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‘Every song was crisp and fully formed’

Talking Heads, the Rock Garden, London, 13 May 1977

Talking Heads broke off from a European tour supporting Ramones in 1977 to play two shows at the Rock Garden, a small basement club on the Covent Garden Piazza, now the site of an Apple Store. After an apprenticeship as a three-piece (David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz), the band had recently added a fourth member, Jerry Harrison, and were close to completing work on their debut album.

In London, every song was crisp and fully formed, with Psycho Killer as the set’s devastating climax. The audience included Brian Eno, who invited them to his flat the next day for a meeting that would lead to collaborations on More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light and (as a Byrne/Eno project) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: a series of albums that changed music. Richard Williams

The sun shone out of their behinds

The Smiths, The Refectory, University of Leeds, 29 February 1984

I remember what I wore: a 1950s charity shop raincoat, traditional black slacks and a “grandad” shirt from a vintage shop, dyed brown in a pan in our kitchen. This was topped off with an atrocious attempt at a quiff. So many of us scrambled to adopt the Smiths’s restyled retro chic because we wanted to be in their gang.

In the nine months since their first single, Hand in Glove, they’d swept through John Peel/NME culture and into the Top 20. That night, stage right, Johnny Marr resembled a prettier Keith Richards as cascading riffs tumbled out of him. Morrissey, wearing a big girl’s blouse, whipped the stage with the microphone lead to emphasise every “crack on the head!” during the then-unreleased Barbarism Begins at Home. They were progressing so fast that even while touring the debut album, they played a song intended for the follow-up. Dave Simpson

Shambolically appealing

Nirvana, London Astoria, 3 December 1989

In later years, I liked to tell people that I was one of the first people in Britain to buy Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach. True enough – my copy was on white vinyl, part of the initial batch of 300 copies – but I tactfully left out the fact that I thought it was … all right. I didn’t dislike it: I recognised that About a Girl was fantastic. But I didn’t love it the way I loved their labelmates Mudhoney’s debut, Superfuzz Bigmuff.

Likewise their show at London’s Astoria, supporting Mudhoney and Tad. Nirvana were good, noisy and shambolically appealing. Broken guitar strings forced them to temporarily abandon their set and jam a version of I Wanna Be Your Dog. People stage-dived and they smashed their equipment up at the end: all splendid chaotic fun.

But if you’d told me that night I’d just witnessed a show that would be deemed historically important – about which articles would be written and which would be cherrypicked for tracks on a posthumous live album, because Nirvana were 18 months away from literally changing the face of rock music – I’d have been genuinely baffled. Then, if you looked over 18, I’d have asked you to go to the bar for me. Alexis Petridis

Eggsactly maybe

Oasis, 100 Club, London, 24 March 1994

“At the end of the day, there isn’t another band worth frying an egg on!” This unlikely observation came from Liam Gallagher, leaving his brother Noel so bewildered he exhorted me to turn my dictaphone back on. “Frying an egg on?” he said in a “What is he like?” voice.

We were wrapping up an interview and, time being tight, I took up the offer of a ride in their van with lots of scouse mates. As we entered the 100 Club by the tradesman’s entrance, a harassed security guard, seeing the tiny basement venue suddenly half full, said: “Where have you lot come from?”

I’d love to say Oasis were incendiary but, really, it was like most of their gigs: properly loud, occasionally ponderous, with Liam always compelling. Afterwards, I knocked over a table of drinks backstage and lived to tell the tale. My most memorable gig or the most messy? Both – and definitely worth frying an egg on. Martin Horsfield

Kevin was met with bottles and boos

Kevin Rowland, Leeds festival, 28 August 1999

When Kevin Rowland took the stage, he was met with a barrage of bottles and boos. It wasn’t the music people were protesting, but the fact he was wearing a dress and white stockings. It was an eye-opening moment for me, as an avid reader of the music press (anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia). Naively, I’d assumed most indie fans to be similarly open-minded. This was my introduction to a more dispiriting reality.

