I know! Another concert, only a couple of months after the last one I went to. Very unlike me. However, I’ve been a huge fan of The Stranglers since high school, and there were a couple of spare tickets going so I went along with friends.
It was another winner. The venue was the Opera House, which was larger than the uni hall that Billy Bragg played at. It was also seated, and we were way up in the gallery, so there was no chance of getting up and dancing which was a bit of a relief to be honest.
The show kicked off with Jon Toogood from Shihad as the warm up act. I was surprised not to recognise any of Shihad’s songs – weren’t they quite big a couple of decades ago? Anyway, he played a couple fo covers of famous NZ songs so that was fun. He was very sweary, though – there are more adjectives available than just the ‘F’ word, young man! Actually he’s only a little younger than me, as it turns out.
His half hour set was followed by 15 minutes of set up before the lead act started playing, which brought the whole thing perilously close to my bedtime, and I did several prodigious yawns between sets.
The Stranglers were great though, and singing and boogying along in my seat woke me up nicely. There’s only one member of the original line up still in the band, the bass player, which is no wonder as they’ve been around since the 70s. The lead singer who also plays lead guitar was not in the original line up, and having just spent the last ten minutes perusing the groups Wikipedia page, I’m no closer to working out who he is or when he joined. But, he fitted in well and is of around the same vintage as the original band members would have been. The original hugely influential keyboard player sadly died in 2020 of COVID but his young replacement does a terrific job of filling in, as does the drummer.
There were only about three songs I didn’t know, it was really just one hit after another. I think they had 24 top 40 singles over their career, according to Wiki, and they must have played most of them. The highlight was Golden Brown, my all time favourite.
The only downside was that it was loud. If I’d been a more experienced concert goer I would have brought some earplugs. As it is, my ears are still ringing, which I know is not a good thing for long term hearing loss. Anyway, you only live once, and sometimes you’ve got to live life on the edge to pull yourself out of the drab sensible rut you normally find yourself in. But I will take earplugs next time.