All my best friends used to be metalheads

I think it was about 8 years ago, the last time I went to a metal gig. Probably not long after I went to the Reading Festival in 2000. So anyway, this was the first time in many many years.

The title is a reference to Less Than Jake for anyone that didn’t get it (i.e. everyone that didn’t get it)

I went to see the band of a friend of a friend – called Red Mourning – who were playing at La Boule Noire in Paris as a support band to some folk called Klone who I’d never heard of.

The doors opened at 19:30, and I got there early since I’d already had weird experiences with the support bands being on as soon as the doors opened. Once again, JC and his band were on by 19:45. Just enough time to buy a beer and shuffle down to the front of the venue.

Once they were on, they were OK. Better than I was expecting, even though I couldn’t really understand much. That’s just the nature of metal music I guess, despite the fact they were singing in English I had no idea what they were singing about. I guess quite a lot of bands have an affectation of a gimmick, and JC’s was that he played the harmonica partly to the detriment of his metal cred. There were 2 guys down the front who continued moshing through the harmonica sections though.

That was something really unusual though. My friend had told me that metal music wasn’t very well established in France, but there were so few people down the front moshing. It was unbelievable! I went down to the front for 15 minutes during Klone’s set and I was 4 bodies away from the band, and despite that I could stand quite calmly nodding my head along to the music without getting involved in circle pits or any other shennanigans. It was all very tranquil.

In the end all the other people I knew left during Klone’s set, and even after 4 beers I had trouble keeping up an interest in the music. They weren’t bad, they just weren’t very interesting, and nowhere near as good as the bands like RATM, Machine Head or Slipknot that I remember seeing when I was younger.

But that sounds like an old man talking about the good old days, so I think I’ll put my slippers on and make a cuppa tea before I start talking about when Snickers were called Marathon, or a Twix cost 25p (about €0.30)!