Kings of fucking Leon

Let me preface this by saying that Kings of Leon put on a great live show. They came out on-time, performed beautifully, played all the good songs and didn’t show any symptoms of the ‘exhaustion’ that resulted in the tour being postponed earlier this year. In fact, you can read all about it here. That said, there’s just no writing a review of their show without saying something of KoL fans. Never before have I encountered an audience with such a high proportion of stuck-up pricks.

I arrived at about 7:45 and then proceeded to work my way to the front of the stage. I ended up getting within about ten meters of the front barricade, just right of centre, where my friend was waiting for me. Little did we realise at the time but we were in the worst standing position in the arena. It became apparent that the people who surrounded us on all sides had decided to get as close as they could to the front of the stage, yet had failed to consider what this actually meant.

For all the stuck-up fans of any band out there, if you’re going to get up close at a gig maybe you should take the following into account:

Deciding to stand ten metres from the front barrier means being prepared for the possibility of getting bumped, knocked or touched by other audience members. Obviously no-one wants to get punched, kicked, or jumped on. But the fact of the matter is that when the music is getting heavy people are going to move around and the idea of personal space pretty much goes out the window. If you can’t handle the heat, sit at the back. Getting close to the band comes at a price.

I ended up stuck in between ‘too-old-to-be-here’ people and the 13 year old girls. This limited my ability to jump around but there were still a few opportunities I couldn’t pass up. For example, when they played ‘Four Kicks’ early in the set I decided to get my jump on. After all, it was a rock and roll show.

The swarm of girls in front of me seemed none too pleased and I was actually told off by the older folks to my left. Yes, you read correctly. I was told off, at a rock show, for jumping around. Let me make it clear; I wasn’t exactly frogstomping my way through the crowd, (it was KoL, not Limp Bizkit), so I kept it pretty tame.  Most of the time I was nodding my head and enjoying the show, keeping to myself. However I still felt that I reserved the right to jump around and have fun when it got heavy.

For most of the gig I had an older woman to my left, maybe 45, actually trying to elbow myself and others out of her way so she could have a metre radius in which to do her thing. At one point I got asked to move back a few steps, to which I could only reply that there were a few thousand people behind me and that moving back a few steps might prove difficult. She did have a point I suppose. She and I had touched elbows several times thanks to her Nutbush-inspired freestyle dancing and clearly she should have been able to move about the area without any disturbance or intrusion.

So by now you’re probably thinking that it was I who was the turd in the punchbowl, and that I was probably ruining it for everyone else. Well this was a rock concert and we were standing right up near the stage. I would understand people getting uppity if I was acting like a tool, throwing fists and kicks around and dropping people like no-ones business. In the end, I jumped to a few songs and because we were all trying to get as close as possible, yes, I ended up inadvertently touching my fellow audience members. But is this really unreasonable? I didn’t begrudge the old-timers for coming to see a band of boys who could have been their children, nor did I mind sharing space with the young teenagers who kept screaming for Caleb to take off his shirt. For some reason my kind wasn’t as welcome.

Another thing I found surprising was the lack of audience response during the set. Although KoL weren’t very engaging with the audience there were clear moments where Caleb deliberately did not sing lyrics so the audience would. The part of the audience I was in was either too cool or too stupid to sing along. I’m fairly certain I got a look or two for trying to sing along. Again… what the hell?

I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. This gig confirmed my suspicion that most KoL fans are pains in the hole. With KoL, there are the people that were ‘cool’ enough to know about them before ‘Only By The Night’ and then there are those who didn’t know about them before that album.

For some reason, people who knew about them before they became massively successful seem to think that this makes them better than the rest of us. I guess there’s something to be said about knowing something before it was cool. My only problem with this is that all of the people I know who claim to have known KoL before OBTN seem to save a special look of disgust for people who didn’t know about the band before then.

I actually can’t think of any other band where there is a greater sense of superiority among people who knew about a band before it was mainstream. I can empathise with these people, particularly when something is just becoming mainstream and you get some precocious punk trying to tell you how you should check this band you’ve been into for years already.

But to those folks, I say get over it. Seriously. Move on. If you need something like that to make you cool or interesting, you’re not cool or interesting.

I’m actually glad I didn’t discover KoL until OBTN because I’ve been able to enjoy each of their albums to their fullest. In the end, those KoL fans who look at people like me with disgust are usually the ones who say ‘the new albums are shit.’ Well actually they’re not shit, they’re just different. Maybe if you were really into KoL you could enjoy them too? Oh what’s that? You’ve got your head stuck so far up your own arse while you worship your copy of ‘Aha Shake Heartbreak’ that you can’t enjoy ‘Come Around Sundown’? To them I say ‘sods you all!’ Or, as Ice Cube so eloquently put it, ‘eat shit and die!’