Six quid

This fine picture is from Mardagg.

When I was fourteen (cue music from the old Hovis advert) I already thought that life was passing me by. I was starting to go out and watch bands, but I felt that I had already missed the finest hours of many of my favourites. I was well into the NWOBHM, but I had already missed the great tours that built up the momentum before this very British type of rock broke into the mainstream. For me it was the Golden Age, so recent but out of reach forever.

In the late seventies UFO, Thin Lizzy, Rainbow and of course many other heavy rock bands pounded away despite the media obsession with punk and new wave. I didn't get to see Rob Halford leathered up and whipping the audience on the Judas Priest X Certificate tour, Motorhead with Saxon on the Bomber tour or Iron Maiden with Paul Di'Anno. Most unfair of all in my opinion, was the fact that I wasn't at the Heavy Metal Barndance at Stafford Bingley Hall in 1980.

All these gigs I had read about made me feel that I was a latecomer to the scene and that I had caught many of the bands too late, past their best even. As if to prove me right, big-haired American bands, all sheep in wolves clothing, came along to steal their audiences and sell out big arenas while the bands I liked might as well have been playing in skips and shop doorways.

In the time since then, all the decent rock bands (Nirvana, Jane's Addiction and Rage Against The Machine come to mind) seem to have come from the USA. This meant that I was unable to catch them on the rise, when rock bands are at their hungriest and best. I got very enthralled by Love/Hate in the early 1990s but they got dropped by a major label, a label who then had the cheek to send me mail-shots about a band I couldn't stand. That was pretty much the end of my interest in new rock bands.

Then in the Summer of 2007, still under the influence of Hayley's Jedi mind trick (which causes me to check for McQueen tour dates nearly every day) I finally saw the dates I was looking for. The band had announced their second headlining UK tour of the year. When I looked for details I discovered that the tickets were six quid. Six quid, the cost of a pizza, or twenty fags. McQueen in concert, in my neck of the woods, for six quid. Fuck the past, the Golden Age is now!