Daft Punk is Playing at My House
Daft Punk is Playing at My House
On cultivating your passions, and why staying in is the new going out.
This is one of two wildly different music-related essays I’ve been working on for a while. The other is about the joy of a good night out as you enter middle age. This one is more suited to the current moment: when the evenings are still dark and cold and staying in remains preferable to going out.
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One of the biggest terrors I feel as a parent isn’t exhaustion, geopolitics, poverty or what happens when my kids get online. It’s the existential threat of losing a sense of who I once was in those carefree days before children. Empty nest syndrome—the feeling of grief that parents encounter when their kids leave home—can be directly connected to that loss of self. It’s not hard to imagine a world where you hit your mid-50s, your adult children are out there living their best lives, and you struggle to recall the person you once were, all those sleepless nights ago.
That’s why it’s so important we cultivate our hobbies, tending to them as allotments of passion, even amidst the chaos of raising tiny humans. And that’s why this is a long-ass essay about music. Nothing in my life—outside of my family—has brought me more joy during my time on this earth. Your enjoyment will depend on how strongly you agree. Consider yourself warned.
One of many strange things that happen on turning 40—a sneak peek for those on the ascent, a sad reminder for those making their way down the other side—is that you start to catch yourself saying the oddest things: things that a 40-year-old man would say. The types of gaffes you’ve heard older men make all your life—a dead giveaway they belonged to a previous generation. Things you’d have heard in your twenties that would have made you recoil in horror. Things your parents might have said.
Things your parents did say: decades ago, watching Glastonbury on BBC2, meekly entering your teenage years, staying up late to watch whoever was headlining the Pyramid Stage that year. Hundreds of thousands of revellers, a sea of bobbing heads, broken up by all kinds of flags: a kaleidoscope of colours and indecipherable jokes, a PhD in pop culture required to make sense of them; acting as location markers to aid friends returning with makeshift trays of plastic pints.
You’ll watch Glastonbury from afar and wonder—wouldn’t it be so much better IF I WAS THERE?! You will, one day (luckily, more than one) grace the rolling plains of Worthy Farm yourself. There will be the year when you end up with sunstroke, realising only after being informed by a doctor a week later, seeing your symptoms and asking, “Were you at Glastonbury? You’re the fifth case I’ve seen this week.” Another year you will propose to your future wife on the grassy plains, and upon asking a passing man-with-a-DSLR to take your picture, you’ll later learn he travels around the world with Princes Harry and William as their official press photographer. Glastonbury will become one of your most beloved places on earth—one week a year where a bubble of joy secures itself atop a Somerset field, a place where you can fully inhabit your true self, and you’ll walk off the farm with a deep sadness on leaving a place that means so much to you—a place that played centre stage for key moments of your life. These vignettes steer you towards the place you find yourself today.
This is all to come. But as a teenager, in your living room in the middle of the 1990s, you’ll wonder what it might be like to be amongst that crowd and experience all of that until your mum says: “Well, it’s lovely to watch all of those people and all that mud from the comfort of the couch.” It felt odd to hear it then. But, in a peculiar echo of the past, I recently realised I’d arrived at the same place.
Last year a close friend came to visit Barcelona for the weekend. We did what Barcelona does best—eating, drinking and stomping our way through the city. Upon returning home early in the evening, I asked my friend—a fellow Kendrick Lamar devotee—if he’d seen The Big Stepper Tour: Live From Paris on Amazon Prime. I was still waxing lyrical to anyone who would listen about why Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is the most important album of the decade. He hadn’t seen it, so we decided to rest our weary legs and enjoy the show from the comfort of the couch. And I was staggered by how satisfied I was with the experience.
In the pro column: I can sit in my own chair (damn, this is a terrible start, I’m straight in with the old man cliche); I can pause the show when I need to quickly nip to the bathroom, with no pushing past two hundred people and hoping I can find my way back; beers are a lot cheaper and colder from the fridge; I can see the show from every angle, without standing on my tiptoes to peer over the six-foot dude in front of me; I can make it as loud as I like—a common issue with gigs in cities, like the Arcade Fire gig in Hyde Park I left halfway through after the lead singer told the crowd they needed to “be careful not to wake the rich people up.”
