“Gig Euphoria” was the phrase one of my friends came up with to describe that giddy high feeling you experienced at the end of a gig. A lovely dopamine jolt to the brain. The culmination of that special shared, communal experience in a room with your friends and complete strangers.

In my student days, after another extremely sweaty night at Glasgow Barrowland, we would sit in the pub, on a high trying to process how we were feeling and reflecting on what we’d just witnessed. It’s a feeling that I’ve been addicted to, and I’ve continued to chase over my 55 years. At the time of writing this I have been to 1060 gigs (yes, surprise, surprise I’m geeky enough to have kept a list of them all). Over 42 years of going to concerts, that roughly works out on average as 25 gigs each year or a gig every fortnight. That’s not too ridiculous is it?

Notable runs of consecutive gigs include 3 in row in 1988 at Barrowland; Iggy Pop, The Proclaimers and The Fall. 4 in a row in 1989…Elvis Costello, REM, Costello again and 10,000 Maniacs and finally a run that should have been a red flag to my future wife to get out before it was too late (but thankfully she was brave)….a week in 1995 when I saw Bob Dylan 6 nights out of 7 - Birmingham, Manchester x 3, Edinburgh, a night off and then finally Glasgow.

The Fall (Steve Hanley, Simon Wolstencroft, Marcia Schofield, Craig Scanlon, with Brix Smith, and Mark E Smith) (Image: PR)

In all probability, there’s loads of people of my age who have been to as many gigs if not more, than I have. The distinction is that, before the introduction of digital tickets, with the exception of a few missing entries, I still have tickets for all the gigs I’ve ever been at.

So it was during the lockdown that I turned to my alarmingly overflowing bag of concert tickets I had carefully curated over the years. I started to text photos of tickets of gigs from the dim and distant past to friends who I had shared them with. It was a nice way to check in and say hello to a variety of friends during that first weird lockdown time using these precious artefacts from the past.

For some friends, it became a semi regular WhatsApp quiz with a series of clues…”singer-songwriter…American…had a big hit at the time of the gig which was featured in a David Lynch film? Correct! Chris Isaak.”

For one friend with a particularly poor memory, it was a lovely surprise to discover a whole series of artists he genuinely had no memory of having seen live. Conversely, these messages brought one or two false memory syndromes where friends swore they were at a certain gig with me, when I’m pretty sure they weren’t.

On one occasion a well-meaning text turned into a slightly fractious exchange. Having taken a friend for his 50th birthday to see Peter Gabriel at the OVO Hydro performing his album So, on its 25th anniversary, I misjudged that he would welcome a random friendly text and my ticket from the original tour in 1987 at the SECC. I must have caught him in a particularly tense Covid moment with this teenage sons judging by his response…”Why are you sending this to me?? I didn’t even know you in 1987.” Ouch.

Bob Dylan (Image: Gary Miler)

I started to think that this large bag of tickets was far too precious to be languishing at the bottom of a wardrobe and I needed to do something with them. And inevitably they were at risk from some domestic mishap; be it a burst pipe or a fire or more likely our then new puppy having a good munch through the bag.

Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I had some time on my hands. I had recently finished a contract during lockdown 1 and with nothing immediately on the horizon I thought if I was ever to do anything with the tickets it was now. Our cloakroom toilet was in dire need of a refurb, having never been touched since we moved into the flat almost 20 years earlier. My daughter’s school artwork collection covering the walls had been the only concession to putting our own stamp on it. My mind was made up. The artwork was going to be moved elsewhere, and I was going to turn my concert ticket collection into wallpaper.

I searched online and came across an image of the sort of thing I had envisaged. It was from a US concert goer from the 70s, with the ticket montage largely made up of the likes of Aerosmith, the Allmann........

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