david

When we first meet, David tells me that music is his life. He brings a huge stack of tickets which he keeps in a smoking box which once belonged to his great-grandfather and that in the box is a porcelain jar which was once used to store tobacco, and though the jar is over a hundred years old, you can still smell the tobacco. He tells me that the box is worth a lot of money but that he’d never sell it because the sentimental value is higher. And now he keeps the tickets in the drawers. 

They date back to the 1980s. But we focus on just three stories out of hundreds.

It’s 1972 and outside St George’s Hall in Bradford, David joins a queue where he will stay all night. He waits with his brother and hundreds of other people. They are all waiting for the same thing. Queuing for last minute concert tickets, to see Genesis. 

To fight off the midnight cold, someone advised that he should wear tights, so he went out and bought them specially. So David, wearing tights, is queuing. 

So he queues… through the night in the freezing cold.

When the doors open in the morning all semblance of the queue is forgotten. Hundreds of people rush forward to try and get tickets. David and his brother manage to get two. And that night they watch them play to a packed out St George’s Hall. This time, David isn’t wearing tights. 

*

In September 1980, with tickets this time, David is in New York at Madison Square Garden to watch The Commodores. 

He doesn’t realise until he’s there that the support act for The Commodores is none other than Bob Marley. He can’t believe that just by chance he’s seeing this legend of the music world. 

At this point, Bob Marley is dying and doesn’t know it. In two days he will collapse during a football match in Central Park and receive a cancer diagnosis and eight months later he will be dead. 

David is about to watch Marley’s final performance and he wasn’t even expecting to. He tells me there are people dancing in the aisles before anyone has even started performing and that the atmosphere is electric. 

He tells me how lucky he feels that he was there.

*

Now it’s August 2017 and David is 70 and in Benidorm to visit his brother and David Guetta is playing a concert which starts at midnight. So they go.

David Guetta arrives at the venue at 11.45pm by police escort after performing in Ibiza that very evening.

He plays nearly all night to a packed out crowd 

At 4am they dance to Titanium, then leave at 5am, back to his brother's apartment. 

They still talk about that night, and all of the others, with friends. And now whenever his wife phones it’s a David Guetta song that plays.