When it comes to concerts, cinemas or, really, any situation in which you have to be in a room with a number of people you’d happily wipe off the face of the earth if it meant you could have the place to yourself, you’re either a shoosher or you’re not. There are no grey areas: you either hone in on the dude telling his mate about the hella sick subwoofer he just installed in his Commodore and attempt to silence it with an impersonation of Pete Doherty taking his first slash after a big night out, or you don’t. There might be many reasons why you don’t: you might prefer to let chaos reign – let people speak when they want to and to hell with the consequences – or, as many are, you might be too scared to have actual confrontations with people and instead prefer to quietly will them to die of syphilis them and curse under your breath about the lack of human decency. Either way, not a word or a ‘shoosh’ is ever exiting your mouth.
Until recently, I haven’t been a shoosher. Depending on the circumstance, I’m either a staunch advocate of noise or worried about incurring the wrath of someone who was brought up thinking scratching and vomiting are reasonable ways to resolve arguments, which isn’t as crazy as it sounds if you take a look around the next time you’re at Hoyts or the Big Day Out.
A trip to a small town to see a ‘vintage’ act the other weekend, however, changed all that. It was a pilgrimage organised by a group of friends who’d grown up listening to said ‘vintage’ act through their teen years. Admittedly, I hadn’t, and went along willing to be introduced to their back catalogue for the first time in person and take in the scenery of a rural venue, sip a couple Coopers Sparkings and treat the whole thing as an ethnographical experience I could later relay to those back home with some mild curiosity about what the outside of an inner city suburb looks like.
It took us nearly two hours to get there and, when we finally settled into the old hall and the ‘vintage’ act began, it soon became apparent that, a) we were the youngest there by about 30 years, which gave me less hope that we’d witness a good old-fashioned country chair-over-the-head brawl, and b) there was a group of men and women over by the bar who were smashed and weren’t going to stop loudly slurring at each other over the top of the acoustic performance any time soon, which reinstated my hope.
But instead of chairs, it was an unusually high level of passive aggression that was thrown around. The dirty looks and audible scoffs began from all corners of the room in the direction of the slurrers, and the act onstage (who was quite possibly ready for bed anyway) made a cranky though very general comment between songs about needing a certain level of quietness to concentrate.
But the slurring continued through the set, during which my friends, equally annoyed but trying to let it go, gave each other the looks of recognition that can only be elicited by shared songs from years ago, the soundtrack to some teenaged road trip or school camp or acid-laced orgy. The nodding heads, taps on the arm and smiling eyes.
It was then that the ungodly sound escaped my lips, unintentional, like the drunken, oblivious unzipping of Pete Doherty’s fly – “Shhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The slurrers eventually got the hint from the crowd and left, and as we exited the venue we came across them standing around outside, another four or five pints down, slurring more wildly than before. “At leasht we can make as much noish out here without getting’ shooshed!” one of them gargled.
Part of me felt like a traitor; a Judas to all those who believe that uncivilised rackets are the saviour of our all-too-regulated souls. Now that I’d crossed the line, could I ever blurrily blag over the top of a band without some level of guilt?
I decided I must repent immediately. So I got drunk, made lots of noise and put my deviant behaviour down to the fact that quaint trips to the country to see ‘vintage’ acts are against the natural order of the planet.
From October 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment