Until last week, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, the last time I’d been to a professionally-organised pop concert was 1993 and the Anson Room at Bristol University, where I saw Half Man Half Biscuit and a support band called the Dead Poppies, whose existence I thought I’d dreamed for a very long time until earlier this year when I saw a copy of one of their CD covers in an exhibition on Merseyside pop music at Liverpool Museum. I can’t remember much about that evening- suffice to say that I didn’t understand that "Doors At..." just meant that they started letting the punters in at that time, with no guarantee of when the musicians were going to start up. In this particular case, I drank about five pints of lager and all I can remember is noise and HMHB playing a disappointingly short set. So for the last fifteen years or so, as far as I’ve been concerned, a gig has been primarily a method of transportation used in a Jane Austen novel. I’ve worked with some real music buffs- if there’s anything you want to know about Forward Russia! then my colleague Bryan will be more than happy to oblige- without ever really getting into such things myself. Some may recall that a couple of years ago I started trying to broaden my horizons by following the book ‘1001 Albums to Hear before You Die’, which pretty much ran out of steam when I had a couple that I really didn’t get the hang of, but by and large I spent much of the last fifteen years or so following the occasional recommendation and buying the odd compilation but hadn’t done much else apart from attending the occasional folk night at local pubs.

Then came the Leeds Academy- the first I heard about it came through the Leeds Guide magazine, which I buy most fortnights, and which looked forward to a new venue with the necessary backing to be able to draw in well-known bands. In an idle moment I checked out the website and spotted Goldfrapp- having previously purchased copies of ‘Black Cherry’ and ‘Supernature’, as well as several versions of the single of ‘Ride a White Horse’, this caught my eye, as well as the ease of e-ticketing- to cut a long story short, they send you your ticket as an email attachment and you print it out at home. With a brief check of the calendar to make sure I didn’t end up otherwise engaged, the ticket was booked and printed (in duplicate just in case) and a small pencil note went on my calendar. As it happened, come the day I could quite easily not have gone; for as long as I can remember (at least twenty years, because I can remember it happening in my A-level years) I’ve found it intensely difficult to sleep on Sunday nights, rarely getting off before midnight and often suffering bad headaches on Mondays as a consequence. And as luck would have it, due at least in part to some early business being done at the cattle auctions over the road, I had a stinker on Monday afternoon- nevertheless, I decided to chance it, nipped home after work and back in again three quarters of an hour later, leaving me in Leeds some three-quarters of an hour before the doors even opened. The first tingle of excitement came as I walked past the main doors of the Academy, with "Tonight- Goldfrapp" on the illuminated sign outside, in much the same way as old-fashioned cinemas used to advertise the current and forthcoming attractions, but I had a stroll around Millennium Square and the city centre for fifteen minutes or so- Leeds is quite atmospheric on a cold, clear autumn evening now- and joined a queue which numbered about twenty or so.

