Panic at the Disco Tour Diary: part 2

Everybody gets there and everybody gets their way: London Roundhouse March 10th and 11th

Monday morning was a tense and grumpy run to the train station then 2 hours cuddled up in a hoodie with some coffee, some Cobra Starship and trying to update this with a sore arm and really bruised fingers. London was the first day of street team as well so imagine my delight when it started throwing it down just outside King’s Cross. It felt weird being back in London so soon after I’d left – I’m still on autopilot and got halfway to my old flat before rerouting to Alex’s. I arrived drenched, grumpy and cross but fortunately Alex is a wonderful hostess and plied me with tea and hot showers and gossip set to a soundtrack of Nick Cave albums (Murder Ballads is giving me ideas about all the musical cautionary tales I want to write). London was always going to be the big Dress Up Day, which was kind of depressing; there’s nothing like straightening your hair whilst watching sheets of rain outside the window to fill you with a sense of futility.

Street Teaming at the Roundhouse was…difficult. London crowds are always a bit snottier than the rest of the country, partly because a large part of them are tourists so are there in ones and twos and often don’t speak English and the other half… well growing up in London is bound to be quite different from growing up anywhere else. Those kids have been at the centre of the commercial scene forever and they know it. But I digress… Panic fans have always been known for being a bit on the cliquey side as well so the London Panic date was a double whammy of “and why should we sign up for your mailing list? Why would we need to find out our news in so plebian a way? Do you know the band? No? oh well….” (all direct quotes except use of the word plebian).

Eventually the mailing lists were too wet to write on and my hands were too frozen to even hold the clipboard so I went and hid in the café and watched Zack and the venue staff get the Meet and Greet kids in. This is the first time I’ve said this but it’s not going to be the last, I have no idea how Zack does what he does; he’s patient, funny and really compassionate to these often quite hysterical fans, he never comes off as being the kind of person who’s a barrier between Panic and their fans but at the same time, do anything that compromises their safety and he’ll have you in a second. Zack is totally my favourite.

By about 6.30 I had three full lists, a completely numb hand and a band-mate incoming, so Tom and I ditched the queue for the relative safety, warmth and scotch-giving properties of The Enterprise. Depressingly, they didn’t ID me – I guess I really do look older than your average scene kid now. Eventually the scotch and the real coal fire did their work and the queue vanished so we sprinted across the road and into the venue.
You can always tell that the London gigs are meant to be the big ones – there’s a massive (like Massive, Zack tried to give me the measurements and I couldn’t even figure it out then) Pretty. Odd. Banner in the foyer, the staff have Pretty Odd sashes, there are balloons, there are people in suits with animal masks, it all seems to be boding so much better than Birmingham.

We watch Black Gold from the back and they seem much better tonight – I think that’s more me than them though: compared to Metro Station who are the very definition of bouncy and accessible and Panic whose songs I know inside out, Black Gold are a little less obvious and have actual well written songs which need more than one listen. By the third track I was smiling, and I was starting to actually recognise tracks towards the end of the set. It’s kind of hilarious, now that I know it’s going to happen, to listen to the split second delay (is that…? Oh my god it is!), then hysterical scream when Brendon walks on and it’s kind of cool to see him and Eric perform together with a slightly different dynamic than when they do it with Panic. But Shine is definitely the thing that sticks out of Black Gold’s set for me; it has that gorgeous ascending melody that builds and builds and makes me want to buy it, learn it and perform it myself.

There’s not much I can say about Metro station that I didn’t say last night – I really like them and I know not everyone does. But there’s lots of different ways to enjoy music and not all of them involve listening critically to well structured music. Metro Station are accessible, they’re obvious as hell and they’re two very pretty boys coiling an audience up in the palms of their hands and making us dance, clap and sing. There’s nothing challenging about them, they’re barely playing live but they have a knack of telling us what to do so that we do it and convincing us we have a good fucking time, and part of me sometimes needs that. They do, however, trot out a very entertaining spiel towards the end of their set, telling us that they’ll be in the bar, where they will be drinking LEGALLY. They seem happy about the relative differences in legal drinking ages between the US and UK. Bless. God that sounds patronising, but just….bless!

At some point in the evening, Tom realised he hadn’t bothered to put eyeliner on. Instead of us both skidaddling towards the nearest toilet with a mirror, he instead insisted on kneeling at my feet so I could administer instant emo there and then. Part of me hates that he’s tall enough that he has to kneel to put me at hand/eye height, part of me thinks it’s ridiculously funny that we had a band night out that involved both whisky and girls putting eyeliner on boys in the middle of a Panic at the Disco gig. Wearesoscene. Except the part where we’re not at all.

Immediately after Metro Station, we started to make our way to the front. Tom and I have both been to lots of Roundhouse gigs before and the relatively open plan of the venue usually means it’s a piece of piss to circle round to the front and slot in on the second row somewhere. Nope. This is where it all started to go wrong. There’s always a bit of pushing at the front of big gigs, but it’s usually reasonably good natured and reasonably organised – you always get a sense that the crowd as a whole is pushing. Forwards. You also get the feeling of the crowd as a single entity, and that if one person is moving against the grain everyone else will push back against them (mixed metaphors much? Hi!)

But this…. This was different and patently unsafe. I guess because of the age of the crowd and the number of people who were there in small groups. People were pushing backwards. And Forwards . all over the fucking place really and instead of doing the sensible thing and trying to absorb and stop the movement, everyone (ok, mostly little girls) were leaning into it then screaming in terror (actually literally in terror which made me feel so awful for them) when the entire crowd nearly landed on top of them. And part of me wanted to be really impatient and pick them all up by their directional fringes or Clan hoodies and pop them down at the back of the room with an instruction to not come back to the front until they were old enough to handle it, but the rest of me remembered a little, pint-sized 13 year old who got hauled out of the front of Greenday at Reading ‘95 because she was desperate to see Billie Joe up close and wouldn’t let 25,000 adults deter her. I guess Tom and I decided for the sake of our gig, and because the terrified screams of young teens was kind of emotive, that we’d be pit parents which is probably very stuck up of us, but I really hope that at the very least a couple of people had a slightly less bad time than they would have done, especially the two really tiny little girls who we held up right through the gig and who stuck it out like troupers.

