Do you remember the first time?

"Do you remember the first time" sang Jarvis (Cocker, singer from Pulp).
I saw Terrorvision from Bradford last night. It wasn't the first time. The first time i had seen them was 11 years virtually to the day. May Bank Holiday Weekend 1997. Brighton Essential Festival. Indie Day.
We had to wait outside the tent as Bodycount had overrun. Too busy shouting obscenities about the police. I was 15. 16 in 7 days. Last night i was 26. 27 in 6 days. I felt 15 again. It was almost as if 11 years hadn't gone by.
Now i know I'm not OLD. Not technically. And every person over the age of 30 who i say i feel old to (and my girlfriend; same age) respond by telling me to shut up, or to wait till I'm 30 (i very nearly am) or even 40. But that is what the point is not. I'm not old, i know that. I'm OLDER. Which is still scary. Whilst i was being crushed and pushed around last night screaming every word of every song, i had regressed. I was a teenager. And so was everyone else around me. No-one (and by that i mean probably 90% of the crowd) WAS a teenager.
They were my age, or slightly younger, or slightly older, or a lot older.
I talked to a couple of them, who laughed when i said i felt old and they said they WERE old and i should wait till i was nearly 40.
Typical.
This was before Terrorvision came on. I saw one or two of them mid-set. They were teenagers again, you could see it in their face. Maybe, unlike me, they wouldn't admit it, or even acknowledge it to themselves, but they were. They had regressed too.
You see older people at gigs starring the latest NME band (because you don't stop liking good music) but they look like they know they shouldn't be there. Some thrive on that, but all around them young, good looking teenagers and early twenties nubiles are strutting like peacocks as if they are the newest cast member of the TV show Skins. All impossibly skinny and svelte with hipster jeans, converse and a tight t-shirt with no hint of fat underneath.
They even looked old. The band. Its hard to describe watching people that you used to associate with your youth looking every bit their age. Time should have stood still in the intervening years whilst you got older and got a job, and put on weight and lost hair. But Tony, Mark, Leigh and Shutty should have stayed the same age, forever young. Forever the Terrovision i saw in a tent, in Brighton. 11 years ago.
Last night wasn't any ones first time. It wasn't supposed to be, and it never was going to be. It was a celebration of being young, when your not anymore.