Foo Fighters, Hyde Park

Sometimes I have trouble with…connecting. It’s very hard to explain the feeling, I don’t know what it is or when it started or what it means, but sometimes I have... difficulties. I feel being distant and apart almost from everything, including myself.
Bang in the center of my skull, there's a strange coolness.
For a time in Leicester I was writing about feeling “body-snatched” like some alien entity was in control of my body and I was just a passive observer. I would have to look up exactly when this is to be able to say if it was in any way related the drugs I was on for depression. Either way, I consider the feeling now a kind of scar from depression – depression never really leaves you, even if you aren’t actively depressed it’s always there, in some distant synapse, waiting to re-emerge like an LSD flashback.

Lately I’ve been to a number of gigs and where I had once lived and breathed live music, I have instead felt numb. Have watched the bands perform on stage to surging, ecstatic crowds – but I’ve felt cold and unmoved. I can list excuses – REM at Brixton disappointed me because it was such an exclusive fan-club gig that I didn’t know most of the songs they played, or that Pearl Jam at the Astoria had played so many new songs I hadn’t heard… But I can think of several other times and the excuses about headaches or unfamiliar material wear thin.

Yesterday was Foo Fighters in London’s Hyde Park – the biggest gig they have ever played, they said. It was nine years ago this summer that I saw them play at the V Festival in Chelmsford, it was my first-ever festival and I still wear my “Disintegrator Pistol” t-shirt I bought on the day.

Yesterday was like a mini-festival, since there were ‘special guests’ supporting – including Motorhead, Queens of the Stone Age, Angels & Airwaves and Juliette & The Licks. Juliette Lewis’ punk band was surprisingly good, reminding me of a slightly catchier version of Babes in Toyland. The other guests are barely worth mentioning, but when Foo Fighters took the stage there was no sign of my detachment.

Predictably starting the set with “In Your Honour”, it was a song that will never make my favourites but set up the rest of the show for improvement. I wasn’t let down, I can’t even recall how long the band played for but they neatly avoided playing songs from the mellow second disco of their latest effort, instead concentrating on crowd-pleasers like Breakout, Monkey Wrench, Times Like These, Best of You and Learn To Fly. If I’d had my way they would have played twice as long and included some older singles like For All the Cows and I’ll Stick Around, or mixed it up with songs like Up in Arms and MIA, but the more material a band has the less chance there is they will play all of your favourite songs – and last night it was more than enough that I loved the songs they did play.

The band left the stage, and San asked me “Is that the end?” as it all went quiet – I reassured her that they wouldn’t get out alive if they didn’t play Everlong as an encore. Without fail they returned and did their duty to the fans – although a one-song encore was disappointing, as I said before they could have played for twice as long without boring me.

It's times like these you learn to live again.