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Not really liking music has meant I’ve lived a joyless life, but boy, the money I’ve saved.
My Twitter feed was full of people either complaining that they couldn't get tickets or that they'd been asked to spend £600 to stand in the car park at the gig. They were outnumbered by people making a joke about trying to buy Oasis tickets and ending up with the drink called Oasis. You'd think you'd spot how many other people were making that joke and not bother making it. If Twitter is good for anything it's for showing comedians the kind of jokes that anyone can come up and that they thus definitely shouldn't be doing on stage.
So here is my Oasis joke that I bet no one else did.
I tried to buy oasis tickets but ended up with an Asus computer where all the letters on the keyboard were O. I guess they make those for people who are constantly surprised by everything.
I have to go to the Edinburgh Fringe now because I have just written the joke of the Fringe 2025. Will sell for cash, because I'm not going. The Oasis gigs are going to make the accommodation prices insane.
I haven't met many people who are as indifferent to music as I am. The only person I can really think of is David Mitchell and I suspect it might be due to a similar story from our childhood, where we were swotty kids who were never going to be in with the cool kids and maybe found pop music rather banal and cliched. I've always loved words and jokes, so whilst there are many artists who are excellent in that arena, most of them weren't in the charts in the early 80s. I don't think my parents were keen on us playing pop music (or listening to Radio 1 or watching ITV) so that might have been an influence, but I can't really claim that as my brother and especially my sister were into music (Jill was obsessed with the Bay City Rollers)
I was grabbed by comedy in the way that most people are grabbed by music and I also thought that sense of humour was a much better way to find your group of friends, rather than liking the same music. Because as well as liking the same comedy (as with music) being a good way to find like-minded souls, comedy is something everyone can actually DO, which is not true of music for most. You can choose your friends based on who you think is funny, not because they like (or often pretend to like - I know this was the case for me) the same music. I liked funny songs. I think music is OK, but I could do without it, but I couldn't do without words or jokes.
Occasionally now I come across an artist that makes me realise what other people get out of music, but even then I don't end up playing their records all the time. I'm listening to speech radio and podcasts and audiobooks. There's only 7 notes, but there are 26 letters and many more words than melodies. If you smash both together then that's cool, but I'd hate to define myself by music and it seemed weird to me as a kid that I wasn't allowed to be friends with someone just because they liked Phil Collins instead of the Sex Pistols.
Come on comedy is way better. For the price of what a pair of Oasis tickets will cost you, you can possibly buy every single ticket to a Leicester Square Theatre RHLSTP and have a private performance. Sometimes that's true if you just buy one ticket though.
I do have some happy music memories though and one of them involves Oasis. In an early Lee and Herring tour, where the actor Kevin Eldon was our support, we travelled around in a big minibus. It had a video player and we watched the first series of the X Files (that I had bought at great expense with money I didn't really had - the video player chewed up one of the tapes, but Stew and Kev refused to contribute any money to me for the loss). We also listened to music - more Stew's thing than mine, for sure and I've forgotten all of the guff that he played, but Kev would play the Oasis album and we had great fun singing the lyric of all the songs that they'd ripped off over the top of them "Me and You", "How Sweet To Be An Idiot" - there were quite a few more. Touring with Stewart wasn't always fun, but that's a nice memory. So thanks Oasis. It's not enough to make me pay £300 though, though I'd love to lead a stadium of people singing the real lyrics over the top of their stolen tunes.
