In 1976 the English novelist Martin Amis wrote a short review for The New Statesman of the Stones' first show at Earls Court. It appears in a book of Amis's essays entitled Visiting Mrs Nabokov, but I can't find it online. Here are some good bits:

The Rolling Stones at Earls Court
Throughout the entire course of my visit to the first of the Rolling Stones concerts at Earls Court Arena last Friday night, I did not get my eyes spooned out, my teeth stomped in, or my head kicked off. Neither was I deafened, trampled, robbed or maimed. For these small highpoints in an otherwise rather disappointing evening, I hereby give laconic thanks.

...

The ante-hall of the Earls Court Arena was a Brobdingnagian underground carpark of remote and overcrowded bars, sweet shops and dirty hot-drinks machines. Normally a token homogeneity obtains at the average rock concert: David Bowie fans all look and behave like David Bowie, Bryan Ferry fans look and behave like Bryan Ferry etc. But everyone is a Stones fan. On the concrete safari from the turnstiles to the concert area I was impartially menaced by sick junkies, posh druggies, junior droogs, fat suburbanite tikes (who half-tried to lure away the two girls I diffidently squired), elderly men in suits, platformed teenagers - and, I suppose, people like myself, who had quite liked the Stones a few years ago, who had somehow been given or got hold of tickets, and who were now wondering why they weren't somewhere else.

...

To a 'Dawn of Man'-type prelude from some undisclosed source, the huge leek-shaped tube behind the original stage started to unpeel in segments - and there, perched high on the tip of one of the descending petals, was the awful Mick himself. The stage flattened bouncily out, Mick began jumping up and down on the end of it, and the whopping chords of 'Honky Tonk Woman' [sic] cracked out into the darkness. Immediately, as is the way at rock concerts, everyone got to their feet. I assume that the first few people to stand up do so out of genuine excitement; the rest do so because they can't see if they don't.

...

I was glad I could see the stage, unimpressive though it was from my vantage - and it must have been a flea-circus to the thousands further back. Glad, because it soon became clear that the evening would offer nothing to gratify even the rudest ear. Mick's voice came over as a strangled, monotone holler; the instruments weren't distinguishable from one another; the two percussion men (Watts plus a grinning bongoist) merely provided the basic fuzz on the general cataract of sound. And this wasn't, as they say, just me: a dozen bars of 'Get off my Cloud' [sic], easily identifiable on record, passed without comment from the audience, and only when Mick started up did the crowd click, granting the applause traditionally accorded to an ex-number one. Indicatively, too, the two or three new Jagger-Richards creations left the fans embarrassingly cold; only the songs already embossed on the responses could be recreated by the frenzied approximations from the stage. No, it was all too big; there were too many people; you couldn't respond to the music because it couldn't respond to you.

Visually, though, one got some point out of it - or some of the point of Mick. This well-put-together, vitamin-packed unit of a human being does not really dance any more: it's simply that his head, his shoulders, his pelvis, both his arms, both his legs, both his huge feet and both his buttocks are wriggling, at great speed, independently, all the time. When at one point Mick abruptly fell over, for instance, you couldn't tell whether or not he had meant to; it didn't particularly matter, but you couldn't tell. And when he swung out on a cable over the adoring stalls, I wondered how he could contain his galvanic twitching long enough to stay attached to the rope. No question: Mick is, without a doubt, one of our least sedentary millionaires.

Such energy communicates itself, even to a half-engaged audience. "My head is really scrambled," a nearby fan sobbed after 'Midnight Rambler'. "Want a Kit-Kat?" droned another lugubriously to his girlfriend after the same song. But the more vehemently eager-to-be-pleased sections of the audience, having set their hearts on losing their heads, now began to behave as if they actually had. Jumping up and down was the favourite form this activity took, and soon everyone near me was doing it, despite the vicious denunciations from further behind. "Are you feeling good?" Mick demanded. "ARE YOU FEELING GOOD?" No, not at all, I thought, deciding to leave. And having staggered through the forsaken halls into the Earls Court Road, I was obscurely relieved to find that the world hadn't gone mad in my absence. Perhaps I'm too old for this sort of thing now - too old to buy fruitless discomfort at £1 an hour. I shouldn't have gone. I'm never going again.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2023-05-21 16:34 by bv.

Beautifully put - it's Martin Amis, after all - but I suspect a few here will furiously disagree with the writer. I wasn't there, so cannot comment.

I read that piece a few years ago (my library has the book) and I immediately thought Amis was a literary novelist who resented the bigger fame of rock stars, as Marianne Faithfull relates in her book MEMORIES, DREAMS & REFLECTIONS. Below is from when she taught lyric writing at a school, and the other teachers included famous poets/novelists (whose fame, alas, was not that of rock stars). The Allen is Allen Ginsberg:




P.S. I'm also reminded of reading earlier this year a book review of a Martin Amis biography in which a friend of his parents described Amis at age 18: "He was tired of everything before he knew anything."



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2013-09-28 09:02 by Title5Take1.

It's not the only Amis' piece on the Rolling Stones.
In his book that, in Italian, is entitled 'Esperienza' (Experience) talking about his Christmastime in 1970 he writes about listening 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out' for the first time, togheter with his brother, and how they were impressed by 'Stray Cat Blues'live version.
Great writer, fantastic description of an experience we all have can understand very well.
Bye, Luca

Literature--teaching and writing about it--is my job, and although I'd never read that extract before, it confirms my opinion of both Martin Amis's talent and his taste. (And his father wasn't much better.) Nuff said.

>> This well-put-together, vitamin-packed unit of a human being <<

That's nicely said :E