Teenage boy sees "the greats"

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Fascinating article:

Teenage kicks

Do the heroes of 60s and 70s rock and pop have anything to offer the young? Or are they just surfing a wave of nostalgia? We sent Sam Wetherell, 17, along to their gigs to tell us (after we told him who Kraftwerk were and what Paul McCartney looks like)

Friday June 25, 2004
The Guardian


Brian Wilson: back out on tour

Our taxi weaves its way though the Spanish town of Gijon, ferrying us to the opening night of Paul McCartney's 2004 European tour. Outside, the sky is grey and overcast, the weather humid. Inside the cab, however, a terrible frostiness has descended. It began when we passed an advert for tonight's show. "So is that what Paul McCartney looks like, then?" I asked, pointing to the vast poster of a jowly middle-aged man brandishing a guitar. This perfectly innocent question did not receive the response I expected. My companion, Guardian rock critic Alexis Petridis, frowned, repeated it very slowly as if he thought I was joking, then nodded. Since then, Alexis's entire conversation has consisted of three words: "Jesus", "Christ" and "almighty". Even the taxi driver, who as far as I knew could not speak a word of English, seems to be scowling at me in his rear view mirror.

It all seems a bit unfair: how am I supposed to know what Paul McCartney looks like? I'm 17 years old. The last time he had a top ten hit, in 1987, I was a little busy, being born. I have admired my dad's Led Zeppelin albums from a safe distance, and I once went through a phase of listening to his copy of the Clash's London Calling, but I have never really been a fan of "old" music. Instead, like thousands of other teenagers, I have been hungrily consuming Muse albums since the turn of the millennium, but I also listen to Faithless and Massive Attack, and break up the monotony of A-levels by visiting Milton Keynes' beer-soaked punk and ska clubs to see local bands. I had a brief nu-metal phase at 14, but now I hide my pile of dusty Slipknot CDs underneath a pile of GCSE textbooks in my cupboard: at my school at least, nu-metal is now a genre exclusively for the under-12s.

I think my music taste has always been eclectic, but, until three months ago, the closest I had ever come listening to a Beach Boys album was when I wrestled Pet Sounds from the arms of a tipsy middle-aged woman at a New Year's Eve party in 2001. I thought that Kraftwerk was a low budget German airline and that Abbey Road was John Leslie's ex-girlfriend.

This apparently makes me the ideal candidate for a socio-cultural experiment the Guardian are out to conduct. At the moment the heroes of classic 60s and 70s rock and pop music are all out on tour again: Brian Wilson, the Who, Paul McCartney. They are selling tickets by the caravan-load, but no one seems certain whether they have something genuine to offer musically, or are merely surfing a tidal wave of nostalgia and passionate, almost religious, hype. My role is to infiltrate their shows and judge them on music alone. I can't be nostalgic for something I've never experienced, and while I am vaguely aware of 60s music, I'm not informed enough to know the myths and legends that surround these artists.

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Which is how I ended up pacing up and down in a large empty hotel room in Birmingham, waiting to see Brian Wilson at the Symphony Hall, and wondering if the whole thing was some twisted and fantastically expensive joke. The Guardian have installed me in a room without any working electric lights. This, I felt, was taking the "back to the old days" theme a little too far. Although it's not on my A-level history syllabus, I was fairly confident they had electricity in the 60s. I sat in almost complete darkness, until Alexis rang. The light from the phone lit up the whole room. He explained that I should insert my key card in the light switch to turn them on, but other than that wasn't giving much away: "Brian should be . . . interesting, but I can't tell you any more."

I ended up sitting on my own, near the front of the stage, notebook in lap while the fans around me united behind their love of Brian Wilson. Some of them seemed to have been following him around the world ("Oh! You were at the Vladivostok concert as well! Wasn't he great?"). They sat in thin-lipped, awe-struck silence while he played, then, without fail, erupted into a standing ovation at the end of every song.

