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We have  finally got there; live music has reappeared in our lives like a rising sun at the beginning of the summer. February 2019 was the last time our team stepped on a sticky beer-soaked floor to enjoy live music, at that point we could have never in our wildest dreams come up with the impact the global pandemic would have on our favourite pastime. 

I was so excited to go to my first post lockdown gig I ended up arriving at the wrong Bristol venue early without a clue why I was the only music goer in the car park, but when that light bulb finally (20 minutes later) flickered on in my head I arrived at the right venue. 

Instantly, I felt the socially distanced but warm embrace of the lost community I so fondly remember being part of, yes reuniting with music fans and friends of the last few years was a huge highlight of the dreaded queue which I somehow forgot existed. The only problem is when we have all been confined to our homes for a year and a half, surprisingly we all had the same type of story to retell but I was happy to hear their stories, because the community are back and ready to re-enter our shared world of live music.

One of the most grateful common conversations we’ve had was the fact that we’re all surprised that the majority of our much-loved venues and bands have managed to reappear from the rabbit hole of the COVID blackout. Heartedly we stood and sat 2 meters apart and shared the fund-raising ideas we all dived feet first to save the venues and bands we so much need in our lives, walking through the doors of these massively influential venues is the reward that we need for a very trying 18 months of only listening to music on your devices.

When you grow old before your technological timeframe you get an instant crash to earth with the new aspects of live music, pre buying tickets for yourself and your friends and making sure you have the right number of friends to seats ratio can be a nightmare, because you don’t want the band to play thinking that someone didn’t bother to turn up when in real terms it’s the fact you run out of friends after three people and can’t fill out that fourth seat. Then the QR codes I never heard of this invention until 2021 but apparently they have been around for a long time. Try telling that to my block of a Nokia phone when you need to scan the code to get in, but all joking aside, if this is what’s needed to get everything going again give me an extra empty seat and a thousand codes I’m willing and accepting.

But let’s be honest some changes are secretly likable, being escorted to your seat gave my ego an inflated sense of being a VIP. It almost resulted in giving everyone a royal wave until you realise you're not the only one battling this new sense of importance. Then comes the app to get drinks delivered to you, venues this is an indolence I like, but maybe not the best thing for my head the next morning as I seemed to turn the waiter into a marathon training Olympic athlete, but I’m sure going from the bar to my seat with drinks bouncing around won’t win that poor soul a gold medal.

The fact that bands seem to have untapped a huge amount of new material they have created provided me with a warm glow and light headedness which allowed me to forget the fact that some seats surprisingly are not designed for watching live music. New songs felt like a reward of coming out of your house and seeing the lights of returning to a life which was very normal in 2019.

I’ve always experienced hair raising on my arms and and shivers when enjoying music Infront of my eyes and ears, but this time it felt more than that from a couple hours of escape gave me a overwhelming positive impact on my wellbeing, when talking to my reunited community after this seemed to be a shared experience which left us all smiling when returning to our cars.