My all top top five rock concerts #2: Two-thirds of Neil

I've seen Neil Young play in real life twice, but I feel like I've really only seen two-thirds of what he can do.

One was a big festival set where he played almost all the hits (although the wife managed to straight up hallucinate one of them). It was incandescently good, I could see the music buzzing through the air when he did Cortez The Killer, and it was absolutely everything you would want in a Neil Young concert.

That's what I thought anyway, until I saw Young perform again with Crazy Horse a few years later, and it was fucking brilliant in a whole new way. He was just jamming with his mates, and the songs went on forever, and he played about three songs that everybody knew, and then a bunch  of deep cuts from decades of songs, and it was glorious in a whole new way. 

The disappointed faces of the other concertgoers who never got to hear him do anything they could sing along to - that just made it all the sweeter.

The only thing I need now is to see Neil in his most laidback, acoustic mode, warbling out Harvest Moon on a stage covered in straw. The big fella is not getting any younger, but I still have high hopes that I will get to see this Neil Young, and complete this particular circle of life.

My all time top five concerts #1: Seeing it all through another pair of eyes

As much as music ruled by life in my teenage and early adult years, I didn't actually go to my first big rock or hip hop concert until I was well into my twenties. I went to plenty of gigs at the dankest pubs in the South Island, and saw my mates get up on stage and do wonderous things, but I never got to see any of the really big international acts.

There were all well outside my reach, for starters. The mega gigs were all in the far-off big cities, and getting tickets, transport and accommodation would cost hundreds of dollars, when I was lucky to get $5 a week for the latest issue of Excalibur. The only people to have the willpower to get to the big shows were the obsessives like my mate Kaz, who went to ever damn U2 show that came within a few hundred miles. I was so fucking jealous.

But once I had disposable income of my own, and moved to the big city, I got to see almost all of the bands I grew up with, and always adored. I saw most of the Clash play with the Gorillaz, and Faith No More do their thing, and Massive Attack up close. Dozens of shows, to the point where I have to consciously remember what concerts I've been to. 

And this week, with all the horror in the outside world still pressing down on us all, I'm going to remember the five top gigs I ever went to. It's actually more like nine or ten, because I loved some very different shows for very similar reasons, but top five always sounds more appropriate.

None of them are going to be very surprising, or anyone that obscure, because it should be abundantly clear that I am the most basic of all bitches.

So of course I'm picking the one time I got to see the Manic Street Preachers. It was years after I'd been a committed Manics fan, but they did all the big parts. What made it so great was that it was the best example of introducing my lovely wife to something that meant a lot to me, because that's when I got to show her the glory of Nicky Wire.

We've been married for 20 years now, and she still doesn't give a damn about many of the things I'm into - she never got into comics, and I will never make a horror fan out of her - and that's absolutely fine, because everybody has their own things to be passionate about. But I can still slowly introduce her to the music that speaks to my soul, and she will sometimes fall for it harder than I ever imagined.

And so we are at the Manics gig in Auckland, and while we are waiting for the show to start, she wonders why one of the mike stands has an outrageous feather boa on it, and I say it's because Nicky Wire, and then she got a crash course in the eternal coolness of the bassist. Her later discovery of his love of tidying up the house only made it better.

It's happened a couple of times. Checking out the late and truly great Mark Lanegan at the Reading festival in 2012 was another bet that paid off, his stoic stage presence making another new fan with the absolute minimum of effort, and the Rammstein show we saw at another festival was most impressive pyrotechnics I've ever seen, with the flames vaporising the light rain that was falling, and burning with such heat we could feel it on our faces 50m from the stage. But the most surprising thing about that was that she immediately went out and bought every single one of those albums.

And this is a win for everybody, we both enjoy the music, and can luxuriate in it together. But there is also just something truly special about finding a new connection with the love of your life.

Big rock concerts are all about a connection on the macro level, with thousands of people all living in the same moment, all jamming to the same tune. But it's also about those tiny connections, and it's just always better when you can share the love.

Fighting with Frank (part 7 of 13): Felt that, eh?

- All Star Superman #9

Pencils by Frank Quitely

Digitally inked and coloured by Jamie Grant

Written by Grant Morrison

Lettered by Travis Lanham

It was Jim from IT all along!

I watched all of the Cumberbatch/Freeman Sherlock stories recently, and I think they did just the right amount of episodes for that series before it got to much, but one part that still fucking rocks is Andrew Scott's Moriarty, who remains incandescently good. They killed him off brutally early, but brought him back through flashback and mental mind-games and Scott fucking nailed it every time.

