 20 of us, the choice was between staying here and waiting for the always brilliant Foo Fighters or go to one of the big circus tents and see James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. No contest. There was plenty of time in life to see the Foo Fighters (I've seen them twice since), how many opportunities would I get to see James Brown? This was it. There was one problem, the tent was full. The big top had filled up before Rodrigo Y Gabriela had finished as people gathered to see the hardest working man in show business. Security were stopping anyone else from entering while the stage was re-set for what I was certain would be one of the greatest gigs I'd ever witness. Our gang had split up depending on who they wanted to see but most of those who'd come with me to see James Brown were now heading back to the consolation of Dave Grohl's band on the main stage. There were 3 of us left, me, my mate and his wife. They were happy to sit on the grass outside and listen to what came from inside. I remembered an awful experience of having to do this at an outdoor U2 gig in Belfast in 1997 when I joined hundreds of people sitting on the banks across the river listening to the concert and wondering what was happening on stage. "I have to get in there" I told Liam and Fiona again. We sat looking at the right hand side of the blue three-ring as the warm up music ended and the crowd inside cheered in excited anticipation for Mr. Dynamite. Then I saw it. Behind the chest high railings that ran along the side of the tent, there was a 12 inch gap where the ground and the bottom of the tarpaulin didn't meet which ran for a couple of metres. I fixed my sights on it, levitated off my arse on to my feet, said "see yous later" and moved from walk to jog without taking my eyes off the target. I swung both my legs over the barrier as if I were a gymnast on a pommel horse then did an army crawl under the heavy plastic curtain. I was in....the space between the barriers and the front of the stage. Security came running towards me from the right hand side - "Oi!". My heart raced to 100mph, I ran down the gap towards where the band would play shortly, another security guard was charging towards me, the crowd in the front row cheered the chase. I was right in line with the middle of the stage at this point, I turned left to avoid becoming the meat in the sandwich of two burly event security men, stood up on the barrier and threw myself into the crowd. Thankfully the audience pulled me out of the reaches of the angry security men and I burrowed my way well into the middle. As I turned to face the stage the band came on in their smart suits and the sweet soul music began. Then after what seemed an eternity of a build up with his stage announcer heralding "Here he is James Brown, James Brown, James Brown.....", the tent nearly came out of the ground as the band expertly brought the atmosphere to a crescendo before the star was launched onstage. There he was. Older but still stylish and unmistakably James Brown, whose music I'd grown up with from movies like Good Morning Vietnam, Rocky IV, Lock, Stock... and The Commitments as thousands of white Irish people, "the blacks of Europe" lost their shit to one of musics greatest ever performers. I marvelled at what looked like a slick Las Vegas show complete with horn section, dancers and backing singers in a tent in the middle of a racecourse. In between songs, he spoke to the band and the audience in his garbled voice that sounded like someone going up through the gears of a motorbike, I recalled Eddie Murphy's impression of him and his band "what the fuck James talking about?". I have no idea what he played in the set or when. I assume all the hits were in there and it was something like Live 8 the week before. All I remember is watching in awe and coming out of there totally elated then finding my friends and only being able to say "wow" before meeting up with the rest for our final night at an Oxegen music festival. Such was the impression James Brown made at Punchestown in 2005, he came back the next year and headlined the main stage, playing to 80,000. Less than 6 months later, he died on Christmas Day 2006.