Weighing down the other side? An insurmountable catch: the ineffable feeling of being there, present in a shared space with hundreds, if not thousands, of other music lovers, coming together to watch an artist perform, experiencing what French sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence:”
Collective effervescence refers to moments in societal life when the group of individuals that makes up a society comes together in order to perform a ritual. During these moments, the group comes together and communicates in the same thought and participates in the same action, which serves to unify a group of individuals. When individuals come into close contact with one another and when they are assembled in such a fashion, a certain “electricity” is created and released, leading participants to a high degree of collective emotional excitement or delirium.
The live music experience will never be bettered. But when you look at what it takes to attend a gig as a parent—exorbitant Ticketmaster prices being artificially inflated by Live Nation and a cottage industry of touts; Brexit’s damning effects on touring schedules (meaning UK artists are finding it more challenging to make their way across the world, and European artists locked out of the UK); and the cumulative cost of a night out once you tally up the tickets, taxis, sitters, drinks, and whatever you manage to cram down your face in the time between leaving the house and making it to the venue—then the concert en casa takes on an appeal of its own.
The TNF-Approved Home Gig List
Put the kids to bed, partake in your poison of choice, settle into the couch, and enjoy the masters at work. This is a selection of my favourite live gigs you can attend from the comfort of your couch. I’ve included links to watch, and in the case of the YouTube videos, have sourced the highest quality sources available. So, without further ado …
Radiohead: At Home With Radiohead (Watch on YouTube, 1080p / 5.1)
This one goes first. Because maybe it saved me. 2020. Those first few months of the pandemic. We were in Spain, experiencing one of the world’s harshest lockdowns—our children couldn’t leave the house for seven weeks. I missed a lot. But live music—and the joy of being crushed in a crowd of strangers, screaming lyrics together—felt like it might never return. It had been stripped away almost overnight—the world had become a strange and terrifying place. We did things during those months that we’ll look back on in decades to come and wonder whether it was a collective nightmare. Billions struggled to make sense of a world that no longer made any.
In the middle of all of this, I like to think that Thom Yorke hopped onto the Radiohead Whatsapp group and threw out a suggestion: “Guys … what if we took some of our live gigs out of the archive, dusted them off, and put them up onto YouTube?” Ed replied with a 👍, and Jonny with a 🎸. Whatever happened before wasn’t important; what happened next was: an email to their enormous mailing list (what, me, jealous?) informing them, “Now that you have no choice whether or not you fancy a quiet night in, we hereby present the first of several LIVE SHOWS from the Radiohead Public Library.” These Friday drops were released for 13 weeks, until “the esteemed government of the United Kingdom deemed it time to ease lockdown.”
The audio on these videos is unparalleled. I’ve listened to this band more than any other, and they’ve rarely sounded better than these gigs. This series of gigs was a blessing for my mental health back then—a weekly concert I could look forward to, a chance to watch my favourite band somewhere in the world, a few hours to escape the house in mind, if not in body.
You might prefer a specific vintage of Radiohead. No matter which way you lean, they’ve got you. Maybe you’d like to head back in time to 1994, when the band were still in their Pablo Honey era at London’s Astoria, and Thom solemnly introduces, “Yet another new song … this one’s called ‘My Iron Lung.’” Or to be In The Basement with the band in 2008, whilst Nigel Godrich is putting the finishing touches to In Rainbows (which we all know is their finest album, I’ll take no further emails or comments at this time.) Want to watch them a month after the release of OK Computer? Sure thing. You may believe—correctly—that A Moon Shaped Pool is a haunting swansong from a band who are still putting out music as good as they’ve ever made, almost forty years (there’s that number again) into their musical career: then take 2016’s Lollapalooza Berlin headline set which is as close to a greatest hits setlist you’re ever going to get. “Everything in Its Right Place” into “Idioteque”? Mercy me. Leaving the stage the first time to “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” before the second encore comes crashing down with “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”? And back out once more for “Creep” and “Karma Police”? Those lucky Germans. (Yes, I’m watching this as I finish this essay.)
They left most of them up on YouTube. They’re all excellent quality, but they come with a huge caveat: if you don’t have an adblocker or pay for YouTube Premium, then you’re going to ruin your experience entirely. A 30-second unskippable advert for butter interrupting “Pyramid Song” will somewhat ruin your experience.
(This bit ran longer than expected. What can I say? Those streams got me through some very dark times.)