When I was watching the first couple of films when they were first broadcast, I was looking out for Moriarty, because he was crushingly inevitable. They already had the Mycroft fake-out, so I was waiting for the mastermind criminal, and took no notice of Jim from IT when he stumbled across the scene, because you never take any notice of the IT geek. 

In hindsight, it was very obvious. But the best twists always are.

Rambo was my first grown up movie

Film classifications used to be a big concern in my life, because I was just a kid, and didn't know what real concerns actually were. But just because I didn't know what was really important in life didn't mean the entire classification system wasn't still a cause of heartbreak and sorrow.

Around these parts, it used to be G for general admission, and GY for the parental guidance thing. But it was the hard Rs that deprived me of seeing great films up on the big screen, and it could be years before I properly caught up.

Me and my mate Nigel completely failed to get into the R13 Terminator when we were 10, and I can still taste the bitter disappointment of not being allowed to see Blade Runner because I was too young, even though it had Han frigging Solo in it.

Things got a bit looser when video players rolled into town, but there were still restrictions at home. I wasn't allowed to watch Beverly Hills Cop after 10 minutes, when his boss showed up and unleashed a tirade of f-bombs, because my Dad was a pretty liberal dude, but he still had his limits.

So it was a big deal when I was allowed to watch Rambo, I was just shy of the 13-year mark, but that was close enough. The profanity was bad, and the sexual stuff was just awkward for all concerned, but cartoonish violence was still a-okay.

This kind of permission must be immediately seized on, before broader issues of parental responsibility come to mind, and we were on our way to the video store as soon as that permission was granted.

The movie itself was no big deal - I was never really into the absurdity of Stallone in the 80s, and it's fair to say that a lot of aspects to the biggest Rambo of them all have not held up well, (although it remains dumbly entertaining, and long as you don't think too hard about it).    

But it was the first taste of something that was made for adults, and a powerful symbol for the changes machine-gunning their way into my life. It's one way to do it. 

What are you shooting at, Clive?

And sometimes there is a film that is just so fucking stupid, you can only watch it in 15-minute bursts before it gets too much. You keep going, because even the dumbest films can redeem themselves, but it can be hard going.

I didn't expect Anon from 2018 to be one of those films, even though it's part of the endless waterfall of straight to streaming efforts. Writer/director Andrew Niccol had done some smart films in the past that did occasionally veer into the realm of the dumb, but walked that line with some skill.

But Anon trips up over that line, right from the start. The very concept of the film - that everybody has implants that lets them see everything anybody else is getting up to, along with helpful heads-up displays showing all the details of the shit they look at - isn't as smart as it thinks it is. For starters, it's a whole new technology that nobody can turn off, even if it's majorly malfunctioning, and everything you look at comes with grating text and a horrible digital ticking sound that would drive everybody nuts in a week.

So far, so Black Mirror, but then Clive Owen's head gets hacked, and he literally can't trust what he's seeing, and it looks like his hallway is on fire, so he pulls out his gun and starts blazing away. Even though he knows it's fake, and even though it's a fucking fire - what does he think bullets are going to do against it? And thinking somebody might be using the flames to attack them is still no fucking excuse for blind gunfire.

I had to take a break after that. That was too much, man.

And then when I get back to it the next day, Clive goes and gets in a fucking car and tries to drive around a busy future metropolis, even though his eyes are still subject to enforced hallucinations. He doesn't get past the first intersection.

I guess you're meant to admire his hard nature, but this blatant dumbarsery, and the only reason these scenes to be there in the film is so other plot elements can play off later - his poor neighbour who nearly gets shot by him is sacrificed so Clive can be framed for the shooting - which is the dumbest part of all.

I do feel foolish, ripping into a fairly nondescript film from seven years ago that literally nobody else cares about. But it took me days to get through something that should have been an easy watch, because I couldn't take that kind of stupid for too long.

Dreaming of Judge Mortis

I've been reading horror comics since before I could actually read, but one of the few to genuinely scare me were the early Dark Judges stories in Judge Dredd, and I know this because I had genuine nightmares about them for years. They were coming for me, and no matter where I would hide, they would find me.

It was only the Bolland versions that counted. Bolland's art is always a detailed delight, but that just made the horrific absurdity of Death, Fear, Fire and Mortis all the more real, with oblivion hiding in the sharpest of shadows. 

They became more of a joke, the more they appeared -  I have no such reaction to the recent muddy, overwrought versions in the Fall of Deadworld comics. But they were absolutely terrifying in their primal glory. 

I still sometimes dream of them coming down the road towards me in bright daylight, and the only way I can ever escape is by waking up.

