I was begining to think that for some reason or another, I wasn’t meant to go see Radiohead live, ever. Rarely did they tour down-under and when they did, I never had enough money to go see them. So upon moving to London, my chances of seeing my favourite band live was a definite possibility.
A possibility yes, but not without some difficulty. The London shows sold-out just about as soon as they came on sale, so my next option was to see them in Manchester. After waiting 8 months, the day arrived. I was there with my wife at Hugh and Vera’s, our friends who live in Manchester. I took the tickets out to see where we needed to go, to my suprise, the tickets were written in French. I haven’t looked at them since recieving them by mail months ago. I showed this to Vera, who knows a little French and to my distress she turned and told me the tickets are for Nimmes Arena, France. I didn’t know what to do. It was 2pm and I had just found out that I had purchased Radiohead tickets for the wrong country. I turned to my wife with such a helpless look on my face that read, “…please help me!” Somehow we had to get to Montpellier, France from Manchester in less than 5 hours! While I was beating my self into the ground, wondering just how I could be so stupid, my wife made a frantic search online for planes to France, with no luck. She then looked on the Radiohead site for available tickets somewhere else and luckily there was tickets available for the Glasgow show. Better thank nothing I guess but I had to wait two more weeks to see Radiohead, so after she booked, I went to lie down and I wanted to cry.
5am on Friday morning, the alarm wakes my wife and I. We had a 7:40 flight from Gatwick to Glasgow. Upon arriving at the station, our train is running late, which means that we’ll miss our connecting train from Croydon to Gatwick. This in turn made us late for our check-in and therefore we missed our flight. Why me! I scream inwardly. We then had to book tickets for the next flight and had to wait around for 4 hours til 12:45. I was starting to think this concert better be worth all this. And it was.
Radiohead were to play in Glasgow Green, a large park and so our hope for fine weather dissapeared upon flying into Glasgow. Really what did I expect. After all that I’ve been through getting to this concert, of course it’s going to rain. But the rain never did once put a dampner on the concert. In fact I was very thankful for the rain, it cooled us down while we were moshing and washed the beer from us, tossed from all direction. It wasn’t an angry crowd, but I did see a short wench of a girl smack a guy in the face several times because her friend blamed him for feeling her up. The mosh kicked up several gears when Radiohead broke into, “Just”. There was a massive surge thankfully away to our right, away from this one girl who was 4 foot nothing in danger of being trampled on. There were plenty of the usual nut cases being pulled out of the crowd by security for crowd surfing. I closed my eyes in a state of rock and rock moment bliss. Most of my favourite tunes from the new album were played; Weird Fishes, Reckoner, Bodysnatchers, Videotape and suprised to hear Fake Plastic Trees. For their final encore, they finished an amazing concert with Idioteque and Karma Police, which people kept singing the lines, “For a minute there I lost myself” over an over. Radiohead still remains my most favourite band and even with all the trouble I had to go through finally to see them, they did not disapoint and I can’t wait to see them again.
