The day arrived. Doors opened at 7. At 6:50 Ella was drunk (we know Ella is drunk when she has a drink in her hand and is waving her arms about in the air, slurring, and doing her ‘sexy face’ which basically resembles everybody’s else ‘Oh God I’m having a stroke’ face). At 7:05 we concert goers were still sat in the college bar waiting for the rest of the girls to sort their fucking lives out – apparently they wanted to ‘eat dinner’ before going out. Bullshit. They shouldn’t have even attended. I was far too excited to even contemplate swallowing a morsel. Eating? Pah. You would have sooner seen me, I dunno, NOT attend the Frank Black concert. And that is a shorthand way for saying ‘not bloody likely’ because I bloody love Frank Black. Anyway they all took a sacred age to get changed. Frankly I don’t think it was worth the wait, because they were wearing the same clothes they usually wear on going out days, and their hair was only mildly more jazzed up than usual. POINTLESS. I’d got myself into the frame of mind by wearing the cool tshirt that my little brother bought me for Christmas. It had an amplifier for a guitar on the front, and on the side written in gold lettering were the words ‘Turn on Tune in Rock out’ which I frankly think sums up my entire life mentality. I’m just chill. I don’t stress about anything, I’m too busy ‘rocking out’ and ‘sticking it to the man’.
By the time the bloody females (I say females I mean LIABILITIES) sorted themselves out, I was getting so het up and stressed that we were going to be late that I was actually shivering and getting hot flushes. I thought they were reserved for women going through the menopoly. That was how stressed I was at the thought of being late to see Frank Black – I grew sixty years and swapped sexes and then had a symptom. I was dancing about being all high pitched and saying ‘COME ON COME ON COME ON’ and they were all ‘Do we even know where the concert takes place?’ and ‘What bus do we get?’ and ‘We suck, let’s walk slower so that Thomas misses the bitchin’ awesome concert’. Frankly the fact that we got there at all was a miracle. Luckily Tall Matt has a friend with red hair who knew the way to Oxford Brooks (don’t ask me what that is, some kind of polytechnic university as far as I can tell). Towards the end I was like ‘Forget this noise’ and just sprinted away from everyone towards the concert centre. It was dead romantic, I just imagined BURSTING into the concert hall and then Frank Black looks up and he sees me and he’s like ‘Tom, you came!’ all happy and then I get to join the band as a Bez-style backing maraca singer. That’d rule.
As it was, I BURST into the hall at 8:13 only to find some shit student band called Bono Mango or something – can’t remember – on. Turned out that Frank Black didn’t even come on until 9:45 and he was supported by shit student band 1, and some other band called Art Brut. ‘Oh yeah’, said one of the girls ‘I only came for Art Brut’. At this point I saw red and stapled a ‘loser’ sign to her forehead. Going to a Frank Black concert in order to see Art Brut supporting is like going to a Live Jesus live sermon in order to see the Scientologist Equivalent of Jesus (which is, as far as I can tell, one of the Martians from “Mars Attacks”) supporting. Anyway I quietly drank while Art Brut were on. And to be fair, they were not bad, singing songs about being drunk, not being able to get over your ex-girlfriend, being quietly unimpressive in bed, and being crap at dancing. Frankly though none of it really resonated with me, and I was far more excited about Blacko and his songs about incest, birth defects, bizarre arthouse films and retarded Mexican tramps. I was so excited, in fact, that I went to the toilet four times. This was because I didn’t want to need the toilet when Frank was on stage and I was terrified of having like, a tiny bit of wee left in my bladder that was insistent and irritating. The main paradox is that once I’ve been to the toilet enough times I start to get stressed about being thirsty, and worry that I’ll have an insistent thirstiness that will be offputting, so I drink three and a half pints of water and thus need to go to the loo again.
