A report of a gig

We went down into the basement. The band was playing downstairs. The support band was on first. They were some local band. We went into the bare room and hung shyly back. He said into the microphone, "You... can come closer". The slight awkwardness.
I thought it was unbelievably loud. The guy in the band on stage was long and hippyish. They did a cover of "She Don't Use Jelly". I went to the toilet, a tiny closet of a room under the stairs.

I wasn't wearing my glasses. The American band was on stage now. The room was full of bodies. People sitting down near the stage. The clear smell of cannabis from their ranks. The darkness.

The band came on and did their set. It sounded like their records. The singer: An American in leather.

The lights came up and there was some kerfuffle. I didn't have my glasses. It transpired that someone had stolen an effects pedal from the stage. Someone had taken advantage of the darkness.

There was much hubbub and waiting. The venue manager got up on the stage, very irate. A blur of a balding, sweaty man. No-one was allowed out until the wah-wah pedal was returned. Someone in the audience shouted at him. He shouted back, "No you shut up ya radge!". The band waited, nonplussed and brooding.

The pedal was sheepishly returned. We filtered out into the night. I had gone almost deaf, my hearing was drastically muffled, as always happened for a day or two after these punk gigs. They were always too loud.

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight, grimy gret toothed old patchy walls all concrete and haunted and no wonder if whatever band backstage, the singer thereof, or more likely geetar player, finds himself most lonely at that point, knuckles cold and fingers raspy and ready just prior to onstage. Haunted is the true name of this stage, this gloom onstage illuminated only by these spectral lights that loom large upfront to fright the eager night. A little doomy club or, nameless word, venue, ripped-off and secret walls, needless hangings, doesn't matter, terrible topfront lights, perhaps seedy memories of sweat dripped on the caverny floor. Echoing loves of spirit up from the lusty ground.
Here is the heart of secretiveness in the heart of that anguished sound, guitar riff, combined with the blind hysteric numb of the dark and the throb thru the feet of the waiting patrons healthy to be crushed, in their hearts a tremulous, approaching love, awed under artifices of star, all the more awed for the artifice, all the more ready for joy, death to leak out in the sparkling night 'r under the subterfuge drink of sweat and fights that turn and twist in the moulting pit, perhaps some shirtless white trash saint, like a ghost, 'll stagedive or splitting thirsty for angst and sweat, make supplications on the creaking floor. The girls down there all clothed and gloomy'll surge scattered and treading with the upsurge of the crowd, hearts awakening, moving onwards, nonplussed in the momentous void. Hear that just then that cry, that rasp of sigh, that delicious escape of shriek that held a dark unlawful promise of condensation and glorious sin among an animal limb?Collectively drawn like grimoire puppets, delicately driven under an awful wing, of music slowly becoming death.