Well, here's an unusual set of circumstances. I took my little girl - or not so little any more at eleven - to see Cher Lloyd this evening in Folkestone. It's a scenario loaded for disaster - let's stack it up.
I've seen Guns n Roses, Jane's Addiction and Nirvana on their UK debuts, seen Kiss 24 times, had my ears blown out permanently by Motorhead - twice - and witnessed just about every rock band worth a damn climbing or descending the rock n roll ladder. I know what I'm talking about - but in all that time, I've successfully managed to avoid live pop in all its forms.
Until a few hours ago.
Throughout the day, as I revealed my plans for the evening to those who crossed paths with me, I've been hit with just about every form of derision you can think of about Miss Lloyd - but a few weeks back, I caught her talking about online bullying on some TV show and I thought she was pretty decent. Decent enough to reserve my judgement anyway - which is unusual for me.
And you know what… I was impressed. More importantly, daughter number two loved it - and that's what it's all about.
Considering it was the first night of the tour, the show was well put together, her voice is in excellent shape and the band was tight and live. It was a little rough here and there, but a couple of years back, I saw Whitesnake being a bit rough here too. Even they will tell you it's not the greatest venue in the world for acoustics - you kind of have to be standing in the right place for it to sound right. Song-wise, there's some good stuff here. There's some I can take or leave too - it's not my kind of thing to be commenting on in the first place but I certainly didn't want to walk away to get away from it. Once or twice, I might even have caught myself moving about about but a sharp glance from small person warning me not to be embarrassing in front of her friends soon put a stop to that.
Here's the deal. Cher Lloyd is 18 and wants to be a singer more than anything and I'm standing there (in the VIP area that we broke into so that we could see and hear properly - teach 'em young I say), thinking to myself, 'this girl has got a great future ahead of her'. Why? Because here she is right now - tonight - doing exactly the thing she wants to. All those people who wrote her off today... what exactly were they doing tonight to push themselves to where they want to go? I could probably take an educated guess that half of them were sitting on their sofa cushion behinds with a remote control of some description in hand.
It doesn't even matter that it was a little rough. I could show you over 1000 rock bands that were more than rough on the first night of their tour. I can also show you another 1000 who are heralded as legends who were sometimes too out of it to even bother showing up on time. I know it's a different kind of thing altogether but if you're not listening, you'll miss the point and that makes you worse than stupid. It makes you ignorant.
There's a lot of garbage talked about bands not being given a chance to develop anymore, but here's Cher Lloyd doing exactly that. Seeing what the audience likes. Some things will work, some won't. It will get ironed out and then they'll start all over again. That's how a musicians career works and it's OK. It's how life works if you're paying attention.
These 'down on Cher' people I spoke about - they're my friends, but today they're wrong. All of them.
It may count for nothing, it may count for something but I'm going to stand right here and fight her corner. Cher Lloyd is not taking anything for granted and is out there doing what needs to be done and that's all that matters. When you start taking things for granted, you end your days in the stupid club with a gun in your mouth - and that's not where this story will end.
So yeah - nice work everybody. To everybody else, have a great day behind your desk in the morning…
You can also find this post at The Void where you can also pimp it to your friends - I don't normally duplicate my content, but this one kind of crossed over...