The joy of the gig getaway

With a dedicated display for books about Paris by the door, it’s less than a minute’s walk to the gates for the Eurostar. Which is what I’m taking to the city of light for a 48-hour city break based around a concert by the Undertones.

In doing so, I’m becoming one of tens of thousands who regularly take gig getaways – international breaks to see music artists they love. Beloved of a generation who grew up on John Peel, the NME and Smash Hits and are now likely to be empty-nesters, gig getaways are city breaks with a difference. You can combine the familiarity of the music you love with a comfortable hotel and an opportunity to seek out places of interest. 

They seem to be a better and better idea every week, as musical heroes we grew up worshipping slip away – Terry Hall, Shane MacGowan, Sinead O’Connor aND more recently Rick Buckler of The Jam and Brian James of The Damned. It sparks a desire to see favourite acts while we still can. And rather than waiting for their annual gig in your town, it’s far more interesting and accessible now to grab their tour dates and see if they’re performing anywhere exciting in Europe.

“I do this a lot,” explains David Bell, a 57-year-old merchandiser and art event curator from Dublin. “Gig tourism is a thing.” David has been following Kraftwerk since he first saw them in Brixton in 1991 and now builds holidays around them, turning it into a family affair by taking his daughter, Layla, now 22, with him too. David’s seen Kraftwerk over 50 times, which may seem obsessive but the gig is not the only thing he does in each destination.

“As a Dublin resident, I’ve got used to travelling to feed my obsession. These trips are art and culture odysseys, a packed immersion in what that particular city had to offer. Galleries, restaurants, record stores and bookshops. Kraftwerk like playing in art galleries, and I’ve seen them at the Tate Modern in London, Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. 

“I often meet the travelling community of Kraftwerk devotees who follow the group all over the world and I’ve sometimes found myself staying in the same hotel as the group, which makes for awkward exchanges with Ralf at the breakfast buffet. I’ve also bumped into them in galleries as our mutual quest to see great art overlapped. As for interesting things I saw on my Kraftwerk travels – the opera house in Oslo, the old Phillips factory in Eindhoven, the Reichstag in Berlin, the Coliseum in Rome.”

As well as visits to new cities, or revisiting old favourites and enjoying their cultural offerings, gig getaways also allow fans to see their favourite bands in different settings to where you would find them in the UK. Last March, Jeremy Thomas from Colchester visited Oslo to see Underworld.

“In London, they usually only play on a Friday or Saturday night, and family commitments mean those nights are unavailable to me,” he said. “When I saw they were playing midweek in Norway, I just thought I’d go for it. I’d never been to Oslo and had no idea what to expect but it was quite a short return flight from City Airport and surprisingly not too expensive.

“Sentrum Scene, the venue, held 1750 people, so it was small in comparison to when they played to 11,500 in Alexandra Palace. Apart from the gig, I visited the Munch Museum, which was the crowning glory. Like most people I only knew about the Scream, so seeing this whole museum of work I was unaware of was incredible.”

Niel Johnstone, 57, who works at a home improvements company in Yorkshire, has just returned from eight nights in Japan, planned around two New Order gigs where he enjoyed the same smaller venue situation. 

“My wife, Boyang, is Chinese and loves going to Japan to shop for household things at Daiso, the 100 Yen Shop. But I’d never been, so when I saw New Order were playing there I booked it straight away. 

“There was no pushing or shoving at the gigs and Osaka was really good, a small 2k capacity club. But Tokyo was in a 15,000-seater arena, there was no standing and bars shut when they came on!”

Between gigs, he says, “we went to Shitennō-ji, the oldest Buddhist temple in Japan, visited Osaka castle and took the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo where I saw FC Tokyo v Nagoya Grampus 8 in the J-League. I loved it and we’re definitely going together again. I’d probably have never gone without the gigs.”

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The concert that started Chris Neill, a 55-year-old from Bolton, deliberately looking for European dates on tours was AC/DC supporting the Rolling Stones in Oberhausen, Germany in 2003: “I saw it advertised in the Manchester Evening News classifieds and it turned out to be a real gem – we booked the flights ourselves and bought a hotel/gig ticket package. Surprising my girlfriend with gig tickets to see her favourite band in Europe rather than Manchester was a winner and we’ve been doing this ever since.” 

Chris has discovered that European gig tickets are often cheaper than the UK which means he’s got more money to spend elsewhere on the trip. “I never want to feel that I’m rushing in and out of a place, experiencing the sights of the city are as important as the gig to me. We’ve been to Germany a lot, we went to Berlin for The Killers, when it was minus nine degrees, but we were still able to see the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie and the Reichstag. We went to Frankfurt for OMD, which had an amazing Christmas market.”

Beyond venue size, cultural differences and art galleries, others use gigs as a reason to revisit a favourite city. Paula Greenwood from Manchester regularly combines gigs in Amsterdam with visiting friends there. “I used to do this a lot in the ‘90s and I’ve been doing it again more recently with acts like PJ Harvey and Neil Young.”

My own decision to follow the Undertones abroad came after seeing them in Bexhill on Sea a couple of years ago. The seaside resort is renowned as a place where OAPs settle, and the sons of Derry – teenagers when they recorded their classic songs with Feargal Sharkey in the late 1970s – are now of advancing years themselves. 

But they still look in good nick and there was nothing retiring about them as they smashed through Here Comes The Summer, Get Over You and Jimmy Jimmy.

The band originally split in 1983 when Sharkey, now a respected clean water campaigner, jacked it in, but reassembled in 1999 with a new frontman in local Derry DJ Paul McLoone.

It occurred to me while watching them in Bexhill that feeling happy and energetic like this was good for my health and that I ought to use this as a reason to travel to see them again. I used to go to Germany and Holland with bands as a fledgling music writer in my late teens; it was always a good way to meet people and see different places. 

So when I saw the Undertones were playing Paris, I booked the Eurostar, giving myself a day either side to take in some culture and history and revisit a bar in the Pigalle that I used to drink in as an NME writer with bands like the Charlatans and Happy Mondays.

On the morning of the gig, I was in the stunning reading rooms at the Richelieu Library, with its glass-domed ceiling and four storeys of literature surrounding you with tens of thousands of books. I followed that by going down to the Liberation of Paris in the 14th arrondissement, which is housed in a former air-raid shelter, and tells the stories of how key figures of the Free French Army and Resistance fought back against the Nazis. 

The Undertones gig itself took place at Le Trabendo, a live music club surrounded by far larger venues in Parc De La Villette, which has become the centre of major concerts in Paris. My Perfect Cousin, It’s Gonna Happen and Teenage Kicks – respectively their most successful, their best and their most anthemic singles – got separate generations of fans moving. The original audience with grey hair nodding along and smiling, the early YouTube adopters in their late 30s shuffling furiously and the female Spotify punks in their early 20s stage-invading and crowd-surfing. 

It’s not how I spend a normal Friday night and it lifted my spirits. Now see which European city your favourite band are playing in next.