TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME: THERE’LL BE TROUBLE AND JOY TONIGHT

“OH BOY, YOU GET PRETTY emotional about gigs don’t you?” Mate, you don’t know the half of it.

The first time it happened was in the Sydney Entertainment Centre, at the time the second most unlovely box in town. A space that only the squat ugliness of the Horden Pavilion could outpoint on any list of least atmospheric rooms in which I saw music regularly. I’d been excited and pummelled and on occasion affected in there. I’d danced and shouted and laughed in there. But really moved? Maybe. Moved to tears? Never. Not at any gig to be honest. I mean, why would you, right?

(Incidentally, I would eventually watch a concert in Madison Square Garden and realise yes, there was a room with even less natural appeal than the Entertainment Centre, but it had one decided advantage: it was Madison Fucking Square Fucking Garden! And reputation/history just about made up for concrete box death.)

On that night, for more than an hour, Radiohead had built and built on emotional foundations: some beautiful melodies that ached, even if lyrically the songs from The Bends and OK Computer were vague or abstract enough to defuse personalising; dynamics and sound lifting and falling, cresting and crashing. The further the concert went on the more things grew, and these feelings had to go somewhere.

As I wrote in my review in 1998, “Exit Music and Let Down were drenched in feeling, almost crushing in their piling of layers of sadness, expectation, hope, wistfulness and yearning. It was too much; how could we be expected to keep this in? What could we do, cry? Yell?”

Well, I wasn’t going to say it outright in the paper, but yeah, I cried. Head down, averted, but unmistakeable if anyone happened to look. It felt right, or at least inevitable, but still wrong – professionally, adult male-ly – and without explanation.

Now I can see things had actually changed a year earlier, not at a gig but a film: watching The English Patient: beautiful and sad, lyrical and romantic, and unexpectedly disturbing to me. Though again, at the time I rationalised it away: it was a momentary shock, a coincidence of events, nothing to see here.

After all, the book which I had read not too long before still was a force in my mind and heart, and the visuals even more than the dialogue tapped right into the lyricism of Michael Ondaatje’s writing. So obviously the film extended that emotional kick. But there was separation, there was distance: I was watching a film set in the tumult of war, I was moved, certainly, but still, just watching it.

Then I noticed, to my shock and embarrassment in that mostly empty cinema on a weekday afternoon, that as a truck load of children, refugees or orphans or the lost and displaced, went by – in a dialogue-free scene lasting a few seconds at most and without reference before or after, just their faces through the slats of the side of the truck – I was crying. Bloody hell, what was that all about? I hadn’t done that since I was 10 or so, watching a post-death episode of Eight Is Enough (the one where they find the presents their mother had hidden away for Christmas, having expected to live that far, if anyone still remembers that show). I didn’t do this stuff.

Searching for explanations, I thought I was not long a father and I just had no tolerance anymore for children in distress. Fair enough. And some years later, again an afternoon screening on a day off, when I came out sobbing from the little-remembered but wonderful film Dear Frankie (easily the best thing Gerard Butler has ever done), about a mother’s attempt to protect her son from the truth about his disappeared deadbeat dad, I could put that down to a father thing too. God I hate seeing kids hurt.

That’s all right and true, but it wasn’t the full story, even if it took more metaphorical smacks to the head for it to sink in. To figure Dickens was on to something when he wrote “I have been bent and broken, but, I hope, into a better shape”.

There were the twin Bruce Springsteen ones, a decade or so apart, with one of the worst experiences and one of the best experiences I would have at a gig – each one having me dew-eyed while pretending otherwise. There was the depth of a Leonard Cohen night, unexpectedly on the second of his farewell tours when I thought I knew how these things worked, only to find I was lost in the sad elegant joyful beauty of it all.

And there was one in 2014 in London, at another show I’ve written about a few times now. When some break inside me had been coming for some time through the Kate Bush concert, and I could hardly pretend to not know that.

Being amazingly close to the Hammersmith stage on which she walked and sang and smiled when I had long accepted I would never see her perform at all. Being there as the second side of Hounds Of Love – The Ninth Wave, as that suite is also known – played out in its blend of vision and grief and love across generations in a way that even the album I loved had been unable to match. Bloody hell, just being there at all when even a month before I had given up any prospect of securing a ticket, let alone one for the very narrow window I would have in London.

Any one of those would be triggers; all three together was a potential detonator. Then she seemed to hover just in front of me, all of us on our feet, all of us singing, all of us releasing, Cloudbusting. And I just bawled, with a look of wonder and joy on my face I am sure.

Alright. Enough. That was it, I figured. There’d not be circumstances like that again; I’d be safe to go out in public. But no. Small gigs, big gigs, it might just come on and I’d be useless to prevent it. Hell, it happened with Joni Mitchell last year (as it had in 2023 and 2022), and I wasn’t even in the room. Not even in the same country.

I was watching on a computer screen at my desk, listening through tolerable speakers – circumstances likely to suck out joy, or at least any high emotion. But as Joni beamed at the hardly inconsequential acolytes singing around her, things got a little tricky in my head. And when she sang Both Sides Now, smiling at the ease of it all, even as her voice reflected every part of a near death experience and unlikely recovery, smiling at the roar of relief and joy and wonder from the audience, smiling at the shared experience that extended to Marseilles and Manchester, Cape Town and this corner of suburban Sydney, buffers went down. My buffers went down. Completely.

Months on, many gigs on, from that day (at least one of those Gillian Welch and David Rawlings nights, and points during Thom Yorke by the harbour; watching A Complete Unknown, and moments in Waxahatchee’s Opera House show; and lord knows you’ll want to step out of the way next time Underworld come) it’s clear that this behaviour isn’t going to end is it?

This is who you are, I tell myself, so you may as well accept it ya big sook.