“Anything is possible, but I’m not sure we will like it” — live music after lockdown, six years on

Dushanbe, July 2026

There are events that, for one reason or another, I had forgotten or removed from my head — and for me one of those forgotten boxes was full of live music. Let’s say that maybe, over the years, if specific memories are not stimulated in any way, your memory selects them and files them in a remote corner of the brain. You may not remember anything for years.

A few days ago, while I was looking at some photos posted by a friend of mine, I reopened that box. The box where everything had been stored — almost without my knowledge, I dare add. What came out of it was not a date or a headline, but a feeling: the noise of live music in a room full of strangers.

The photo that brought live music back

The photos I was looking at were those of a concert in an indefinite place in Europe. I don’t even remember who was playing: just a rock band on a stage and thousands of people sweating like never before, singing and hugging each other. If I remember correctly, these things happened just before March 2020.

Until that day, I also loved to go and see these events. Most of the concerts I have seen in the last twenty years, I have seen them with Peter: a very dear friend, a Coventry fan, who shares my passion for live music. For years we exchanged information about new artists. Even if we didn’t speak for a month, when we met it was almost inevitable that we had been listening to the same records.

Three nights of live music I keep going back to

If I were to list all the concerts we saw together, this post would get far too long and you would get bored. Let’s say that, above all, there are three shows I love to remember.

Glastonbury together in a tent, like two teenagers. Radiohead in St Gallen, in Switzerland, under torrential rain. And then Paul Simon in Hyde Park — to be clear, we did not see that one together. Anyway, Peter reminds me of that concert every time we speak, and regularly, every time, I have to remind him that we did not see that particular show together.

This happens because he doesn’t remember attending many gigs before March 2020 without me. And frankly, I don’t remember many concerts I have seen in the last twenty years without him. I don’t really remember why I missed that Paul Simon tour either. I saw him twice afterwards, but not that night in Hyde Park in 2012, so it is not part of the long history of Peter and me going to shows together. Maybe I lost it because of the Olympics, maybe for some other reason: it is a fact that I did not see it, and after all the times Peter has talked about it, I think I missed something significant.

In short, these three essential concerts are in fact two that we saw together and one that I did not see, but that I remember well. The photos had opened my memory, my memories of the time it had once been.

The streaming years: live music without the crowd

For a couple of strange years, live music moved into our living rooms. Artists opened unusual places — empty theatres, warehouses, rooftops — for vital, often lonely and poignant shows. You paid for an online ticket and enjoyed the concert without the queue at the entrance, without worrying about whether it would rain, or whether the ride home would be crowded.

You didn’t think about finding the best spot, or about being overshadowed by whoever was taller than you. You worried about the stability of the Wi-Fi instead: live music at home was still live music, technically. You checked that nobody would call you during the set, you prepared your food calmly, and you could stay in your slippers — or even naked, if that was your way of being rock’n’roll during an online experience.

The beer was as fresh as you wanted, but the volume of the television could never be as high as at a real gig. The neighbour had just had a baby, and you couldn’t disturb them. Maybe you put on your headphones — but what if somebody knocked at the door and you didn’t hear it?

Peter was watching the same gig, at his house. He might be in the Alps on holiday while I was in Dushanbe, on the Varzob river, in the capital of Tajikistan. How beautiful is it, we are still at the same concert in some way?

That’s nice… Uhm… But my hands were dry. There were no drops of beer falling from the two pints I used to carry back to my spot, pushing past the backs of the people I crossed on the way from the bar. I didn’t have to stretch my neck to look for the place where I thought I remembered Peter was, and where I usually got lost anyway.

The night I lost Peter at a Paul Simon concert

I remember once, for a Paul Simon concert again, I lost Peter. Completely lost: no phone line and no sense of orientation at all. We only found each other at the end of the concert — he was already heading towards Notting Hill, me towards Putney. That is the kind of small disaster you can only live through in a crowd, and it is exactly the kind of thing a stream can never give you back. Live music is also the mess that happens around the music.

Six years later, live music is back — we are not

Then the vaccines arrived, the restrictions were lifted one after the other, the festivals returned and so did the queues at the entrance. Live music survived: 2026 is full of tours, sold-out nights and small clubs that reopened. Our habit, somehow, did not survive with it.

It has been more than six years since March 2020, and more than six years since I last went to a concert with Peter. We keep listening to the same music and following the same artists, but we have not stood in the same crowd since. Sometimes we use FaceTime, or the phone: we know where we are, what we do, what we listen to and what we think. We simply don’t stand next to each other anymore.

My memory had erased all this. Perhaps it had deliberately clouded memories that it knew would hurt in a very profound way. I miss those moments, that contact, that sweat, that effort, that exchange of views with Peter between two songs.

Nobody counts lockdowns anymore. We count the concerts we never went to.

Back then it would have been enough to wash your hands, wear a mask and keep some distance for a few months. Now it would be enough to book two tickets, agree on a date and get on a plane. Both things sound ridiculously simple. Only one of them has already been proven impossible, and the only thing still missing is the live music we used to share.

So many things are possible as long as you don’t know they are impossible, wrote Norton Juster. Anything is possible — I am just still not sure we will like all of it. This summer I am going to try the easy version, the one that only needs a calendar and a booking page: two tickets, one date, one crowd. Peter, if you are reading this, you get to pick the band.

Keep reading

If you want more live music from this corner of the magazine, browse our selection of essential UK indie releases of 2026 and our London letter, If you can’t come to me, I’ll go to you.