A mosh pit is not a place I’ve really ever felt comfortable.
I remember my first experience of a pit. It was September 1995, Green Day were touring Insomniac, and I took an afternoon off school to travel to Manchester to see the gig. I’d never attended live music events prior to that, and naively, I got a place front and centre, eager to see my favourite band. I bloody loved Green Day, they were the band that changed everything for me. They were my gateway from the manufactured pop stuff I heard on the radio, into something that mattered, something that resonated with an angsty teenager. I must have looked like easy pickings, all fresh-faced in my army surplus combats, T-shirt, and Skechers (before they were reappropriated by the elderly as slippers). I felt dead cool. Those trainers were my first skate trainers, and I’d bought them from a magazine, which let me claim I’d imported them like some sort of horrible little hipster try-hard. The punk police might have arrested me and had me in chains, but in my mind, I was rebelling in a grand way.
Thirty seconds in, I’d lost one trainer (which I got back, somehow), taken a fist to the face and ended up on the sidelines wondering what the fuck had happened to me. Why did all these people come to see this great band, and then spend time kicking the living daylights out of each other? Three years later, at V98, I decided to miss the pit altogether and just crowdsurf. I spent an hour slowly edging forward through Chumbawumba and The Lightning Seeds, getting a good spot. I got lifted onto the crowd on the third song (which I was convinced was She, but looking at the setlist, they didn’t play it), and five seconds later, I was in a heap at the front, minus a Skecher, which promptly followed and hit me as I lay in a heap. Not long after that, I was deposited back into the crowd, miles back, with no hope of seeing Billie-Jo with my own eyes, instead having to focus on the big screen. What a waste of time.
Those were two Green Day experiences that shaped my gig ethics for years. Three golden rules learned: stay out of the pit, stay on your own two feet and tie your trainers tight, just in case rules one and two are breached. That was my mantra, my gig code, for many years after. I often watched on as my friends went down the front at gig. I saw Rancid at Norwich UEA, where mosh pit violence put some football hooligans to shame (all good-natured, of course). I saw the Rumjacks at the Rescue Rooms, where a section of support had literally only come to be in the pit for one song, all flailing arms like they’d jumped off Niagra Falls and were trying to fly. I was nice and safe on the balcony, not getting clouted around the earhole. Lovely. I saw Ferocious Dog in Leeds, where I was part of that outer ring, close enough to appreciate every nuance of the show but just on the periphery of getting slapped about a bit in the name of fun.
I remember looking on at that gig and wondering if maybe, at 45 years old, my time was coming around again. Elbows and fists flew at Rancid or the Rumjacks, but at FD, it felt much more good-natured. However, at the time, I didn’t feel 100% like a Hellhound; I felt like I was on the edge, looking in, hoping to be a part of whatever the movement was about. As I wrote before, that changed last August, when I felt like myself, and our little gig-going trio, finally came of age. I felt I had to represent in my own city, and fuelled by a lot of Camden Hells, I got stuck in, so to speak. I remember feeling safe in that pit, only one person got a bit over-eager, everyone else just wanted to bash into you a bit, not go all Mike Tyson. There were enough big blokes with beards to police the pit, beards that would make ZZ Top envious (proper beards, not ones like I had that made me look like the guy from Baby Reindeer who did the dirty thing). These are beards that don’t just grow; they have to be earned, like army stripes. They’re the sort of beard that commands respect, and if you start throwing punches around, the sort of beard that’s not going to be your friend in the FD pit.
That brings me to last night, Ferocious Dog at the Drill Hall in Lincoln. I had no doubt where I’d be for this – I like to try and fly the flag for the band around town a bit. As they get more popular, the gigs get bigger, and it felt like there were more there last night than last year. I made my way to the front, accompanied by Chris (our other mate, Dave, has a gammy knee, an injury sustained in his crowd-surfing days, according to the legend). The band came out with a medley of tracks from their brand-new Kleptocracy album, and I braced myself for battle.
It wasn’t necessary. The pit at a Drill Hall gig certainly isn’t Green Day circa 1995. This crowd don’t just come to knock seven shades of poop out of each other. They’re here for the music, to share in the hatred of Tories, to vocalise the injustices we see every day. Well, almost all of them are – someone just behind me was shouting at Ken to just sing bloody songs during the segues, and I suspect if they’d ventured a little further forward, a menacing beard might have been primed with an elbow or two. However, that didn’t happen.
I stayed put for most of the gig. Certain songs prompt the pit to go into overdrive, but I was quite pleased to hold my own. I’m all ‘arms down’ and just bashing into people a bit, but it feels so good-natured as if causing hurt and pain isn’t the main attraction. Who knew, right? In fact, there was one point where it just seemed to stop after a bit of too-ing and fro-ing, a bit of good-natured nudging and knocking. Not because the music stopped but because the message started. You see, as much as I (now) like a bit of pogoing with sweaty strangers, Ferocious Dog are as much about the message as the music. Their songs are great, obviously, but it seems pointless to try to knock a middle-aged stranger off his feet when you’re both there to listen to a non-political band sing a political song about the blue cancer that has been throttling our country for a decade-and-a-half. Why do I want to bang into this man (or woman) when we could unite and bang into the ruling class? Why would I think about accidentally giving them a clout round the ear, when together we can give out so much more to people who deserve it.
Then the band strike up Paddy Works on the Railway, and that ethos all goes to shit for a bit. Cue an elbow to the head from a man who I’d never met and a sweaty embrace from one of the beards, which felt more like acceptance than anyone could ever truly know.
Half an hour or so after the band had finished, the three of us were sitting in a fast food outlet, eating different trays full of inedible food, when the inspiration for this little article hit me. I realised that, somehow, I’d graduated from a course I started in September 1995, perhaps titled ‘pit etiquette and how to avoid a black eye’. Was I now a mosher? What even is a mosher, anyway? Is it getting smacked about for an hour, bleeding and bruised in the name of fun? Or is it at the front of an FD gig, throwing yourself around with strangers like a five-year-old does with their friends at school, without a care in the world and all united in the hate of their dinner lady, headmaster or whatever it is kids hate these days? Is it that freedom that so often eludes us as adults, a freedom epitomised by kids just jumping about going a bit lairy because they’ve had too much sugar? I liked having too much sugar, I liked not giving a hoot what people think and most of all, I like feeling that way without the impending fear of getting smacked in the face by someone in the name of fun.
I think it’s primal, but not the hunter/fighter primal it first appears. There’s a reason I feel more comfortable at the front of an FD gig than I ever would at Rancid (a band I love, by the way). It’s because the music isn’t the be-all and end-all of the events; it isn’t the sole trigger for the pit to go off. At the Rumjacks, everyone just wanted the Irish Pub Song to come on so they could start sharpening elbows, and there’s no message in that song, other than you’ll get a slap if you draw a shamrock in a beer. However, at an FD gig, the music is merely the (brilliantly melodic) catalyst, the backdrop against which this togetherness and understanding emerges. It is why the pit ebbed and flowed, why at times it was raucous and at times it just stopped, listening and absorbing the message coming from the band’s songs.
I’ll leave you with two thoughts. Firstly, and this came from Chris as much as me: The Protest Singer might not feel like the heavy hitter on Kpetocracy, but it’s got the makings of an anthem for years to come. Right now, it’s the underrated gem from the album, but I can see it being belted out late at FD gigs for the next 10 years.
Secondly, I have to chuckle as I come to the end of this little piece. My first experience of being in a pit saw me lose a Skecher, and 30 years on (almost), I’ve sat here for 20 minutes writing this wearing a pair of super-comfortable Skechers slippers.