Live!: Why We Go Out

'ABC', as perfect as anything I've ever witnessed up until that point in my tiny little life. Three minutes of divine delirium.

In 1972, when Robert Elms was thirteen years old, he saw the Jackson 5 play live at the Empire Pool. At some point during the performance, he found himself in a state of otherworldly perfect synchronicity with everything happening around him. This single event would set him off on an endless pursuit for that same height of pleasure.

Since then, Robert has lived his life through live music, from pub rock to jazz funk, punk to country, and everything in between. Each gig is memorable in its own way, and his snapshots of musicians past and present are both evocative and startlingly concise: Tom Waits showboating with an umbrella, Grace Jones vogueing with a mannequin, Amy shimmying shamelessly like a little girl at a wedding, Gil Scott-Heron rapping with a conga drum. 

While in our changed times, Robert notes that we have found new ways of listening – of being part of something special by uniting fans with their favourite performers online – there is not, nor can there ever be, anything quite like the live experience. Live!: Why We Go Out is a memoir and a musing on why experiencing live music really matters.

A celebration of the joys of live music from BBC Radio London’s Robert Elms

For nearly 40 years Elms has been one of the most distinctive faces and voices in the British media. A journalist, author and presenter, his multi-award winning daily radio show on BBC London, covering all aspects of life in the metropolis, including his passion for great music, is the most listened to programme on British local radio.

The start of the 1980s also saw the start of The Face, the pioneering style bible, where Elms instantly found a niche for his diatribes on the intricacies of young urban life. Becoming an editor of The Face in his early twenties, he also contributed regularly to international magazines as well as most of the prestigious British newspapers. He began broadcasting for the BBC, most notably as part of the team of Loose Ends on Radio 4 where he won his first Sony.

In 1986 he combined two ambitions by going to live in Spain to write his debut novel. In Search Of The Crack was a Penguin original when he was just 27. He also began travel writing for the Sunday Times, who regularly printed his portraits of places as diverse as Venice and Buenos Aires, Istanbul and New Orleans. Elms continued his obsession with Iberia by writing his second book Spain: A Portrait After The General which was nominated as travel book of the year in 1992.