I'm the sort of person who counts things. A while ago I counted my working life in days. More recently I sat down and reconstructed every gig I could remember going to, 137 of them since 1983. I didn't expect a spreadsheet of concerts to tell me the story of my life, but the shape of it does.
September 2026 : about 6 min read - Part of the FreeBefore65 Personal Journey.
The list starts with prog-rock mainstays Pallas at Sheffield Polytechnic in November 1983, when I was fifteen. It ends, for now, with the Sisters of Mercy at Rock City a few nights ago. In between are 137 rows, and once they were all in front of me the pattern was hard to miss, because it maps almost exactly onto the rest of my life.
The early years are a flood. Through the late eighties and into the nineties I was out constantly, eighteen gigs in 1989 alone; the pre-work, University years. Following bands around the country, sleeping in cars or Shopping Centre doorways. The names repeat in a way that tells you everything about me: New Model Army nineteen times, The Mission fourteen, Fields of the Nephilim ten. A goth and post-punk thread I picked up as a teenager and never really put down. A lot of those nights were with my best mate from school, my gig-buddy for the best part of two decades, Leeds mostly, and a scattering of festivals. At eighteen you don't need much persuading to go, but it helped that there were two of us, each egging the other on. And the list undercounts that period rather than over, because there are university gigs I went to and can't now reconstruct, tickets I didn't keep, nights I know happened but can't date. So the peak was probably higher than the spreadsheet admits.
Then it thins out, and this is the part that made me sit back. The gigs don't gradually taper. They fall away, and they stay away for the best part of two decades.
Some of that was a choice. The family years were a deliberate step back, and I don't regret making it. Some of it was circumstance. The music was mine rather than something shared at home, so going meant going alone, which quietly raises the bar on a weeknight. It didn't help that my gig-buddy had moved down to Cornwall by then, ten years ago now, so the person who'd once have talked me into it was three hundred miles away. Nobody left to say come on, we're going. And the job did the rest. Working away for long stints during my career made midweek shows all but impossible, and left me with no appetite for the ones I could have made.
The detail that stings, looking at it now, is that I didn't just stop going. I'd buy tickets and not go. Various bands, all bought and all missed, because after the commute and the nights away I didn't have it in me to stand in a room until eleven. I used to call it losing my gig-mojo, as if it were a mood that had drifted off on its own. It wasn't. It was the job taking the energy for the things I loved, and me handing it over, and paying for the privilege of not turning up. Those unused tickets were a warning I didn't read for years. Money spent on evidence that the work was costing me things I couldn't get back, sitting unlooked-at in a drawer.
The first flicker of it coming back, now I think about it, was my own leaving do. I talked a group from the office into coming to Trillians in Newcastle, a heavy rock bar, to watch some live bands. A throwback to my teenage music tastes, but it was the first time in years I'd built an evening around live music and actually turned up. I forgot to put it on the spreadsheet, which probably tells you how far I'd drifted from thinking of myself as someone who did this.
And now the list has started moving again. A couple of gigs on it already this year, and three more booked before Christmas, The Mission in London, New Model Army back at Rock City in December, another in Leeds next month. The Mission one is with my old gig-buddy, forty years on from the first time we stood in a crowd together, which is not nothing. A few nights ago it was the Sisters of Mercy, in the same darkly lit, dry-ice filled room I used to haunt on Saturday nights before I moved North almost three decades ago. The mojo didn't come back because I decided it should. It came back because the thing that was draining it has gone. Take away the commute and the tiredness and the nights away from home, and it turns out the appetite was never lost. It was just buried under all of that.
I don't want to make the spreadsheet carry more than it can. It's a hobby log, reconstructed partly from memory, as precise as my collection of tickets can make it. But the arc is real, and it caught something I hadn't gone looking for when I started filling in the cells. The flood, the long dry middle, the return. It's the clearest picture I have of what a working life quietly takes, and what stopping gives back.
The list isn't finished. There are three more gigs in the diary before the year's out, dates set and tickets bought. For years a bought ticket was no guarantee I'd be there. These ones I will be.
Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.
Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk. He is not a financial adviser. All content reflects his own experience and research and should be taken as a starting point for your own thinking, not as professional advice.
Add comment
Comments