500 Words on: The Best Concert I Ever Saw

They hobbled on, this motley couple, heads down, one a post-nerd in a Hawaiian t-shirt and the other, a ghost? Wearing a long, flat brown frock and a straw farmer’s hat, looking like a Victorian street seller from a daguerreotype, and absolutely nailed it. I write this after seven hours of washing dishes, something had to kill the time – I asked myself over that sink, what was my greatest musical experience, the ones that others should be held to?

Hearing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ being driven back from Camden Market at fourteen years old was one (I never needed a teenage love, because I had given myself over fully to The Beatles from that moment onwards). The first time I heard Beethoven’s Ninth too, recovering from surgery, another moment of absolution and God. And the other? Diego Brown and the Good Fairy, these two irregulars who had complete control over us that night, we were at the tip of their sword.

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I’ve been fortunate enough to travel the world and I’ve seen a lot of scruffy performers trying to get a break. A bloke with a guitar therefore, is a common feature in my life. I think the artist, of any variety and medium, always carries a terrible burden – you are not consciously trying to compete with Mozart or Dante, we just want to be ourselves and leave it at that, but if that is where the high watermark is set, then if I want to be remembered, I need to aim to be their equal. Our art therefore never sounds entirely innocent, it is never for itself’s sake quite a lot. I think when I look at performers attempting to express their art and voice upon this Earth, the feature I find most lacking in self-conscious entertainers, is the say, Marx Brothers’ anarchism. Our sense of destiny encourages us to play it safe without us even realising. We don’t ‘play’ with art enough. We say to ourselves “OK, let’s try and be the best we can”. And, we shouldn’t, because being the best we can, leaves out all the best ideas.

Diego Brown and The Good Fairy, seemed to have asked “how do we get their attention?” From the very moment they walked on they were already playing us – who were these odd people? They had my attention. So, who the hell was Herbert Hardwick? This blinder of an opener forced us to react. We got our phones out, my friends and I, and others in the audience, Googling ‘Herbert Hardwick’.

There isn’t one. We had been played.

I recall that show as if the music came to me in a dream, because for the most part I don’t remember it. This surreal folk rock odyssey of thirty minutes was five years ago now. But whilst watching, I considered how this was how people once engaged with music, these travelling troubadours would enter the inn in the pre-recording era, blow us away, and leave and we’d never see them again. Scraps of their music exists online, but that’s not where it should be heard.

But you can go and see them: See us live – Diego Brown and the Good Fairy