Nearly all of my Friday nights over the last four years or so have been spent watching TV in my flat, so last night was quite a nice change. I went to the Barbican to watch a concert by Max Cooper, an electronic audio and visual artist. It was the first live music performance I had been to in quite a while, although how I came to be going was a little odd: poor old John had tickets to go on Thursday evening, after we had been to the cinema, but as we were leaving our film my other PA Serkan texted me to say he was ill. That left me in the lurch for dinner, so John had to forgo his concert and come back with me. Needless to say, I felt incredibly guilty. Luckily, yesterday morning, John told me that there was going to be a second Cooper concert last night; and even better he could get two-for-one tickets. That’s how I came to be travelling along the Elisabeth Line yesterday evening, to meet my friend and go to my first concert in months.

To be honest I had never heard of Max Cooper before, so I didn’t know quite what to expect. John had told me it was electronic music, so I presumed it would be like the stuff Lyn used to make, or my friend Hugh Jones. What we encountered was a bit of a shock: a highly intense bombardment of sound and visual artistry, as much to do with the intricate patterns being projected onto the screens around the auditorium as the music/audio. While much of it was incredibly beautiful, merging Italian aesthetics with mathematics and postmodernism, the truth is at times it grew too much, and the lights and lasers began to grow painful on my eyes. Frankly towards the end it also started to feel a bit more like a rave than a concert. Even so, as I rode the train home last night, it felt good to see the return of such evenings out – hopefully it will now be the first of many more.