Six weeks on, Prince reminded the world that there was still a great showman around when he performed arguably the best ever Super Bowl Half Time Show. I hadn't watched American Football or listened to Prince since the mid 90's but I got back into both after staying up to watch this and realised I had to see the man formerly known as The Artist, live. Not long after his Super Bowl triumph, he announced a residency at the O2 in London for summer 2007. My then girlfriend, now wife, loved Prince too so it didn't take any convincing to get her to go to London with me. My first experience of Prince's music was Raspberry Beret on the Hits 3 compilation album that I got for Christmas in 1985. It was played, rewinded and played again on my portable tape deck. It's still one of my favourite ever songs and I recently learned to play it on guitar having watched Beck cover it at Radio 1's Big Weekend in Belfast in 2018. My uncle was a bus driver and sometimes he would find stuff left by passengers. He gave me an unclaimed 90 min TDK audio tape with a Richard Marx album taped on it with the name of each song written in a girls handwriting using one of those green Pentel Rollerballs that writes blue. At 12 or 13 I was still listening to whatever was popular in the charts and Michael Boltons Soul Provider was on my walkman so Richard Marx's eponymous first album was very much along the same lines. It took me a long time to discover the album taped on the other side, Purple Rain, but once I did, I never listened to Richard Marx or Michael Bolton ever again. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life....". Drums. That was it. Maybe I'd overdosed on ballads from listening to mullet rock but at that time Purple Rain and When Doves Cry, while obviously incredible songs, didn't rock me as much as Let's Go Crazy, Take Me With U or I Would Die 4 U. The following year Diamonds and Pearls was released and it would become the soundtrack to 3 weeks of Irish summer school at The Gaeltacht in Donegal. There were about 100 kids from schools all over Northern Ireland who went and lived with native Irish speaking families with anything between 4 and 20 students in a house. I was in a house with 16 boys from several different schools. My spoken and written Irish improved along with knowledge of traditional songs and music but the real education I received was finding out about all kinds of bands other teenagers were listening to. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Beastie Boys, Guns N Roses, The Pixies, Stiff Little Fingers, Rush and The Pogues. One fella from my school was a massive Prince fan, he could even dance like him and had Diamonds and Pearls on tape. By the end of the 3 weeks, every house had a copy of the album and the whole bus was singing Gett Off on our long journey home to our families.

Emma and I were at the second of 21 nights at the O2, formerly the Millennium Dome built at Greenwich in London to mark the turn of the century. The dome had been replaced with a modern entertainment arena that hosted concerts and sporting events. I'd never been in an indoor venue on this scale nor had I seen a stage in the middle of the audience in the shape of the iconic symbol Prince had come to be known by during his contract dispute with Warner Bros. This was still a year before iPhone 1 and there were very strict rules that no cameras were allowed during the performance but I think we smuggled in a digital camera and managed to get some photos of the stage before it began. Thankfully there is some footage of the shows on Youtube. We were sitting up high and could see a black magicians box being wheeled into the middle of the arena. It was soon clear who was inside and although we didn't see him get out, there wasn't much time between the box disappearing from our view and the show beginning. He emerged from the O of the symbol, the coolest man alive, wearing clothes hand crafted by his own team of designers. "Dearly beloved..." Lift off! Let's Go Crazy, Take Me With You and Guitar from the Planet Earth album he was touring. I knew he was a multi instrumentalist but what a guitarist. A mixture of Nile Rodgers and Jimi Hendrix. His band were incredible. "I've got so many hits" he bragged as he played them one after the other. I Feel For You and Controversy after cover versions of Le Freak, Play That Funky Music and What A Wonderful World. It only let up when I went to the bar for Emma. There was one other person there probably sent to the bar by his girlfriend too. The next song started "We're missing Cream" we both said at exactly the same time, got our drinks and hurried back inside in time for U Got The Look, If I Was Your Girlfriend, Kiss and Purple Rain. The encore was Little Red Corvette, Raspberry Beret and Sometimes It Snows In April. A final encore cover of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy and he finished with Nothing Compares 2 U. Simply amazing. What I didn't know was that he did after shows in a bar in the O2. My friend from the Gaeltacht who turned everybody on to Diamonds And Pearls went to both the show and the after party. He was stood 4 feet away from his idol as he entertained for another couple of hours accompanied only by a piano. I can't believe I'll never get to see Prince play live again although I did get to see him one more time at Malahide Castle 5 years before he died suddenly in 2016, a terrible year for music as many of the all time greats exited the stage and never returned for an encore. I've missed live music this year but I'm delighted and honoured I can say I got to see two of the greatest.