April Wine with beer in March

We went to see April Wine last Friday.

April Wine is a stadium rock band from Nova Scotia that were big in the late seventies/ early eighties. Time has not treated them kindly, but they still play over 100 gigs a year.

They packed ‘em into The Marquee Club in Halifax this week at thirty dollars a ticket, so they must be making a tidy penny.

I got Himself tickets for his birthday, as he had spent most of the summer trying to get me to like them.

Driving along somewhere, I would take my eye off the cd player for ONE SECOND and suddenly, there would be surround sound KRAAAAANG, SQUEEEEAL, DOINNNNNG, LOOOOOOVVVVE, etc.

‘Turn that shite off now!’

‘It’s April Wine!’

‘I don’t care if it’s the effing Messiah, turn it off now or I’m walking to the shop/ the liquor store/ Kevin’s house/ Bear Cove/ Halifax, wherever. Usually Himself complied after a bit of grumbling. So when I saw they were playing in Halfiax just after his birthday and knowing he had never seen them, I bought the tickets in a fit of girlfriend-related good will.

Also, I reckoned he’d want to go with his mates.

But no. He wanted to go with me.

Great.

So we got smartened up and headed down to Ginger’s for a couple of pints to get me in the right frame of mind and then headed up to The Marquee Club which had a queue of forty-something year olds halfway down Gottingen.

We queued behind a gang of five laydeez out to relive their youth. I told them that the Marquee was very strict about ID. They all giggled hysterically. When we got up to the door, the bouncer, who was young enough to be my son and probably was one of theirs, was all for waving them in, but no, they insisted on hauling the drivers’ licences out to show him. He was mortified.

We got there at ten, which was far too early of course, not that Himself believed me, because I don’t know anything about going to gigs of course. Only having been to about six thousand more than he has in my lifetime.

Okay, I’ll drop the sarcasm dear…. I went, didn’t I!!

The support band came on at ten thirty. I can’t remember what they were called. They were about twenty. They were really nervous. They had a website address which they kept shouting out. Actually, I was staring out the bus window this morning and saw a poster for a gig they're having next week. They're called Fold of Policy, or something dreadful like that.

They started off well enough with a really loud, relentless guitars running away with themselves style opener that sounded like they had listened to The Clash a lot. I was very impressed. Maybe it was all the smoke in the room though. Then, sadly, their sound slowly disintegrated into a dreadful mixture of Pogues type rock and their version of that east coast Canadian loud guitar sound that drives me insane because it’s so old-fashioned.

Then they played a final song that was nearly as good as the first. So they have some potential. I think they probably need to get rid of their lead singer – he seemed to be responsible for the tripe in the middle.

We were sitting in the back bar through all of this, watching them on the big screen, so for a long while I thought the tambourine player they had brought on for the last song was banging it against his head. I was well impressed. Turns out my eyes were deceiving me as usual and he was holding his hand at head height.

When I grow up, I’m going to join a band and play tambourine and just bang it frenetically against my head for the duration of every gig.

I told Himself he should resurrect his band so I could do that. He took a long slow swig of his beer so he wouldn’t have to comment.

Then he sneaked a look down my top.

This is one of the reasons why I love Himself. It does this girl wonders in the self-esteem department to have someone take a long, slow swig of beer and sneak a look down her top.

Those of you who know me personally can take a stab at why this is the case.

Granted, he’s pretty tall for a boyfriend of mine, so maybe he has a different perspective on it than previous incumbents had.

Or maybe I’m filling out a bit with age.

Who knows. Who cares.

The fish are dancing to Daftpunk. They love Daftpunk. Every time I play Discovery they stand on their tails and sway to and fro all twined around each other. It’s really sweet.

Anyways, back to April Wine, who are definitely not Daftpunk.

They didn’t come on till almost eleven thirty, by which time the crowd was getting ratty, it being way past their bedtime for most of them, what with the career, and the kids, and the gym, and the commute, and the stress of it all.

Himself and I whiled away the time trying to spot the oldest person in the room (I did eventually, he was definitely pushing seventy), and spying on the strange Lebanese couple beside us. Late forties; he was wearing a cream wool polo neck and a leather coat, she was incredibly glammed up in a red dress and lashings of kohl and mascara. They sat sipping spirits, he lifted his chin onto his Sherlock Holmes pressed fingertips and stared at her unblinkingly while she squirmed around in her seat and leaned forward to whisper something to him every now and then. I was amusing myself by imagining their incredibly exotic back story when Himself had one of his ‘I know exactly what’s going on in your head’ moments and said ‘So, when are you going to write this book of yours’.

Ah, fuck.

Not you as well.

I was saved by the sound of guitars tuning up, so we went out and wriggled up to my favourite spot to the right of the sound desk and listened to the gig.

I suppose when you’ve been playing the same tunes night after night since 1979 you get pretty tight, and so they were. Very slick. Not a huge lot of ‘giving a shit’ coming from the stage though. The audience tried. There were a lot of Bud bottles being held in the air. And the crowd went wild for ‘Song of the Gypsy Queen’, from 1981’s Nature of the Beast, which was their mega-album I think (and which is available on iTunes for you rockers out there).

We waited about thirty minutes and sure enough, a big space opened up near the front as people started leaving for their washroom trips. So we went up for a closer look.

Covered in pancake the lead singer was. He looked like a metal version of Danny Kaye.

I lost the one strand of respect I had for him right there and then.

But we still had a good time.

And I got some brownie points. And so did Himself. So it’s all good.