Music fans of every kind will enjoy Graham Duff’s autobiography “Foreground Music: A life in 15 gigs”. It’s a structure we could all follow whether choosing gigs as examples of phases, significant events, psychological revelations… I review it in “Reads”, but thought between us there could be some corking stories to share. I’ll start:

The Cramps, 1984.

After a rather dissolute year of early 80s decadence, finals were upon me, and I decided to knuckle down, cognisant that I could be spending the rest of my life signing on and getting wrecked in south-east London, then find I was 35. I had a month’s washout to tighten-up the synapses and handle the philosophy and psychopharmacology. One slight problem: a Cramps concert scheduled for December was rearranged for the night before a “Philosophy of the Mind” paper, and I was NOT going to miss that. My pals, a good-hearted bunch of degenerates (“Mad”, where are you? it’s been 35 years) had no such worries, so could get appropriately fucked-up. I turned up at their house pre-gig, and within 15 minutes had gone from “No, I better not”, to “more, please”. It got messy.

We got to the Hammermith Palais and » Continue Reading.