I 'n' Gigs 7: First Aid Kit (Islington, 2010)

I was meant to be going to see Nick Cave and his merry bunch of Bad Seeds this week. Since I'm not, and gigs are something which I'm sure a lot of people are missing, I thought I'd write a little about 10 gigs I went to. Not my favourites per se, just memorable ones from down the years.

These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs"  (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs)... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...

This was a good gig for me. I met my wife Juliette there. Good place to meet a person, Union Chapel. Great place for singers to sing too.

I remember I’d just got back from holiday in Portugal, so London felt particularly freezing that early March night. I waited outside with my friends Laura and James, whose friend Juliette was also due to attend. She texted him to say she’d be late. We went in.

That it was a church with pews, and that, with my many years of churchgoing, I had developed certain notions of pew etiquette, probably proved crucial to our future lives.

We sat on a pew quite near the back. I was on the end. Juliette, who didn’t know that anyone was attending apart from James, Laura and her, arrived during the support act, smiled and gestured at me as if to indicate, “sorry, can I get past, my friends are sitting next to you”. I, armed not only with the knowledge that they were my friends too, but also with the understanding that people who turn up late for church just pop themselves at the end of the pew and that’s that, smiled back politely and unbudgeingly. Juliette sat down next to me. And here we are.

What else do I remember about the night? Ed Harcourt was there. Over the previous years, not only had I seen Ed Harcourt in concert several times, I’d also, coincidentally been at a lot of the same events as him, whether gigs or even the cinema a couple of times. I remember a concert he played a year or so before that, he’d begun the show by walking through the crowd playing the guitar, and I’d remembered he’d walked past me and given me a look of half-recognition. Well, this time, at Union Chapel, as I passed him on the stairs, I remember he nodded/smiled at me like he properly knew me – whether this was a mistake, a simple fact of recognising a fan, or he was thinking “jesus, it’s my stalker again, be nice and I’ll get away alive” … I’ll never know.

First Aid Kit were young, very young. They had few songs, and some of those songs (as they still do) sounded a bit callow. But the glory of their voices together when they really sang was undeniable, unstoppably beautiful.

They did ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, the Fleet Foxes cover that had first made them a youtube sensation, they did ‘Ghost Town’, which remains one of their very best songs.

I feel like it was quite a short gig, because there was plenty of time to have a drink in the makeshift bar afterwards, which, again, I suppose, was a good thing.