In this week’s newsletter: Sometimes they were enough to send our music critics and readers straight back out the door again – but mostly just noisy enough to make their clothes shake
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owel-shuddering basslines. Drum fills that bounce off the walls like gunfire. Guitars resembling a pneumatic drill drilling into another pneumatic drill. A truly loud gig stays with you, figuratively and literally, as anyone who has spent the days after one accompanied by a troubling ringing in their ears can confirm.
Last week, prompted, strangely enough, by an old Alistair Cooke column suggesting that Janis Joplin’s group Big Brother and the Holding Company was noisy enough to cause permanent hearing damage in guinea pigs, we asked Guide readers to share their own loudest gig experiences. We had a huge response, with tons of you sharing memories of eardrum-piercing encounters with all manner of bands and artists, across genres and decades. So we thought we’d devote this week’s newsletter to your stories of extreme noise terror, along with a few from the Guardian’s music critics, who are often on the frontlines when it comes to aural assault.
We should probably insert the obligatory (boring) disclaimer here: loud gigs can be genuinely bad for your ear health – just look at the brilliant early 80s post-punk band Mission of Burma, who had to disband for the best part of two decades due to guitarist Roger Clark Miller’s punishing tinnitus. The environments that Burma and bands before them played in were a sonic wild west, with minimal soundproofing in venues or, indeed, in the ear canals of the people performing in those venues. Thankfully technology has moved on since then: I have a pretty decent pair of earplugs immediately to hand on my keyring, and there’s always the free squashy ones behind the venue bar if you’re desperate – though some will always succumb to the cheap, inadvisable thrill of going unplugged.