And yet this short performance – three songs in 15 minutes – has endured. Not because of the music (Rowland performed his stunning cover of The Greatest Love of All), which was largely drowned out by the jeering. But because of the courage and vulnerability shown that day, an artist unafraid to be anything other than himself. Tim Jonze

An unknown New York quintet

The Strokes, The Paradise, Boston, 26 February 2001

I’m habitually late everywhere except for concerts, because I always like checking out opening acts. Back in 2001, my strategy totally paid off: the openers for Doves – a band I adored who were then promoting their first album, Lost Souls – was a practically unknown New York quintet called the Strokes. During a musical epoch dominated by deeply misogynistic nu metal, the band was a revelation: nonchalant, scruffy and totally cool.

I was blown away by their energetic set, which served as a preview for the band’s eventual debut album Is This It? Their songs were taut and gritty, pairing defiantly ragtag Velvet Underground posturing with Television-esque strumming. I distinctly remember leaving the concert and raving about the Strokes to friends. In fact, I bought The Modern Age EP just a few weeks later. Annie Zaleski

‘Tonight God’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt!’

Brian Wilson, Royal Festival Hall, London, 28 January 2002

The impossible had happened: Brian Wilson had come back from the dead. It seems ridiculous now but we didn’t get tickets, scared that – after all we’d heard about his health, mental and physical – he would sully all those fantastic songs.

When the time came, we had a change of heart and my pal Russell went down to the Royal Festival Hall to see what touts were charging. One hour later, he called. “There is a God,” he said, “and tonight he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt!” A woman had given him two tickets at face value, despite being offered huge sums by a tout.

What a night ensued. Exuberantly backed by the Wondermints, Brian nailed it like he’d never been away, from California Girls to I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. The crowd, dancing right from the start, were clearly in awe – and often in tears. Good Vibrations closed the main set, leaving everyone in ecstasy. Then an encore of five more bangers ended with Fun, Fun, Fun. The second encore was just one song: Love and Mercy. Perfect. Andrew Gilchrist

Jittery but danceable

LCD Soundsystem, Great Eastern Hotel, London, 23 November 2002

It’s pretty postmodern to say “I was there” about a band whose signature song features an ageing hipster making exactly that boast. But I genuinely was there at LCD Soundsystem’s first London show, and the review that I wrote for NME is still online. The gig took place on a Saturday night in the ballroom of a newly reopened boutique hotel clearly gunning for the early 00s hipster market. It was part of a club night called Return to New York.

LCD Soundsystem were jittery, awkward and obviously inexperienced live – a million miles from their current incarnation as an expansive, hit-stacked, festival-slaying roadshow. But the six songs they played showed their quality, and most of them remain in their setlist to this day. They kicked off with Daft Punk Is Playing at My House – somehow I managed to miss the fact that it was about Daft Punk, which suggests that either the sound was bad or I was drunk (probably both) – and finished with Losing My Edge.

Every song was intriguing, danceable, charged with excitement and seemed to up the ante from the one before, and the extremely dressed-up audience went increasingly bananas. It was fabulous. I’m so happy I was there. Alex Needham

‘Hardly room for her hairdo’

Amy Winehouse, North Sea jazz festival, The Hague, 10 July 2004

The first time I saw Amy Winehouse was in my lounge: a cheesy item on the lunchtime news about a young singer from north London who sang like a jazz virtuoso and wrote her own songs. She strummed a guitar, chirped a little and then they cut to the weather.

The next time was at the North Sea jazz festival in The Hague. Off the back of her debut album, she had been given her chance at the world famous event, one graced by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan et al, but she was a newbie so they allocated to her Paulus Potter Hall. She was 5ft 3in, but in that small, dark hall there was hardly any room between her hairdo and the flat roof.