When Panic eventually came on (I say eventually like they were late, but there are actually the smoothest, tightest timed gigs I’ve ever been to) everything went mental. Literally mental. Which was pretty fucking amazing actually. We’re So Starving might be a bit of a lollipop when it’s the first new material you’ve heard from them in 18 months (thanks very much for THAT News Years surprise boys) but it makes a great set opener: two long slow sing-along phrases of building anticipation with the lights off (did I make this up, anyone else who was there?) then that tiny pause before 1500 pairs of feet simultaneously left the ground and 1504 voices screamed YOU and the whole thing slammed into an unholy, fun mess of dancing singing and shouting. Nine in the Afternoon was definitely the highlight of the set that night, early enough on that no one was tired and battered yet, known enough that everyone knew the words, but new enough that everyone was excited to know the words, happy, bouncy and a really great moment of every single person in the room being happy to be right there, right then doing that.

From that point on though, the sheen kind of went off the whole thing, partly because there was a small part of the crowd who were actually just fucking around and causing trouble (starting a really vicious circle pit in Martydom and using it as a cover to steal people’s phones from their pockets? No I’m not kidding, yes boys if I find you I will wring your stupid, Scene little necks). I think it was around this point that I saw a 12/13 year old girl take an elbow to the face that probably broke her nose which really put my mood out for the rest of the gig. The band though – high on energy, light on banter (I think this was the only night they didn’t introduce Lying with the whole “who here is single ?”spiel). The Roundhouse is an incredible venue and I’ve yet to see a band there that hasn’t been absolutely thrilled to be in such an amazing building and upped their act accordingly. Everything felt very breakneck though – the old material was met with such frightening enthusiasm from the crowd that they flew through it and the only real respite was during the three ‘new’ tracks: That Green Gentleman, She’s a Handsome Woman and Mad as Rabbits ( as a side note, this was the only night of the tour where this seemed to happen – at all the northern gigs a reasonable proportion of the crowd knew the songs, which makes me wonder if the London crowd was made up of fewer Fans and more fans, or fewer people who hadn’t been sitting up on patdonline and youtube watching the videos and leaks from the European shows to learn the new material ahead of our shows). The whole show was kind of exhilarating in this respect, and coupled with that adrenaline rush of actually trying to stay safe in an unsafe crowd that you get. It felt odd though – pits like that are fun at say and Antiflag or MSI gig (first two bands who came to mind) but it felt horribly jarring at a Panic show, especially at the point where Tom and I had to break up an actual fist fight between two skinny Scene kids (the whole thing was visually ridiculous – one was wearing a Fall Out Boy is for lovers t-shirt, the other a Break Dance Not Hearts one and they stood glowering, trying to throw punches between us) so by the end of the set I was bruised, panicky with a bad case of Red Mist.

At the end of the set, what can only be described as an Unholy Clusterfuck erupted – raise your hand if you were at the Roundhouse and didn’t lose a phone, jumper or shoe? Half the gig piled out to the Merch table to meet Black Gold and Metro Station – the other headed to the front to look for their missing stuff and wrestle for set lists and drumsticks. We spent a futile 10 minutes looking for Tom’s phone before admitting that it really had been stolen right out his pocket by someone before trying to head out to the cloakroom. I get swept up in a crush of people and end up pressed right against Trace Cyrus and have to spend a few minutes trying tactfully to extricate myself and tell him I thought his band was great before doing the same thing to Eric about 10 seconds and 5 feet later. By now I’m tired, bruised, Tom’s understandably pissed off and we both want to go home so when we get downstairs to find a monster of a cloakroom queue doubling back on itself 5 times something inside me just, gives up and decides that This. just. Won’t. do. I crack a joke to Tom, mentioning that my anxiety meds are in my bag and I should fake an attack to get to the head of the queue, he agrees, but the second I let the thought in, my chest clamps and I start to hyperventilate, I hold it together for maybe a minute before my vision starts to go and I manage to whisper that I’m going to pass out now before I collapse into Toms arms. Luckily there was a security guard nearby, Tom is strong and I am light so I’m actually carried like a 19th century heroine to the head of the queue and my bag is fetched. I come to being sat on the counter with a bottle of water being pressed into my hands, swallow my pills and die quietly of embarrassment until a friendly first aider comes downstairs to check on me. I reassure him that I’m fine, and it’s really just hometime, Tom whispers in my ear that I deserve an Oscar and I haven’t got the heart to tell him it wasn’t an act. after that many jokes are made about me having a Panic! attack (they haven't got tired yet so if you want to join in in the comments go for it).

Outside the venue, I democratically distribute the street team posters I wasn’t allowed to use inside to a few cold looking girls who are sniffling a bit and trying to decide if they have enough money to buy a poster from one of the hawk-like touts outside which seems to make their night, which kind of makes mine and then it’s back to Alex’s for a large glass of wine and a long shower. Odd gig. Not all bad, but not something I’m keen to repeat.

Tuesday 11th
Tuesday is an off day for the boys and therefore also for me. I take advantage of being in London to stock up on beer and wend my way Eastwards to catch up with my boys in Clapton. We get slowly toasted and play Guitar Hero (at which they totally school me) and Sing Star (at which I totally school them) before I have to climb on a train back to Leeds for a whole 10 hours in my own bed.