Bring Me Le Bataclan

After 48 straight hours of no sleep, duty free vodka, travelling and moshing I have departed Paris and landed safely back in England feeling dirty, sleep-deprived and slightly sad it’s all over. Why did I go to Paris you [probably didn’t just] ask yourself? To provide Bring Me The Horizon guest-vocals at their show at Le Bataclan!!! With the guest being my wonderful self and the vocals of course being my own. Yes, that sentence has intentionally been written to completely over-exaggerate the entire situation but what I’ll come to mention further in the blog honestly has to genuinely be one of the most unforgettable moments of my life.

Okay so back in October my life was kind of tipped up, threw around and then raped multiple times and I was pretty much on the brink of breakdown and it was the first time in my life I could literally feel my sanity fading away. What triggered this “dark time” is no longer relevant, but for this short time I genuinely didn’t know how to function and had never felt so vacant. Amongst this, Bring Me The Horizon, a band I’ve followed for years, released their brand new album and if I’m being entirely honest it was probably the only thing that made any sense at all to me at the time. Everybody perceives music in their own way and as I listened to these 12 tracks I seemed to relate too so easily I found myself effortlessly drifting away from the shit reality of life back then.

As things started to get back to normal the band announced a European tour and I thought it’d be fun to arrange a little weekend away and go to the Paris show. Thankfully my friends Oliver and Jack also thought it’d be fun so we booked it and began getting excited. Several months later the weekend had arrived and we boarded our coach on route to Liverpool airport! I accidently booked the non-refundable coach an hour earlier than necessary which meant arriving at the Airport an hour earlier than required, I also accidentally misread the flight time meaning we arrived a second hour early ….and I also misunderstood the whole French time difference thing which meant we had arrived a third hour early ….then the flight was delayed which meant we had in fact managed to successfully arrive 7 hours before our flight was even due to depart. When we FINALLY arrived in Paris we hit up the duty free Vodka, checked in at the hotel and got absolutely hammered! Shockingly we drunkenly managed to navigate our way through the Paris underground system to the venue, whilst successfully managing to irritate every single French person we encountered along the way by living up to the “Drunk Brits Abroad” stereotype us fine English men are ever so rightly branded. By the time Bring Me The Horizon had come on we had successfully managed to buy more drinks, make lots of French friends, buy even more drinks, locate all the other fellow English fans in attendance and push our way through the crowd of disgruntled French people onto the front row! The show was fucking IMMENSE. The whole atmosphere was so much different to any show I’ve been to in England. The amount of passion and sweat dripping from each and every single person was so overwhelming. Now for the best bit…. My all time favourite song from Bring Me The Horizon is “FUCK” which mixes their usual hardcore style with soft vocals from You Me At Six (another of my favourite bands) singer Josh Francheschi and generally gives me goose bumps each time I hear it. Obviously Josh Francheschi wasn’t there, and Oli (BMTH singer) can only sing his own lines so during the final verse of the song which features both the singers singing simultaneously guess what happened!!! Oli chucked the spare microphone down to me and my two friends and we sang it!!!! This may not seem too exciting to you but just imagine it; you’re in a foreign country with some of your best friends, you’re inches away from one of your favourite bands, they start playing one of your all time favourite songs and the singer passes a microphone down to YOU! and for those brief 20 seconds you’re a part of the whole thing and instantly feel connected the band, the music and every single person in the room. Call me a “Teenie” or whatever you wish, but they were honestly 20 of the most unforgettable seconds of my entire life …along with the trip as a whole.