I followed suit, but didn't really know why. It was like classical music - I could kind of appreciate it, without necessarily enjoying it. It sounded nothing at all like the music that is around today, and for that matter the music I grew up with. Surfin' USA and Barbara Ann were inoffensively catchy, but the second half, which Alexis informed me were songs from an album called Smile, seemed pretentious and simple to the point of being childish. There was a boring a cappella section. I clearly wasn't the only one that felt this way: up in the balcony I could see a family of four. The mother, the father and the older sister had their arms outstretched and their eyes closed. But the youngest son, who looked about 11, was sitting on his seat, arms folded, evidently trying his best to pretend he was anywhere other than in the presence of Brian Wilson.

I knew how he felt, and after the gig I was ready to mention this to Alexis. He, however, seemed to have undergone a kind of religious experience during the concert. He looked a bit red-eyed, and before I could say anything, he launched into a monologue about Wilson that began a few metres outside the Symphony Hall and showed no sign of ending even after the hotel bar had closed. Smile, I learned, was a lost masterpiece, a product of Wilson's tragic LSD-fuelled genius. He made numerous threatening references to someone called Mike Love, who I soon learned was both the Beach Boys' lead singer and "the biggest wanker in the history of music". As far as I could gather, he was the biggest wanker in the history of music because he shared my views about Smile. I went to bed, exhausted from the effort of biting my tongue.

A few days later, the Guardian called me on my mobile during a school lunch break, telling me to hightail it back to Birmingham to see Diana Ross. The friends I was with were suitably impressed, because it meant I would miss a politics mock exam. They didn't seem bothered about Diana Ross.

The audience at the concert were visibly saner than Brian Wilson's fans. The central stage was surrounded by legions of middle-aged couples, gay men and youngish-looking student types with anoraks and glasses. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised.

Years of half-hearing fragments of songs like Baby Love in shopping centres and on adverts meant that the music was instantly familiar. She interacted with the audience, which was an improvement on Brian Wilson, who spent most of his time fixing his fans with a worrying reptilian stare. At one point she walked calmly out and started not just greeting, but actually hugging them. She was so thin I worried that her body might well crumble into dust the moment someone touched her. The stewards had to hold back those with the greyest anoraks and the squarest glasses from throwing themselves at her feet. Alexis was unimpressed. "It's like a bloody royal walkabout," he said. "I'm going to the bar."

Twenty-four hours later we went to see Kraftwerk at London's Royal Festival Hall. The time between the two was spent losing my railcard, writing two English essays and meeting Tony Blair, who had paid a brief visit to my school. I had only dropped in to assure everyone that I hadn't undergone a life-changing experience in the presence of Brian Wilson and would soon be leaving school in order to play the maracas in the Polyphonic Spree.

Kraftwerk was the only act in the line-up that I had never heard of. I imagined them to be a slightly experimental yet middle-of-the-road German rock band, consisting of blondish men in their late 40s singing in hopelessly falsetto voices. Alexis bumped into another rock critic he knew before the gig started, who assured me that Kraftwerk were in fact "German folk music". Alexis thought this was very witty, which I took to mean that it wasn't true.

Meanwhile, I noticed there were about 10 leathery men in the crowd for every one woman. Even when the four eventually appeared on stage, some part of me still assumed that this was some crazy experimental deviation, and that they were about to wheel in a sparkling drum kit and some glittery guitars. But they didn't, and they were brilliant. Watching them stand, poker-faced, swaying almost undetectably from side to side, while singing, "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" instilled a kind of hypnotic glee in me. Some of the songs were comedic masterpieces. Tour de France sampled the heavy breathing of cyclists, and was performed in front of a cinematic back-drop of white Aryan legs pumping furiously at pedals. The combination of homoeroticism with the band's black suits and stern demeanour made the gig feel like a German Funeral Directors' Union annual Christmas party, which was getting slightly out of control. For once, Alexis and I seemed to agree that a gig was fantastic.

