#112
diablo74 wrote:
I had a ticket to see Therapy? in Narberth on Friday. Plenty of my mates said they were going as well but no one wanted to organise a bus from Llanelli and I’m fed up with doing that sort of thing so I tried looking for a lift. A mate of mine said he was driving down and staying with someone he knew so I decided to tag along with him. That didn’t work though as it turns out that his mate lived in Milford Haven, miles away from Narberth and they were getting a minibus from Milford to the gig and there wasn’t room for me.
I had a look at the train timetables but as Narberth is only a small place out in the wilds, the trainsÂ’ times were odd. The train would have taken an hour, from Milford or from home, to get to the gig but the trains coming back either left at 10pm and took an hour or left at 11:30pm and took seven hours, presumably it went via Cork. In the end I decided to drive, as the car is a 2-seater I had to decide which one of my mates would enjoy the gig most and try to avoid my other mates. I actually asked a mate who is a big fan of Therapy? instead of asking a hot chick.
We drove down on Friday afternoon. It’s the first time I’d taken my car on a proper run like that. Fair play, it’s fast as fuck, it could do 70mph in third, no problems and I got it up to 100mph almost without noticing. I could see the fuel gauge going down though so I didn’t experiment too much. The journey there wasn’t great as the caravaners were heading west for the bank holiday. We got to the venue quite early for my mate to buy a ticket and went to the pub next door, the Angel.
We still weren’t convinced that Therapy? were playing a small town like that and as the pub next door to the venue was full of holidaymakers not rockers we still weren’t sure. I finished my orange juice (me, drinking orange juice on a Friday night before a gig?!) and decided to try another pub. As we left the first pub, a coach was dropping off a load of greasy kids in Ramones t-shirts outside so we knew there was definitely a gig on. We followed them to their pub, The Eagle, where I ordered a green J2O in a glass so that the rock kids thought I was drinking a cocktail, I didn’t want to give them the wrong impression. Next thing, Therapy? walked into the pub so we were finally convinced that they were playing there and it wasn’t a wind up.
We then headed off to the venue to watch the support acts. The venue was far bigger than I expected. I bumped into a few mates from back home, one lot knew the first band and the other lot knew the second band but they couldn’t get back stage for gossip. I did start whinging during One Room Down, sorry boys, I didn’t realise that I was getting too old to go to proper gigs. My feet were hurting, the band was too loud and I was getting pissed off with my mates telling me to go down the front of the hall for a dance, all I wanted was a quiet sit down. I’m going to have to start buying seated tickets for Phil Collins and UB40 gigs. So I wasn’t too happy when another support act came on. They were good though. They sounded like a Californian skateboarding punk band when they were playing but the singer sounded like a member of the royal family during the between song banter. Interesting stuff though.
By the time Therapy? were on I was getting tired so I bought myself a bitter shandy so I could feel like a big man. Last time I saw Therapy, I didn’t have to first put my glasses on and have a bit of a stetch. Cracking gig, the band really looked as if they were enjoying themselves. They tried speaking a bit of Welsh, chatted to the crowd and generally got everyone going. They played quite a lot of their old stuff, which I was happy about as the lanlord of my local in Llanelli had just put Troublegum on the jukebox. It was well worth the journey. I would have bought a t-shirt if they had one with Narberth listed on the tour dates. The trip back wasn’t too clever though, the fog had come down and I thought we were going to get trapped in deepest darkest west Wales.
Posted on Tue, 30 May 2006 at 15:04
