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Music Therapy column: Old habits die hard

Tune in to Music Therapy on Tameside Radio 103.6FM every Sunday night from 9pm. In the meantime, have a read of their latest column for the Tameside Reporter...

I was looking through a scrapbook of old memories the other day and came across a ticket stub for The Jam at Manchester Apollo in March 1982 and the price was £4.50. 

On Saturday we went to see Erasure at the same theatre and the price was comfortably ten times that. 

From memory, albums back then cost about five quid. For the very few of us that buy recorded music in physical form, you can buy a CD of Erasure’s rather good Neon album for about £15, more if you want booklets, remixes and posters.

There are a number of enormous differences between the experiences though, and of what we attach value to. 

For me, the high watermark of live concert experiences was Take That’s Progress tour in 2011. We were invited as corporate guests to see them - with Robbie Williams, and supported by the Pet Shop Boys - at the City of Manchester Stadium, as it was known back then.

The retail price of what we got that night was in the hundreds of pounds. For ordinary punters in the Colin Bell stand it was just short of £50. 

Millions of people went to those shows on that tour at Wembley, Manchester and Sunderland. 

The staging, the lights, the robotics were incredible. Even through a drunken haze at the end of the night, I came away thinking the bar for live entertainment had been raised forever. 

As artists have seen their income from recorded music fall, so too have they seen the live performance as the driver of their future wealth creation. It, therefore, follows that the shows better be really, really good.

The Jam in 1982 were promoting their final album The Gift, it was a tour to promote the record. 

It was as true then as it is even truer now that the fans still crave the hits, the singalong, the collective moment of energy and emotion that comes with raising the roof of the Apollo to the chorus from Going Underground or Eton Rifles.

Erasure left their two floor-filling wedding disco bangers to last too: Oh L’Amour and A Little Respect.

But I recall there was far more recognition and excitement in 1982 for the horn-infused title track off The Gift, with which Weller confidently closed his set.

I gave Erasure the courtesy of listening to Neon a few times before last weekend’s exertions. It’s a gentle, optimistic collection of songs and is no massive departure from what we know Vince Clarke and Andy Bell are capable of after nearly 30 years of stunning studio albums. 

But I sensed an impatience in the audience to get back to the Greatest Hits. 

It’s been said that we lose the capacity to absorb and appreciate new music after the age of 33. Life gets in the way and we fix on what we know.

Looking around the audience I suspect many around me were born in the 60s and 70s, just as The Jam army will have been in 1982.

But what we seek to do every week on our show - and on Tameside Radio as a whole, to be fair to our colleagues -  is to combine a bit of what we have grown up to love, and sprinkle on a bit of new stuff too, for young and old. 

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