London. A guy from Pakistan in a slapdash, cheap-looking shirt did not even look at me as he inspected my ticket. My heart was uneasy and kept bouncing up and down my chest and I was fully expecting him to find a fatal flaw and tell me in a faux-polite manner that 'sorry, sir, but you got this ticket illegally and I cannot let you in'. Which would have been fair as this was exactly what happened when I realised the Belle & Sebastian summer concert had been sold out ages ago.
The Pakistani barely made a sound. He applied the ticket to a sensor and instead of a green beep we heard a shrill sound of red that basically said 'bugger off'. Now clearly this was it. I would have to go back to the nearest Cafe Nero and scribble a depressing short story drinking a depressing cup of black coffee. I would not hear "A Century Of Fakers", not in this lifetime.
In the meantime, the queue behind me was getting annoyed rather than annoying, and I could see the struggle inside the mind of my ticket guy at the entrance. He kept pressing the ticket to the sensor and it came off red each time. Then he raised his head, looked straight into my eyes (virtually through me), tore the ticket in half and said: 'Never mind, come on in'.
Thirty minutes later, I would listen to the opening "Nobody's Empire" and wonder just how lucky I was that day.
But more than anything else, perhaps, it's all about that guy from Pakistan who was either negligent or extremely generous. For at every concert you visit, there is always one person that gets stuck in your memory. He or she becomes integral part of the experience, the instrument that isn't played by anyone in the band, the proverbial sixth player in a basketball team.
At the Nick Cave concert in Moscow, it was a very psyched-up office worker who freaked out when he saw Warren Ellis enter the stage: 'No! It simply can't be!' (At that point, Cave himself was still nowhere to be seen.)
At the Cold Specks concert in Munich, it was the hippie-styled man who passed me the small green glass of absinthe together with a lump of sugar and a look of amused concern (completely justified as at some point during "Living Signs" the band's saxophone player started to look like a pornographer shooting videos for Andy Warhol).
At the Menzingers concert in Dublin, it was an Irish teenager with guts made of steel who kept downing Guinnesses one after another (I lost count) and jumping to the ceiling and singing along to the chorus of "The Obituaries".
At the Buena Vista Social Club concert in Rome, it was the wrinkled old lady of 90 (no less) who smoked the most seductive cigarette I have ever seen and who danced with such beautiful abandon to "De Camino a La Vereda".
Etc.
Which brings me to this. There was but a single concert in my life where that one person did not make an appearance. It happened in Siena a few years ago where three girls stopped me in the middle of a fairly busy street. They did that without saying a word. They were playing instrumental music on their violins and at that moment they were already besieged by a silent crowd of locals and tourists. Or maybe they were ghosts. Maybe there was no one else there in the street and in fact I was alone listening to them play a dozen classics in that intimate, subdued, totally magical way. I was alone. Or was I.