The result of the past three or four sentences about my water-retention problems was that I was in the toilet when Frank Black came on. I know this because suddenly the sound of bored crowd buzz died briefly down, before erupting in cheers. I stopped weeing and sprinted out of the toilets, desperately trying to force my penis back into my trousers, wailing ‘I’M COMING FRANK’. I returned to the front of the crowd, where I was met by a white dude with dreadlocks and some fat bald guy who I very briefly thought WAS Frank Black. But this was clearly nonsense because FRANK BLACK WAS ON THE STAGE. I WAS LITERALLY METRES AWAY FROM HIM.
And oh, he was beautiful. His bald head shone gorgeously. His belly was fat, but not like grotesque fat, just fat enough that he looked like he could take me down by jumping up in the air, making the ground shake, and then jumping on me. His fingers were plump and healthy. He was wicked. And then the music began!
It was all stuff from his new album. Which was ok, because they were all really good tunes that I had listened to it before and so vaguely knew the words. I guess it was all for the best actually because if he had suddenly launched into Mr Grieves or Hey or – heaven forbid – Debaser, myfavouritesongofalltime, I would probably have had a heart attack of excitement and died right there on the dancefloor. The current album was, in Blacko’s words, “a rock opera about a dutch impressionist”. YES WE HEARD HIM SPEAK. I heard the voice of Frank Black, the voice from Tame and Wave of Mutilation and not Winterlong and Monkey Gone To Heaven and that mildly irritating studio skit ‘You Fuckin’ Die’ from Surfer Rosa (which I still listen to). Firsthand. It was good. It was especially good when he bantered with the audience. I mean, Frank Black isn’t like the king of audience interaction – mainly because he’s singing a ‘rock opera about a dutch impressionist’. However, after he started playing the accordion, some knobheads in the crowd started shouting ‘get on with it fat man’. Frankly I was appalled – that’s like going to see Jesus live on stage and being all like ‘Oi, braceface’. It’s not even that clever of an insult: He’s a fat bald guy. That’s kind of his Thing. I wasn’t standing for it, but FB was all cool – “Yeah, I know in England you have, a sarcastic sense of humour” he said, and then played on his harmonica. It was badass. And he took the – admittedly insulting – crowd heckling so well that I though I would have a go. Not to be insulting, but just to request a tune. So when he’d finished his last song and was tuning up, I yelled ‘PLAY DEBASER!’ well loudly.
This possibly wasn’t a good idea. The fact is, I love Frank Black dearly as a god and as a friend. However that doesn’t change the fact that he really hasn’t improved much since, say, about 1993. Requesting a song from that period is likely to annoy him. It’s akin to going to see TS Eliot live on stage. TS wants to perform his latest poem, which is an interpretive piece of dance-poetry about racial disunity in Harlem, but then some drunk guy at the back of the crowd yells “Oi, do The Waste Land! April is the cruellest month, bitch!” He’d be annoyed. I would be. It’s like pointing out his failure to move on after The Pixies. I knew this, but I shouted “PLAY DEBASER!” all the same. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Possibly for him to be all like ‘Ok, I’ll play Debaser, but only if you come up on stage and sing it with me’ and then I go up on stage and sing Debaser with him and then I crowd surfed for a bit, and then we went back to his dressing room and did some blow and took turns with Elisha Cuthbert, or whoever the hot nympho starlet happened to be at the time. This didn’t happen. Instead, there was a silence for a moment. Frank Black stopped what he was doing (tuning his harmonica) and looked at me, for just a second. Our eyes met. We understood each other. And do you know what he said? “Shh”.
Shh.
I GOT SHH’D BY FRANK BLACK.
THAT’S RIGHT.
All of a sudden I started to glow from within. It was a glow that lasted me through the next week and a half. I walked on air. I danced with the angels. I was so happy I decided at that point to be good and kind and polite to everyone. My musical hero had told me to shut up. That was It. That was fucking It. I could die happy.
That was a happy day. :D
I love you Frank, and to prove it I drawed a picture of us:**
Do you like it?
*NB: all claims of literality may be falsified
** NB: I’m totally not gay
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