The five best gigs I’ve ever seen

I love live music. I never tire of going to concerts. I must have seen thousands of bands and singers performing in everything from cramped pubs and clubs to sprawling festivals and enormous stadiums. There is something about being absorbed into a world of sound as it unfolds that never fails to quicken my blood.

U2 and Oasis, Oakland Coliseum, 1997

You never forget your first time. For me it was early 1977, in the gymnasium of Mount Temple School in Dublin, when a gig by some of my classmates blew my teenage brain. The band was U2, and the rest is pop history.

How extraordinary is that? My first ever gig was the first ever gig by a bunch of schoolboys who went on to become one of the greatest bands the world has ever seen. I have followed U2 ever since, enjoying a front row seat for their development into an art rock behemoth.

Early in my career as The Telegraph’s music critic, I was invited to San Francisco to see U2’s PopMart Tour at Oakland Coliseum. They were being supported by a young British band called Oasis. Like almost everyone else in the UK, I was a huge Oasis fan. I loved the way they had brought passion and songcraft back into rock music. I had been at Knebworth in 1996 with my brother, linking arms and singing “You and I, we’re gonna live forever.”

The USA was less besotted, but the Gallagher brothers have never wanted for self-belief. It was their first gig in 10 months, and they blasted through a no-nonsense set. Liam’s singing was perfectly balanced between passion and nonchalance, while Noel’s incendiary lead guitar cut through the crowd’s indifference, bringing people to their feet for a climactic, cataclysmic Champagne Supernova. It was glorious.

Then U2 took the stage, to deliver one of the greatest shows I have ever seen. PopMart has a bad reputation, because it was a bit undercooked when it opened in Las Vegas in April to sceptical reviews. Twenty shows down the road, it had turned into a sci-fi gospel rock spectacular, overwhelming on every conceivable level: intellectual, emotional, visual and musical.

I was standing next to Liam at the mixing desk, and he was bug-eyed with amazement. “This is the first time I’ve seen U2,” he declared with his distinctive expressiveness. “Now I understand! It’s phwoarghghghgh! F—-in’ mad, man. Mad!”

Spiritualized, World Trade Center, New York, 1998

In 1998, I rode a high-speed lift to the top of the Twin Towers to see British psychedelic shoe-gazers Spiritualized. They were touring their extraordinary album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space and would do a grander performance the next night at the RKO Theatre, binding together Velvet Underground sleaze with Krautrock propulsion, space-age gospel choruses and tender melodies with darkly profound lyrics.

The World Trade Center was more of a guerilla gig, with the six-piece band in the corner of a bar, clouds drifting across the giant windows behind them, fulfilling frontman Jason Pierce’s ambitions to play “the highest shows on earth.”

It was spookily intense, yet not everyone was impressed. A scattering of Twin Towers regulars dressed in the tailored suits and designer dresses were clearly irritated by this intrusion on their cocktail hour. One couple belligerently installed themselves at a table next to the speakers, where they sipped drinks and flipped through newspapers with bored expressions, while one of the most exceptional live bands of the decade performed a free set behind their backs.

Amy Winehouse, Pizza Express Jazz Club, London, 2004

One of the privileges of this job is being introduced to rising artists before the world has caught on to their talents. I saw Amy Winehouse a few times over her short, brilliant, tragic career, and, honestly, she could blow hot and cold live. But I knew how great she was, because in March of 2004 I had been invited to watch her play in the tiny basement jazz club of the Pizza Express restaurant in Soho, London.

Her whole family was there for the occasion, and I sat at a table sharing pizza and red wine with her jazz-loving grandmother and taxi-driving dad Mitch (who got up and joined Amy for a Frank Sinatra duet). It was the best of Amy, relaxed and chatty, really enjoying performing.

She was just 20, promoting her debut album Frank. The freedom of her singing was electrifying, an earthy vibrancy conjuring up the ghosts of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, with notes fluttering and rippling all over the place when she would take off over a stew of urban soul, jazz and pop.

Sadly, the pressures of fame eroded her confidence on-stage. When I saw her again at the Jazz Cafe later the same year, she had become much more awkward, even as her songcraft was blossoming. The tragic decline of Amy before her death aged 27 in 2011 was one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed. But I still have vivid memories of that early encounter.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Hyde Park, London, 2012

You could run out of superlatives writing about Bruce Springsteen. He is the greatest live performer of our times, especially when marshalled with the incredible E Street Band. It is something about the power, generosity, range and intimacy of his performances, while his glorious songs full of meaning and purpose advocate for what is right during troubled times.

I have reviewed him a lot over the decades, and the challenge is always to convey what makes the experience exceptional. Because every Springsteen gig feels like the best show he has ever given. One of my peak Boss experiences was to see Paul McCartney join him for the first time, onstage at Hyde Park in London in 2012. I have loved the Beatles since I was a boy, and every time I see Macca in the flesh, I’m a bit pinch-myself incredulous.

Honestly, when McCartney arrived at the climax of a three-and-a-half hour set to storm through I Saw Her Standing There, Springsteen looked the same way. “I’ve waited 50 years for this,” he beamed. It was the Beatles meets the Boss, and then, as two of the world’s most legendary rock stars ripped into a historic, glorious, celebratory romp through Twist and Shout, some joyless jobsworth from Live Nation, promoters of the concert, turned the PA off. Apparently, the show had extended beyond its curfew. It’s the first time I have heard a fade out at a concert.

Patti Smith, Royal Albert Hall, London, 2021

I’m really an old punk. That was my teenage baptism of rock-and-roll fire, a few thrilling years at the end of the 1970s in which I saw the Ramones, the Clash, the Stranglers, the Jam, Buzzcocks, Blondie, the Boomtown Rats, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, the Pretenders, the Fall and Patti Smith.

I didn’t quite get Patti at first, but she burned through to my soul over the years. She is one of those exceptional artists who seeks transcendence for herself and her audience through the music, with shamanic-like power. Her show at the magnificent Royal Albert Hall after the frozen years of Covid-19 was something to behold.

Everyone in the room had experienced loss – of freedom, of live music, maybe even of loved ones, and Patti took it on herself to express that. Her set blended incantatory poetry, tender meditations on grief and pummelling garage rock of such uplifting force it had the whole of the audience on their feet for a final rip-roaring run through Land, Gloria, People Have the Power and Not Fade Away. Crouching, kneeling, spinning, dancing, howling, laughing, the 74-year-old Smith was prepared to shed her own senior citizen dignity to connect with the crowd.

I found myself wiping tears from my eyes at a gig that felt like a shedding of the past and celebratory ritual of return. “Raise your hands!” Smith called out above the noise. “Raise your blood that has been stagnant for the past 18 months. We are free! We are free! We are f——- alive!”

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