I made an unconscious decision, when I turned forty (yet somewhat flexible, as it turns out), to avoid live music concerts as, I feel, they are more for the young 'uns than for middle-aged folks like me. This goes against my own experience, and I suspect it's more that the aforementioned young 'uns are actually kind of embarrassing to be around at a concert, even if I don't know them (for example, the bunch of teenagers at a Jane's Addiction gig I went to years ago, who were confused by any song from an album prior to Strays, who were playing with matches before the concert started, and whose female contingent was quite literally falling out of her clothes). Of course, this misses the point that most of the bands I like are now made up of middle aged members... Nevertheless, I passed on the opportunity to see Queens of the Stone Age again last year, pleading financial worries, and now rather regret it... And when my girlfriend recently discovered that Weird Al Yankovic will be playing in town this year, I encouraged her to obtain tickets.
Perhaps that's why, last night, I dreamt of a Nine Inch Nails concert which seemed to have been split into two parts. One, the kiddie-friendly part, seemed to have been staged in a school assembly hall, with all the kids sitting cross-legged (and laden with all kinds of cool boxed electronic gadgets, for no easily discernible reason), patiently awaiting the start of the concert. I was with my best friend and another old friend who now lives in the States (in fact, it seems likely, going by the accents of the other folks in the dream, that the concert was happening somewhere in the States), just wandering around the hall.
The venue was well-lit and the stage unadorned with the usual lighting accoutrements of a NIN gig, but none of us were in any doubt about the headline act. While my friends and I were wandering around - possibly looking for seats - a man crawled over to one of the kids and indicated that the concert was about to start, and that everyone should be encouraged to wave their gadgets (in-box) in the air, the way some folks like to wave cigarette lighters in the air during a cute song at a grown-up rock concert.
OK, brief digression: now that electronic cigarettes are a thing and lighters are no longer as necessary... what the hell are people going to wave in the air during a cute song at a grown-up rock concert?
Back to the dream now...
This one kid spread the word throughout the blocks of seated kids, but my friends and I moved on before the concert started... as far as I can recall.
Moved on, it would seem, to the grown-ups NIN gig in a huge stadium nearby... Only it almost wasn't a stadium, but just a random section of a city, as I'm sure I saw public seating and shopfronts, pavements, roads and alleyways as we wandered around. In fact, thinking about it now, it kind of reminds me of the Disney venue my girlfriend and I visited last year...
Weirdly, once we'd found our seats, the first part of the concert just seemed to happen without any music being played - the lights came up, we cheered, and it was all over for the first half. I'd noticed a large number of teenagers wearing red hoodies, and put it down to them being from the same 'yoof group' or school or college, but it transpired that they were later to be part of the events on-stage, as all of them left their seats and started making their way backstage during the intermission.
My friends and I took this as an opportunity to find better seats, and so wandered off down one side of the 'stadium'. We found better seats, certainly, in that they were less crowded... but they were also far off to one side and too close to the stage to really have a good, comfortable (non-neck-craning) view of the stage. I protested on just those grounds and headed off, further back and toward the middle - close enough to our original seats, I thought - for a better view of what was likely to be another stunning NIN light show during the second half (going by the lighting rigs being moved into place on and around the stage).
In fact, when I finally took a seat, I felt pretty sure that I was back in my original seat... though the gentleman I'd sat next to (clearly not of the mind that rock concerts are for the young 'uns as he was even older than I) disagreed. He first reached into my shirt pocket, only afterward explaining that he was after my ticket, so he could clearly indicate that I was in the wrong seat. Pulling my ticket out of another pocket - firmly believing that either I had a duplicate of his ticket, or maybe he or I had come on the wrong day - I realised that he was right - his group were in seats D16 and above, while mine was clearly D9.
I got up and went in search of the correct seat just as the main lights started to go out and the lights on stage started to pulse and flicker. When I reached what I thought was seat D9, I found it occupied by a baby, wrapped in a blanket and looking rather confused. I leant over the seat back and asked the lady next to it - who appeared to be the child's mother - if there was any chance I might squeeze in (the thought having occurred to me that I really didn't want to sit on the baby), but she indicated that the row was crowded (which it was - suddenly all of them were).
And so, as the droning intro to The Great Below began, as an announcer boomed over the PA that NIN were playing the venue "for the first time in fifteen years", accompanied - in celebration of the momentous occasion - by several assembled youth choirs ("aha - that's what the colour-coded hoodies were in aid of!"), I made my way back to my friends with my tail between my legs...
...And the sinking feeling, as I passed through groups of red- or white-hoodied teenagers right in front of the stage, that I was probably intruding on a filming of the event. I'm not even sure I reached a seat, let alone the seat with my friends, as the concert started and the dream moved on to a shopping trip with my girlfriend where, walking through what appeared to be a market set up in a town square, I thought I recognised a nearby building and said "Now I know where we are!", then decided to make a detour, crossing the road to properly explore how the area we had come to connected to the nearby area (somewhere on the Bakerloo line, going by the brown London Underground sign on the station I saw) which I was already familar with...
...Only that was the moment I woke up and told my girlfriend (still half asleep, the both of us) that I'd just had a dream about being at a Nine Inch Nails concert, and decided to get up to write about it here, lest I forget some of the details.
Such as, now I think about it, as we were approaching the market in the final segment of the dream, I'm certain I saw the three presenters of Top Gear lurking in the crowds, no doubt making pithy remarks about the quaint British street market for one of their 'travelogue' shows...
And yet that wasn't the weirdest dream I've had so far this year..?
No, that honour would probably go to the one where I was being driven, along with my mother, to a family camping trip in a wooded area around a lake, sometime in Autumn going by the coverage of brown leaves on the ground. When we arrived, I found my mother wasn't sleeping after all... she was actually dead. Nevertheless, I carried her over to a deck chair by the lake and next to my father, and claimed she was still very much asleep so we could all carry on enjoying the holiday, and everyone would think that she passed away while sleeping peacefully at the lakeside, rather than in the stuffy car on the way.
But still, it was pretty weird. And the first thing I did before starting this write-up was check the dates on the two NIN live DVDs I own, to see if the last concert I went to could possibly have been fifteen years ago...
...but it wasn't. It was only about eight years ago at most.
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