And then, with an amazing, dynamic, gritty, already knowing performance, she did her set, the jazz stuff, the funk, the ballads, and off came that roof. Word got round, the place filled up, the temperature soared, and soon it was hard to see her through the bodies, but that didn’t matter because in all regards, her concert had morphed into a sweaty club night. We left thrilled, exhausted, and when she became a megastar, no one was surprised. Hugh Muir

Last days as a little band

Arctic Monkeys, Plug, Sheffield, 22 October 2005

Their pre-fame sets at Sheffield’s Boardwalk are arguably even more legendary – but this gig gets maximum points for poignancy. Arctic Monkeys had gone from local heroes to international pop cultural event in a matter of months, and this home-town nightclub gig was the day before the band reached No 1 with their debut single I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor.

Alex Turner, who still looked like the kid outside an offy who asks you to slip him four fruit ciders, changed a lyric of closing song A Certain Romance to make wistful mention of their chart battle: amused yet disbelieving. That song’s other lyrics profess that “there in’t no romance around here” but the gig was suffused with the same glorious feeling as a giantkilling FA Cup match. Of course, they were never a little Sheffield band again after that night. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

‘Gerard Way was now a kind of deity’

My Chemical Romance, Glasgow Barrowland Ballroom, 14 November 2006

This summer, I’ll be one of 90,000 people watching My Chemical Romance perform their 2006 album The Black Parade at Wembley Stadium. The tour is an evolving spectacle with elaborate sets, costumes and extras – the manifestation of the band’s grand ambitions.

Twenty years ago, I saw them just after the album’s release, in Glasgow’s 2,000-capacity Barrowland Ballroom. The show didn’t have any theatrical elements yet, but it still felt like a significant shift for the band: with his shock of white-blond hair, singer Gerard Way was now a kind of deity, not just another sweaty kid in the pit.

I’m not the biggest fan of The Black Parade: I prefer the poisoned Day-Glo of 2010’s Danger Days. But even in 2006, I knew it represented a conceptual step-up in the band’s artistry, and that I would never see them in such a small venue again. Claire Biddles

Up all night to get pyramidy

Daft Punk, Wireless festival, London, 16 June 2007

Daft Punk’s Alive tour was a technological marvel where the duo appeared in full robot garb within a laser-blazing 24ft pyramid, playing an almighty mashup of big-hitters from their back catalogue like their own baroque rock opera. Sounds fairly standard now, but in 2007 this was unheard of. By contrast, the other headline dance act of the weekend, Faithless, had performed with a full live band.

This wasn’t the first time that Daft Punk had unveiled The Pyramid: it had debuted at Coachella in 2006 where only 10,000 people could get into the tent and at Scotland’s RockNess the week before Wireless; the sides of another tent had to be removed so that more people could see.

But in London, the Gallic pair took their triangle-shaped throne as main stage headliners, just as rock’n’rave was crossing over once more and as the next wave of supersized electronic music (known less affectionately as EDM) was poised to become the next dominant force in youth culture. Kate Hutchinson

‘Touched with greatness’

Lana Del Rey, Manchester Ruby Lounge, 4 November 2011

By the time Lana Del Rey played her first UK show, just under six months after she broke through with Video Games, the knives were already out. The internet had quickly rumbled that – shocker! – that wasn’t her real name, and that she had a few failed pop incarnations before she found indie balladry.

How dare this pouty charlatan try to get one over on Hardworking Real Music Fans?! Her debut performance on Jools Holland had been savaged (though I was there in the studio and she did a fine job) and so the stakes were high for her first proper show in a tiny Manchester basement.

Looking back on the review I wrote, it’s funny how similar her contemporary shows are to that debut, venue size aside: she was skittish, guileless, touched with greatness – very much herself, no matter how obsessed some commenters were with trying to prove it was all a pose. Laura Snapes

Wuthering helicopters

Kate Bush, Hammersmith Apollo, 26 August 2014

The most shocking thing about the Before the Dawn residency was the palpable sense of joy that Kate Bush took in it. Returning to the stage after 35 years, she radiated warmth: at first, whipping through hits in front of a black curtain, a spare backdrop that turned out to be a red herring for an immersive show that audaciously blended pre-recorded video elements with live performance and sometimes aggro set-pieces (midway through The Ninth Wave song suite, a helicopter descended from rafters).

