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- The Herald Scotland
‘It completely blew my mind': Great memories of the first gigs we saw
It's an interesting thread, one sparked by Rebus author Ian Rankin recollecting that the first concert he ever saw was by Barclay James Harvest, the progressive rock group.
Writing the foreword to Edinburgh's Greatest Hits: A Celebration of the Capital's Music History (2022), Rankin says: 'They say you always remember your first time. For me, that means Barclay James Harvest at the Usher Hall.
'I was sixteen and didn't even own one of their albums. I think 'Mockingbird' was the only song of theirs I knew. But my mate Colin had gone over to Edinburgh from Cowdenbeath and come back with tickets.
'In my memory, the plan had been to go see another band – Argent maybe – but they were playing in Leith and we weren't sure how to get there from Waverley Station, so Barclay James Harvest it was'.
Johnny Rotten was only about six years old when his parents took him to see Cliff at a well-known London venue. 'We were up in the balcony and I couldn't hear anything at all of him – just girls screaming, and my young ears couldn't take it', he told David Hepworth and Mark Ellen in an In Your Ears video interview. 'It was awful. I couldn't figure out why these girls were screaming'.
Star Trek actor, and singer, William Shatner, once declared that his very first gig was a Rolling Stones concert in Toronto. He was more a Frank Sinatra fan at the time and it was only much later that he got into rock'n'roll.
For the Canadian musician Leslie Feist, who is known by her surname, her first concert experience was seeing Tina Turner at a venue in Calgary. 'I remember it exactly, the whole thing', she told an Ontario newspaper years ago. 'It was the Private Dancer era. Her hair was enormous. I was a million metres away and her hair was still completely enormous'.
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Rolling Stone magazine once put the question, 'What's the first concert you ever saw?' to a handful of celebrities. Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas said: 'My dad took me to see Tina Turner. We sat in the second row. She sang 'Proud Mary,' pointed at me, and I thought that it was a sign.'
For Sylvester Stallone, it was a double bill with Blue Cheer, a San Francisco rock band, and Jimi Hendrix, in 1969. Slash, guitarist with Guns'n'Roses, recalled seeing David Bowie 'for three nights at the Los Angeles Forum, around 1973. My mom was doing his wardrobe in those days.'
Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry told the magazine: 'It was the Dave Clark Five, in '65 or '66, at the Boston Arena. It was pretty amazing, seeing all the girls screaming'.
Jim Kerr, of Simple Minds, had wanted to see David Bowie bring his Ziggy Stardust tour to Glasgow, but a bad injury to his foot the night before derailed his plans, according to the band's biographer, Graeme Thomson. Kerr's first gig turned out to be Genesis, at the Glasgow Apollo in 1973. The band's bassist, Derek Forbes, had as his first-ever gig The Who, Thomson writes in Themes for Great Cities.
Alan Edwards, the high-profile music PR (Bowie, the Spice Girls, the Stones etc) was slightly more fortunate than Kerr when it came to Bowie. Aged 16, he saw him debut Ziggy Stardust. 'There were only a couple of hundred people in the audience', he writes in his memoir, I Was There. 'At one point, David sat on Mick Ronson's shoulders while the guitarist walked around the sparse crowd. I'd never seen anything like it'.
For good measure, Edwards recalls that, while still wearing his school uniform, he 'managed to squeeze in at the back to see the Who play Worthing Town Hall [in Sussex]. They were so loud and powerful, with such great songs'.
The culture website, Vulture, once asked celebrities the same question that Rolling Stone had asked. Sting remembered being hugely impressed by Hendrix at a small club in Newcastle. 'I was 14', he said. 'Well, I'd never seen a black man before, or ever seen anyone play a left-handed guitar before, and it completely blew my mind. It blew my worldview away. And it's why I'm a musician'.
Dumbarton-born David Byrne, who emigrated to Canada with his family when he was two years old, and went on to launch Talking Heads, told Vulture: 'It was — I'm dating myself — when my dad took me to see Ravi Shankar. This is, like, late-'60s, Baltimore. They played Symphony Hall in Baltimore, and I was 16. Obviously, I couldn't go myself. It was another world, another musical world. And after then, I started to go to things myself. Yeah. Pretty cool for Dad, though'.
Actor Chris O'Dowd has no memory of his first concert; as he told Vulture: 'While I was in the belly, my mother went to see Chuck Berry in Ireland. She was six months pregnant with me. Out of the womb, on my own, was Oasis in 1994'.
The guitar great Richard Thompson, who found fame with Fairport Convention and later as a solo artist, was at secondary school, and already hooked on the guitar, when his parents took him to see the great Andres Segovia at London's Festival Hall. 'He was nearly seventy years old and seemed ancient', Richard wrote in his autobiography, Beeswing. 'He had fat sausage-like fingers, but his playing seemed effortless and he sounded like an angel'.
The late Rab Noakes saw a package-tour gig at Glasgow's Odeon in 1963, starring the Everlys, the Rolling Stones, Bo Diddley and Little Richard. At one point, Little Richard, began taking off his clothes, and his shirt landed in front of Rab. As Rab told Jim Wilkie, author of the Scottish music book, Blue Suede Brogans, for years afterwards he kept one of the shirt cuffs in a drawer.
For many people in west-central Scotland, the Apollo was the place where they saw their first concert. On the Apollo's Facebook page, an anonymous contributor says: 'My first concert was Led Zeppelin in were so many speakers on the stage , piled high one upon another and this little tiny space for the band. What a night it was and what a noise. I was hooked on going to concerts at Greens'.
Ronnie McGhie's very first gig was Slade, supported by Status Quo, at Green's Playhouse in 1972. Valerie Goldie's, meanwhile, was The Style Council, at the Apollo in June 1985. Sadly, it was also the very last concert the old place ever put on.
Some people, however, are just too busy to attend music events. Kaleb Cooper, 26, who has found fame as the farmer on the documentary show Clarkson's Farm, only saw his first concert two years ago, when Jeremy Clarkson took him to see the Who, at Badminton House in Gloucestershire.
'It was awesome', Kaleb told the Sunday Times magazine recently. 'Growing up, everyone I hung around with was a farmer, I never had time to go to a concert. I had to work every single day to save up for my own tractor'.
