Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Beware the ghosts that may haunt those comeback gigs
Something Happens during a recent gig in Mitchelstown. Picture: Glen Bollard
A warning from history. I’m not saying don’t go back to your usual gig-going habits. I’m just saying be prepared. In that visceral moment when you are back, amongst friends, singing your favourite song, enjoying your favourite band, waving your hands in the air, etc… you will be visited by three ghosts.
The first of mine arrived at our gig at the Set Theatre at Langton’s in Kilkenny. Didn’t see him on the guest list. Arrived unannounced. Made his way to the dressing room and was there for me after the gig.
“Hello Tom,” he said, “You didn’t think all this [waving one hand in the air] was over? Did you?”
And it had been going so well. The emotional release you will experience at your first post-Covid live show is hard to describe. It’s like getting really good Leaving results, a new job, having a child and winning a holiday all at once. You will talk too much, enthuse too much and savour every moment like they are the first you have ever known.
But with each high, it seems, a low and after the emotional release of the first gig back that might be quite a big one. Mine started to arrive while I was actually on stage. I started to remember being in Langton’s 14 years ago, at a Christening party for my first born. “Happy times,” I thought.
But between leaving the stage and arriving at the dressing room – a two-minute journey- those thoughts and less happy ones from the last 18 months contrived to hit me like a bus.
“Christ,” I said, sitting beside my ghostly friend, “we are tiny mortal beings being hurled through space.”
“Now you have it, Tom,” he said, “and while I have you.”
The ghost of Covid Past laid out his memories: Waking up to find the schools closed, Leo on TV, Leo on TV again, footage of grim scenes from an Italian nursing home, washing the groceries, googling ‘underlying condition’, googling ‘2KM limit’, watching Tiger King.
Then there was the ‘almost enjoyable’ stage. Getting to watch all of Ozark, Modern Family, The American Office. Getting to listen to more Audible books and podcasts than you ever dreamed possible. Memorising every detail within a 2km radius of your home.
But the grim was never far from the surface: Unreal funerals, the girl that was christened in Langton’s crying and telling me she never sees her friends, breaking curfew to bring food to Kilkenny and sit ten feet away from Audrey’s mum while she wasn’t allowed touch any of us.
“You’re a barrel of laughs,” I told my dressing room friend.
“You don’t need to be a billionaire to go into space,’ he replied, “We are in space all the time!”
“Let yourself out,” I told him, “I have friends expecting me.”
The Ghost of Covid Present joined me the next day for a swim in the sea. Since Covid this practice has become known as 'wild swimming', further proof that Covid improves nothing it touches. But regardless of what it’s called there is nothing like jumping into the sea to remind you that you are still, 100% alive.
I await the Ghost of Covid Future. When he arrives I am hopeful that he will find me at the kind of ‘hooley’ my mum’s sisters used to have when we were growing up. She was the eldest of five girls and they would gather to sing, laugh and tell stories as often as they could.
A ‘hooley’ where a joyous, spirited celebration of life and survival. Their mum had died when my mum was only 13. She had taken over running the house. Their dad worked or drank, depending on the time of day, leaving her to cook, clean and raise four girls all under 11. And all that during World War Two.
“Look at us,” one of them, my aunt Annie, said to me once, showing me photos, “we were always laughing.” And so shall we. But trust me, there is something in that re-acquaintance with music and its well of emotion, that may bring all you have seen, all you have missed, all that you have lived through, once more, very vividly, to mind.
Something about being in the midst of all that joyous humanity might get to you. And if it does you know the drill: Wave those hands in the air like you just don’t … exactly.
