FOALS+GLASGOW=CARNAGE.
This gig is by far the BEST gig I have ever been to, and I get to keep the cuts and bruises as a brutal memento.
Not to mention a puncture mark from a stud earring I plucked out of my shoulder from some gig goer after a collapsing crowd buckles from the weight of itself, “…forget the horror here, leave it all down here…”. I thought this can’t be the last words I hear on the floor of the Carling Academy before I suffocate under the pressure of the sweaty bodies on top of me and pass away. I can’t die I haven’t even seen the rest of True Blood, or tried lobster. This is so typical. No, I want total life forever!! (see what I just did there- yeah you knowz it).
I feel hands grab onto my arm and back as I’m dragged to me feet by an audience member (by the way whomever/wherever my rescuer is, thank you for saving me from a trip to the hospital) but only to be standing in the middle of a mosh pit is an ‘out of the frying pan and in to the fire’ situation. I’m catapulted into charging bodies, where it’s ‘do or die’. At this point I have unintentionally migrated to the middle of the crowd when originally I was at the front looking right into the eyes of Yannis! How have I let this happen. I am cut off from my party and I am in limbo. I have no control over my own fate. Even my phone suffers a battering and changes its settings to Portuguese.
The Foals and their noise are the catalyst for this colourful catastrophe. All the bodies in the room take leave of their senses and are like a sea of flesh making rib cracking waves. The momentum rocks back and forth, and a cloud of condensation rises from us. The residue makes all the faces in the crowd glow as the jump and climb over one another.
Susan Berry finds me again nearer the bar where we take a breather, she exclaims,”I’ve just been hit in the head! Am I bleeding? A pint or an elbow just got me”. I show her my war wounds also, and we get right back in again. Susan finds a Bruce Lee lookalike to keep her company while I try my best to capture some evidence of this love drunk ritual on camera.
I never knew that this band could conjure up such a fury of a crowd. I have found a new respect for Foals. Their latest album is a force of nature. With sultry voices and the tribal drums, unearthly echoes and quaking synthesizers, and in this crowd- the noise will either make you or break you.
‘Miami’ is the last song I can stay for before I have to run for the train, my favourite of theirs. The beginning reminds me of a Prince melody. It’s so 90’s R’n’B with the piano and the drums intro…”I promised you an ocean of Mother and Pearl, gold and indigo, cut through the waves, I watch you swim away, I’ll never love you more than today…”. How could anyone not fall in love with that?!
All of Foals’ songs blend into one continuous movement and submerge the crowd with intoxicating vigorous romanticism. ‘Blue Blood’ was the first tune to be blasted to the glorious mass of sweat drenched Foal lovers, and that’s all I can remember folks. The rest was a fight for survival, and I’d do it all over again.