Dear concert diary.
Today I went to a Slowdive concert, mostly because Lost Girls were the opening act.
They were great, and so were Slowdive, but the experience was somewhat marred by the odour of the venue.
Rockefeller is the foundational concert venue in Oslo.
t’s always been somewhat whiffy: If you don’t stand in the middle of the floor, you’ll experience the olfactory delights of a beer-drenched carped that’s never been cleaned the last few decades (see picture above for why this happens: The venue shovels all “empty” beer glasses from the hardwood floor in front of the stage onto the carpeted wings before collecting the glasses).
But, dear diary, today was a brand new experience.
It’s been a few very warm weeks in Oslo, no doubt due to random weather fluctuations and not climate change at all. But the stench that met us when we entered the venue was of a different kind than any we’ve experienced before.
Instead of the normal yeasty bouquet we’re used to, the non-hardwood parts of the Rockefeller venue smelled like a well-aged mixture of stale ale and diseased piss.
The urinal overtones of the venue were so overpowering that I almost tossed my cookies. I was only able to hold on to the contents of my stomach by standing in the front of the stage, even though I am very tall and that, sensibly, annoys all people of normal height.
If only somebody, somewhere, perhaps the owners of the Rockefeller venue, would hire somebody to clean the carpet in the back of the venue, people would get less nauseated when visiting the place.
Dear diary, one can only dream.
Oslo, July 18th, 2018.