Beyond post-irony: Heretic and Slow Horses

What does it mean when you're watching a movie or reading a book, and you suddenly start thinking about questions that the story is raising, and then the story answers those exact questions, and kinda makes fun of you for your simple queries.

I've felt like this with some stories for a while - the Buffy TV show used to do this all the time. Especially when I'd watch it stoned with my mate Geoff, and we'd have all sorts of deep philosophical insights about the nature of slaying vampires and the questions it would raise, and then the show would answer those questions straight away, like it had heard our complaints and was putting us in our place.

More recently, I felt it with the movie Heretic, which I thought was a lot of fun, but had Hugh Grant spouting some absolute bullshit. Because he's Hugh fucking Grant, it sounds refined and charming, but you're sitting there wanting one of the characters to refute his obvious bullshit, and then somebody does just that, and points out with great eloquence and passion how fucked up his reasoning is.

The Slow Horses books - which I carved through in a few short months last year - also do it all the time, with author Mick Herron constantly toying with expectations, and then blatantly violating them, and acting surprised that you thought it would be anything different. Sometimes it's the use of a jacket, belonging to a corpse at the start of one book, which then features some very blatant mentions of wearing coats; or even the way that each book ends with a member of Slough House dying in some unfortunate manner, and then in one of the latest ones, it's obviously happened again, only it turns out the character just wants to eat all the fucking chicken in the room.

It's all so clever, and is extremely hard to pull off. But it also feels like a direct conversation between author and audience, an unspoken correspondence of anticipation. It's so far beyond literary irony that we're somewhere new.  I really thought we slipped into a post-ironic age very early on in the 21st century, but where are we now? 

You may feel manipulated as the consumer of this story, but you also know you are in on the game. It  definitely makes everything feel a bit meta, seeing the man behind the curtain like that, but in an entertainment world of dumb-arse retreads and the general same old shit, this kind of post-post-post-irony is always a welcome sack of smart.

How was my 1999?

I'm 24 in 1999, which is just about the last age where I could be a total bum for a while without feeling like a complete loser and a failure at life. It was the last thrust of proper youth, the last time to be free of any responsibilities. It was a fucking good year.

Me and my mates had all been working since we got out of school, for six years straight at that stage, and just could not be fucked anymore, so we chucked in our jobs and went on the dole and lived a leisurely life of few luxuries.

And for most of the year we all just fucking chilled out, watched lots of movies, smoked lots of pot, ate lots of trash food. It was the year of The Matrix and the final volume of The Invisibles, and it felt like all the freaky weird stuff that I'd spent the decade indulging in was coming to some kind of fruition. Things looked good for the new millennium.

I wasn't getting any comics regularly - not even my beloved 2000ad, which I'd given up after some truly diabolical mid-90s progs. I would still get the latest issue of The Invisibles through mail order, and I still never missed anything to do with Love and Rockets, but that was literally it. I would see advertisements for things like Planetary, which looked sexy as fuck, but I was most bothered by the fact I was missing out on Hourman (I read it 10 years later, it was pretty good).

It was the last year of the 20th century (yes, it wasn't technically the last year because there was no year zero, but general consensus can be a powerful thing), and is rightly seen as a stunner of a year for movies. While that sometimes only becomes clear in retrospect, you couldn't walk out of the theatre into some 90s sunlight after seeing something like the Thin Red Line and Fight Club and The Matrix, and not realise it was a mini golden age for movies.

I listened to a lot of Beastie Boys and Portishead and Pulp's This Is Hardcore, and the Best of 1998 CD that Q put out, meaning the main soundtrack to my life was still a year late.

But everything was a year late, and I do wonder if part of my affection for this period is because it was the last time I was ever not connected to the world at all times. I could only get on the internet once a week, at most, and would spend that precious half hour checking out the niche message boards that my friends still posted on, before catching up on the geek news from comicbookresources.com and fuckin' Ain't It Cool, and that was it, there was nothing more.

Blogs weren't even a thing yet, there was no bandwidth for Youtube, and social media was a nightmare for the future, not an aspirational goal.

I still know I'm seeing this through rose coloured glasses. I was still five years away from properly getting my shit together, and going to journalism school, and everything great in my life has come from that decision. And yeah, it was fun times, but we weren't making any money, and couldn't go out or do anything exciting, and by the time winter started to bite, we were all back in employment, because beer doesn't come for free.

So I moved on with my life, and things changed in ways I could never anticipate, and I haven't had to go on a benefit since then. But I can still remember that thrilling freedom of the last year of my youth, before the new century came crashing in.