The queue of devotees numbered around twenty or so by the time I joined it, but by the time some twenty minutes later that we began to be admitted, must have been twice as long behind. Our tickets- both for those of us who’d printed them out at home, and those who still relied on the tried and tested methods of the post and the box office- were checked with a bar code reader rather than simply being torn in half or stamped, and then I was in. It was surprising later to realise that at the very least it must have been eleven and a half years since I’d last entered the building, back when one of its previous incarnations was as the Town and Country Club and along with a group of friends I’d gone along to Brutus Gold’s Love Train, a 1970s night which was one of Leeds’s hottest club tickets at the time and never failed to sell out. From the T&C, the building had spent several years as Creation, an out-and-out nightclub, before the Academy people moved in to restore its credentials as a performance venue- something which Leeds, for a city of its size, badly lacks and is only now looking to redress, given that the only venues of any size are Elland Road and Roundhay Park, neither of them under cover and both at least a couple of miles from the city centre. The basic layout of the place was unchanged, with several bars at the rear and sides offering Carling at £3.20 or thereabouts, however as I’d come wearing a pair of 501s with a button fly, the accumulated wisdom of thirty-six years ensured that I knew well enough not to drink too much- the buttons are a nightmare when you’ve had a few. I milled around the front of the auditorium with my fellow early arrivals, drifting off for a few minutes to look at the merchandise stall and buy a set of badges- one of which shows the lovely Alison and three of which feature her doodles from the Seventh Tree album inserts- then spent probably the best part of an hour or so listening to the sea shanties and folk music which made up the background music- that said, it was all very pleasant and quite enjoyable in its own way. At the end of the hour, the support act appeared on stage and kept the assembling masses entertained- the act in question was, he explained, a Leeds man himself, and drew a selection of farmyard noises from the audience when he explained that he’d been supporting the band in Manchester the previous evening. Half a dozen ballads later he was gone, and the background music changed to the soundtrack of The Wicker Man, the whole thing from the fertility songs to the final rousing chorus of ‘Sumer is icumen in’. And then, after the standard warnings about filming and flash photography, a disembodied voice from the speakers announced- Goldfrapp!

The band emerged first, all dressed in white and including a very druidic-looking female harpist, followed a suspenseful moment later by Alison Goldfrapp herself, looking nothing if not striking in a shiny pink smock-type affair set off with a couple of red pom-poms. The reception- and the quirky but winning "Ullo!" with which Alison greeted the audience- spoke volumes about the relationship between Goldfrapp and their fans, because here’s a band with a solid core of support and genuine affection. A lot has to do with Alison Goldfrapp’s charisma, of course; for somebody who opts out of celebrity culture, she cultivates a stage persona which incorporates aspects of erotica, paganism and the dressing-up box and allows an imaginative mystique to envelop the real Alison. The stage, by the way, was set u almost as if a wedding had taken place on it a couple of days earlier, with a large wickerwork panel at the rear draped with neglected bunting, and bouquets tied to the microphone stand and synthesiser with white ribbon. To be quite honest, I could go on for ages about the performance and never really touch on how it felt to be there- the only negative was a slight spat between Alison and an audience member after the sublime ‘Utopia’ (the first time I’d heard that particular song, by the way, but certainly not the last because it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard), when it became apparent that he’d been filming the concert from the word go, and the plank in question failed to take the hint offered by the suggestion that his arms must have been aching. The miscreant has of course since gone on to post the song (and the incident) on YouTube, however she need not have worried too much as half the time he’d simply been filming the back of his friend’s head. From then on the memories of individual songs start to blur; it has to be said that before this evening I hadn’t heard either Goldfrapp’s first album ‘Felt Mountain’ or the most recent ‘Seventh Tree’, although I’d heard ‘Happiness’ a couple of times on Sarah Kennedy’s Radio 2 show (and the fact that I’m normally up in time to listen to that shows just how dangerous an idea it was to be going out on a Monday night!), so it was the songs from ‘Black Cherry’ and ‘Supernature’ that I recognised. Nevertheless, as a singer and stage performer Alison Goldfrapp is nothing short of mesmeric- I must have counted at least half a dozen times, if not twice that number, when I was just captivated by what I was seeing and hearing and had to mentally bring myself back down to earth. ‘Ooh La La’ brought forth a lively reaction from us, but then it’s a jumping-up-and-down-and-clapping song, but the songs I remember best even at this distance are the last three- ‘Train’, at which point the back projection was working particularly well, and the encores, ‘Black Cherry’ and ‘Strict Machine’, a last selection of crowd-pleasers from the earlier album. And then the lights faded back to neutral, Alison raised a glass to us and left the stage, the house lights came up and I followed a tortuous route through the bowels of the Leeds Academy to the exit- as I left, I glanced into the auditorium again and could see people already clearing up and taking the set apart. Fifteen minutes later I was on the 33A bus home, an hour later in bed and absolutely incapable of sleeping, such was the exhilaration I felt with what I’d seen and heard.