Live music is one of the big joys of life and we love a good gig here at The Women’s Room. We first started going to see groups in pubs and clubs as teens and have progressed from sticky floors and smoky dives to proper seats and sometimes we even have house concerts at home (we’ve done it twice) where we hold concerts in the kitchen (huge amounts of fun and not as expensive as you’d think).
As we’ve got older we prefer going to concerts where seating is an option as we get a bit weary standing the whole time and also it really makes us cross if we have paid good money to see an artist and we’re stuck standing behind the really tall guy. We also don’t like giant size venues because we can’t see the artist (we hate Wembley for this reason) and it seems a bit of a con to watch the band perform on a giant size screen, we can do that at home. We hate people chatting in the audence (we’ve come to LISTEN TO MUSIC) and we love it if we get to go home before 10.00pm as that means we’re tucked up in bed before 11.00pm.
But what makes us really mad is a grumpy artist, particularly one that is old enough to know better. A young Amy Winehouse making mistakes at 20 is not the same as veteran country rock singer Lucinda Williams having a bit of a strop at Shepherds Bush Empire on Monday night just because she was ‘nervous’. Lucinda is a geat singer, she’s won Grammys, she’s friends with Bruce Springstein (last time we saw her he joined her for the encore) and she’s been around a long time. On Monday night she told us (the audience) off a number of times for taking her photo and holding up our mobile phones while she was singing,
She acted like a grumpy old woman throughout most of the show and spent a good deal of the evening with her back to her fans, Now we we can all be grumpy old women at times, it seems to be something that happens to us as we get older (we’re always having grumpy rants here at TWR as you will know), but there’s a time and a place and at 56 years old, with decades of concerts behind her she knows the difference between good manners and bad behaviour. Even though the music was good, our evening was tainted by her middle-age grump. get over it Lucinda! And by the way, we prefer you with blonde hair.
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