‘A-one-two-three-four …’
The smell of warm grass rises in the tent. Afternoon sun throws a strong but diffuse light as, smartly turned out in their tailored suits and winklepickers, The Fourmost from Liverpool bash into it.
The tent is not large. It’s not like The Big Top at the circus I went to in London that had horses, elephants and lions tamed with whips. This one holds maybe 50 people max, though it isn’t that full for the Fourmost. I was the first in here, and I’ve been sitting cross-legged in front of the stage for what seemed like hours waiting for something to happen; staring at the drum kit and amplifiers with anticipation, tempered by not a little resentment.
Living no more than two minutes’ walk from the park in which this tent is pitched, I feel a strong sense of ownership when it comes to this field where I spend most of my non-school hours, playing football or cricket or just hanging out with my park mates, drinking R Whites Cream soda and chalking swear words on the shelter. Imagine my outrage on turning up to find the field fenced off and a charge of thruppence to get in. It was like being taxed to get into your own sitting room. The pretext for this intrusion is of course charity. It’s something called a fête. None of my park friends is around, and it’s full of boring rubbish like tombola stands where grown-ups can win booze—together with a load of God stuff.
If you ask me, there is already far too much God stuff in this park. If it’s not the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s the Mormons or the Baptists, all of whom flock to the field in holiday-time to feast on young souls. They’re always trying to separate you into groups for organized games; giving you free lemon squash and saying, ‘this will be fun!’ Then before you know it you’re sitting round in a circle bashing tambourines and talking about Jesus. And if it’s not the God-people it’s the nonces …
Watching the Fourmost from Liverpool has got to be more fun than Kumbaya with the Baptists or dodging paedophiles. This is, after all, my first ever live gig. However, right from the start something is telling me that the band’s punning name fulfills only the cardinal half of its two possible numerical interpretations: yes, there are four of them, but no they are not, let’s be honest, the foremost, F-O-R-E. Granted, if you screw up your eyes and let your vision go out of focus they look a bit like the Beatles (though less handsome, and with not such good songs) but it’s the Beatles of a few years ago. The actual Beatles have moved on from tailored suits and winklepickers. Their new film Help! has fancy abroad locations and a whole new way of having fun that you don’t always understand because it’s completely weird. And the Beatles are in Technicolour now, where the Fourmost seem to be still in Black & White.
The level of excitement in the tent is not high anyway, the audience being mostly grownups with kids, a few dogs and hardly any teenagers (a bad sign). But even with my undeveloped nine year-old critical faculties I can see there’s cause for concern. I mean, I don’t want to come across like some kind of prepubescent Kenneth Tynan, but it’s clear that what we’re watching here is not the first division. Not even the second or third. Watching the Fourmost, in fact, is a bit like watching Southend United lose four-one to Tranmere Rovers at Roots Hall; better than bashing tambourines for a beaker of lemon Treetop, but not something to set the heart of youth aflame with rebellious passions.
Nevertheless, among the mixed emotions I feel—balancing if not entirely cancelling out the umbrage taken from being done out of an afternoon’s football and low-level vandalism—there is a sort of visceral fascination.
The way everything gleams. The light glinting off cymbals and the metal pickup covers of the guitars. The bigness of the sound compared to listening on the radio—or even the stereogram at home—so you feel the bass right inside your chest and the snare whacking you round the head. The kinetic force of the performers: the thing it does to the air to have four grownups going hard at it with their lungs and their instruments. And somehow the fact that the Fourmost aren’t exactly the crème de la crème doesn’t matter so much compared to fact that they are here in real life rather than on the TV (which at this point in the sixties means small screens and tinny sound). Everything is bigger, louder, more blatant in real life, and the blemishes that come along with that only seem to bring the music closer. A gig is a gig, just as a football match where your fourth-division team loses four-one is still, for all that, a football match—with corner flags, officials, and a cheering, jeering, swearing crowd—a big-boy step up from your park kickaround.
Eventually the hit is played and the set comes to an end. Liverpool’s not-quite-finest make to leave the stage, then take a polite smattering of applause as justification for an encore. I drift away—unimpressed but hungry for more, and better.