One revision-packed month later, I arrived at the Royal Albert Hall to see the Who. I was hopelessly early, the show was a benefit gig for the Teenage Cancer Trust and after a few minutes of conversation with an ingratiating steward it became painfully clear that she thought I was a patient. Eventually, two middle-aged blokes emerged on stage under biblical spotlighting. Their first song, Who Are You?, was a primitive howl. The balder of the two (who had made the interesting decision to wear wraparound sunglasses) treated his guitar like a musical punch-bag, while the singer bounded around the stage, stopping occasionally to take a sip from a cup of tea. I had never knowingly heard a song by the Who until that moment, and it completely blew me away. It was heart-wrenching, belligerent rock music, authoritative and powerful, but at times almost paradoxically tender. I began to empathise with the droves of middle-aged fathers and (to a lesser extent) mothers, who put on the My Generation album for their children and order them to appreciate it. "Listen to that class, son!" By the final guitar solo, a bald fortysomething man a few rows in front of me was in floods of tears, and a few rows behind a be-dreadlocked 20 year old in a singlet had his eyes closed and his head raised to the ceiling, conducting his own silent prayer for another encore.

It never came, but my Who experience at least was far from over. The next day, the Guardian had arranged to have my photo taken with the singer, Roger Daltrey. Outside the dressing room there was time for more confusion over whether or not I had cancer, which did nothing to make me feel any less awkward about meeting a rock legend who I wouldn't have recognised in the street the day before. As it turned out, he was charming. He agreed with me about the Beach Boys' Smile and gave me a free ticket for that night's charity show, featuring the Stereophonics ("Get this boy a ticket now!"). When I told him, even Alexis seemed impressed, at least until I got to the bit about the Stereophonics ticket, which he said sounded more like a punishment than a present. I was beginning to wonder if the Guardian's rock critic knew anything about music at all - the concert was brilliant.

Another month passed between the Who and Paul McCartney in Spain, the perfect amount of time to perfect my nonchalance. "Oh yeah," I'd say to friends and teachers, "the Guardian are sending me off to Spain next week to see Paul McCartney." My friends would snort with laughter. "One man sitting on a stool playing an acoustic guitar for three hours!" they said. "Have fun with that."

By the time we reached the football stadium Alexis's mood had recovered somewhat from the incident in the taxi, and I began to feel some of the infectious excitement sweeping the arena. While waiting for McCartney to come on, I learned the Spanish for "hot dog" (bocadillo) and noted that we were apparently the only people in the stadium who weren't eating sunflower seeds.

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Sir Paul finally arrived on stage at the rebellious hour of 11. The first few Beatles songs he played reminded me of the problem I had with the Beatles stuff I'd already heard. They sound like a middle-of-the-road American/English rock band. As I seemed to be the only one that wasn't in floods of tears during The Long and Winding Road, I couldn't help but think of all the people who would donate their kidney to be in my seat, and, not for the first time on this project, felt like a bit of waste of space. The feeling intensified when Paul dismissed his band and whipped out an acoustic guitar. One-man-and-his-acoustic-guitar music always sounds the same to me, whether it's played by Paul McCartney, or by a drunken uncle at three o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day. I went for a bocadillo.

But then things got much better. He launched into a string of amazing songs, beginning with Back in the USSR, and ending with Helter Skelter. He conducted mass sing-alongs to Hey Jude and Yellow Submarine. It was 1.30 in the morning by the time The End drew to a close and Paul walked off, holding his acoustic guitar aloft in a gesture of defiance. I couldn't be entirely sure what he was being defiant about but I was feeling rather defiant myself. I had learned many things on my Big Musical Adventure. Not only could I now pick out both Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney from a 60s music identity parade, but I also now "own" (and by that I mean illegally downloaded) a copy of both Revolver and Abbey Road. I know that dance music was invented by men who look like German supermarket managers, and that, regardless of whether or not he is actually the Biggest Wanker in Rock Music, Mike Love should keep at least 100 miles away from Alexis Petridis at all times for his own personal safety.

But my world view hasn't really changed. I still think that music from the 60s and 70s sounds like a less evolved, rather slapdash version of the music made today, like the first draught of an essay done at three in the morning. And although I enjoyed the Who, Kraftwerk and Diana Ross live, listening to any of their albums has since proved a rather muted experience. But music is always hard to appreciate the first time you hear it, and I would happily revisit any of the gigs and wouldn't turn down a two-week trip to the 60s either, if, of course, Brian Wilson was in a different hemisphere. And as for next New Year's Eve, will I continue to sabotage any middle-aged attempts to play Pet Sounds? The answer, I'm afraid, is yes. But I might be tempted to suggest some Kraftwerk instead.