Sick Of It All

My earliest memory of music is being terribly young and dancing around my living room to Abba with my father. Fastforward about 7 years and Im stood at the Astoria in London trying to meet Machine Head, who were playing their second night, to get me into the show that night because I had been told that I was barred from the venue the night before for stagediving.

After being stood in the foyer for three hours with noone to talk to, a man comes out with his arm bandaged. I look up, and bored out of my brains, I start talking to him.

"How did you hurt your arm?" i ask inquisitively
"Ahh at the show last night" He replies with a grin on his face.
"oh right.. where did you play last night?" I ask, hoping he is someone with Machine Head so I can start my "pleeeeeeeeease help me get into this show.. you will NEVER believe what happened!!" speech.
"Bradford"
"ahh ok"
"Are you coming to see us tonight?"
"who's us?"
"Sick of it all". The band were playing downstairs at the astoria 2 with a band from Long Island called VOD.
"Oh. no. sorry. I'm trying to get into the MachineHead show"
"Oh. OK. You don't like us?"
"Not really. You aren't really my thing. I like metal and punk, not hardcore"
"Oh ok. Thats a shame. Well, I have to go. It was nice meeting you"

I had actually picked up Scratch The Surface around half a year before this meeting and only given it one listen before storing it with my hundreds of other tapes.

A couple of months later, I had gone to my first real hardcore show, which was an eye opener, I heard they were touring again. I dug out the tape and gave it another listen and fell in love with the album. For 6 months, it never left my walkman. They announced dates and as I was at university in Southampton, I booked tickets for Portsmouth and told my brother to pick me up tickets for their two dates in London at the Garage..

They blew me away in Portsmouth. I stood there for the entirety of their set with my jaw on the floor. I had seen hundreds of bands by this point in my life and never had I seen a band with so much enthusiasm and dedication.

The next day, I trained it up to London for the first of the two London shows. I was stood outside the venue with my best friend, and the man that I met at the Astoria walks out of the tour bus.
He looks at me and says
"hey. weren't you at the show last night crowd surfing all over the place?"
"yeah. haha that was me. I had a bit to drink". All I could think was "Please don't remember me from the Astoria.. please don't remember me"
"Haven't I met you before?"
"um.." I pause. "Yeah. I met you before the VOD show".
"HAHAHAH HOLY SHIT, you are the Machine Head girl. What, you like my band now, huh?"
I felt my face go bright red.

The rest, as they say is history.

There is no band that I have gone out of my way to see more than this band. There are no songs I have listened to more times. There is no band that I get so excited about seeing that I can't sleep the night before. The lights go down, their intro starts, and my stomach does flips and i'm grinning like a Cheshire cat. And after 5 days of following them around the country, I have lost my voice.. I am happiest when I am stood watching them onstage, singing along. The band end their UK leg of this European tour in Norwich tonight, and I am sat at work, miserable because I am not on a train right now going there.

Thank you for giving me some incredible memories.