State Farm Stadium
8th May 2024

And you thought Al Jourgensen was old? Mick Jagger will turn 81 in July, so sets a new record for the oldest performer I’ve seen in concert – he was born about six weeks before Roger Waters. The Rolling Stones as a whole were founded several years before I was born, with Jagger and Keith Richards having been continual members for the 62 years since. Hell, the first time they played Phoenix was in 1965. Tickets cost $4.50, and among the crowd that night was a young Vince Furnier. He’d go on to become Alice Cooper, and open for the Stones when they played the first concert at what’s now State Farm Stadium in 2006.

I’ve never been a particular fan, but Chris is, and there’s no denying, the Stones are icons – maybe the most famous rock band in the world? Hard to think of any who surpass them overall, in terms of longevity, influence and impact, across a range of musical genres. But would Mick be able to cut it, at an age when simply “not being dead” is an achievement?

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Rialto Theater,
5th April 2024

Can’t argue with a line-up like that. Three icons of the electronic music scene, with over a century of experience between them? Even though, oddly, the tour’s only stop in Arizona was the second city of Tucson, it was an easy choice to make for a road-trip. Front row balcony tickets secured – we are at the age where sitting down is now preferred, especially when there’s a full night of concert to attend – we headed down the I-10, for our first Tucson trip since OMD in 2019. The world was literally different then, and so were we. But what about this trio of industrial giants, all now eligible for AARP membership?

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T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas
1st December, 2023

Depeche Mode are certainly among the bands whose fandom has been among my most enduring. Digging through Google, I might have first seen them as long ago as 1986 at Wembley Arena. Certainly, it’s at least thirty years, since I definitely was there at Crystal Palace in 1993, when they were supported by the Sisters of Mercy. It’s no exaggeration to say we’ve got old together, an aspect driven home by the unfortunate death of keyboardist Andy Fletcher last year. That seems to have concentrated the minds of surviving members Martin Gore and Dave Gahan, subsequently releasing an album called Memento Mori, whose lead single was titled “Ghosts Again”: “A place to hide the tears that you cried / Everybody says goodbye”.

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Arizona State Fairgrounds, Phoenix
22nd September, 2023

Much like the Renaissance Fair, the Arizona State Fair is something which we feel like doing only about once every five years. And by the end of the day, we have usually remembered exactly why we are such rare visitors. But it’s still an experience, and as such, deserves to be documented. It is certainly part of Arizona history, the State Fair dating back to well before there even was a state. It began in 1884, as the Arizona Territorial Fair, and has taken place on its current location since 1905, which is positively the dawn of time historically, by the state’s standards. There have been various interruptions since for wars, pandemics (both Spanish Flu and COVID-19) and economic depression, but the event is now a fixture in the calendar for October.

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It’s that time of year again, when we engage with the kind of music which, for the other 364 days of the year, I would probably run screaming from. But Eurovision deserves special treatment, being the musical equivalent of an MST3K marathon. You go in, knowing to expect a slew of women belting out power ballads, Justin Bieber wannabes, cultural appropriation, and the batshit crazy entries that every country tends to throw up now and again.

This year, there were 37 entries, some of which won’t even make it to the grand final on Saturday night. But they still have deserve their moment in the sun. We sat through all their music videos, so you don’t have to. Here’s our thoughts, scrawled in the moment, and a back of the envelope grade as to whether we like them or not. Which may (and probably will) be utterly independent of musical quality.

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