The dialogue she created between screens, props and flesh-and-blood artist was nearly a decade ahead of the curve. I didn’t see the fluidity matched until Rosalía’s landmark Motomami tour in 2022. When I interviewed Bush, she told me she hoped to create “an integrated piece of theatre” with the show, rather than what she sniffily called “music with theatrics added to it”. Bush’s contemporary disciples are two a penny: many could afford to take note. Owen Myers

‘Kanye covered Bohemian Rhapsody’

Kanye West, Glastonbury, 27 June 2015

The antisemitic and misogynistic version of Kanye West has been around for so long (he has apologised for antisemitism), it’s easy to forget that he used to be controversial for entirely different reasons. Coming off Yeezus, an abrasive, industrial album that represented a wildly successful reinvention at a time when artists such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean were rewriting the rules of hip-hop, in 2015 West seemed to be walking the line between eccentric genius and megalomaniac.

Still, the Glastonbury booking was divisive enough to get 130,000 signatures in protest and inspired Noel Gallagher to remark that someone who’d never played guitar had no business headlining the Pyramid stage. Just as Jay-Z had lampooned this sentiment by playing Wonderwall in 2009, Kanye covered Bohemian Rhapsody and referred to himself as “the greatest living rock star on the planet”.

Between the excess, strobes and decision to perform Touch the Sky from a wobbly crane-top platform, the gig gave me a sense that right here – in this field – something was being decided. Over the course of 90 minutes, Kanye won over his detractors with a great show and, if anything, his decade-long fall from grace only adds weight to his moment of deification. For one night only, Kanye truly was the greatest rock star alive. Sasha Mistlin

‘Even standing at the back, it was unbelievable’

Beyoncé, Coachella, 14 April 2018

I’ve only been to Coachella once. Beyoncé was scheduled to perform – making up for her cancellation in 2017, due to her pregnancy – and it had turned the supremely chill festival, filled with a clientele decidedly unbothered about actual music, into a hive of anticipation and rumours. The only gossip I heard anyone discussing was what her set might look like, how many trailers had supposedly brought in gear, which special guests she might bring out, and so on.

Her merch, supposedly a clue to the theme of her set, wasn’t going to be sold until her set was over. Expectations were astronomically high. And, somehow, Beyoncé delivered: I consider myself a very casual Beyoncé fan and was astounded by the scope and scale of her headline set, designed to look like a performance by a Historically Black Colleges and Universities marching band, on the levels of both art and entertainment.

Even standing right at the back, it was an unbelievable spectacle. I’ve never seen anything like it since. Shaad d’Souza

Physicality at what cost?

Britney Spears, O2, London, August 2018

At university, I had bonded with a friend over our mutual love of Britney Spears’s Blackout album. So when the Piece of Me tour was announced for 2018, an adaptation of her Las Vegas residency, we raced to get tickets. The residency had seemingly settled a question haunting Spears’s career: whether the show would go on. Raking in $1m a week in Vegas, she showed that she had been down, but was not out. Or at least that’s what it had seemed.

Thinking back to that show, I can remember my elation at seeing Spears’s incredible physicality, commanding the stage in a bedazzled black bra, running through the hits with complex choreography. But of course what we now know from her conservatorship case is that Spears was performing against her will and threatened with a lawsuit if she didn’t complete the tour.

I remember my friend and I having had a blast, remarking that an older gay couple in front of us looked like they’d been waiting their whole lives for this, but also that Spears seemed somewhat distant, as if not quite occupying her body. To know that this was almost definitely the last time that anyone would see Britney perform conjures a feeling of melancholic gratitude: yes I got to see one of the divas who defined my childhood, but at what cost to her? Jason Okundaye