Seen Them Live...

Remember when bands used to tour their new album. It was one of the few ways to get people to hear the new stuff, of course. Some of the time, the new record had just come out or wasn’t even released, so we hadn’t heard it. The irony was, more often than not, we all wanted to hear the old stuff we knew, not the new. I bet you’ve been to at least one gig where they played the whole of the new album and everyone was bored. Neil Young was famous for doing this at one point, on the Tonight’s The Night tour.
These days with the economics of touring being very different and tickets costing a lot, you can’t really experiment too much. It was different when you’d paid £2.00 to get in. It often worked though, I sometimes went and bought the new album based on what I heard in concert though more usually though, I bought an old, classic album.
I did buy the debut Pat Travers album after seeing him support SAHB and I bought EC Was Here after seeing Eric Clapton and Octoberon after seeing Barclay James Harvest, Who Are You after seeing The Who and There And Back after seeing Jeff Beck, Songs From The Wood by Tull, New England by Wishbone Ash.
I’m sure people are still turned on to new music after seeing a band and just stream or download it and no-one really benefits from that. It seems very shallow and disposable and isn’t part of that rock culture we so loved. The support acts would often have a small table selling black XL t-shirts and the latest album. Did you ever buy the support acts record? I did it twice. I saw an excellent soft-rock AOR band called Arbre supporting Chris Rea at Middlesbrough Town Hall and I bought their debut and I got the Widowmaker debut after seeing them as support on the High And Mighty tour. I thought they were going to be massive but they got killed by punk.
Going to gigs and being turned on to new albums was all part of our rock lives.

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