A

Best gig ever: Liverpool Lomax. Symposium headlining, A supporting. Summer 1998. I’d been to the Lomax on a couple of occasions before with my best mate Paul and about eight other people. I wasn’t expecting the place to be rammed full of sweaty, expectant kids, especially not for a support act, especially not for a band I thought only I had heard of.

Then they were there, singer Jason Perry bounding onstage and screaming like he couldn’t wait for his band to catch up, but they did and the place exploded. Chaos. Sherbet semtex in a shoebox. Abiding memory: Jason yawing over the crowd and kids actually bouncing off the walls, upside down and pinwheeling off the ceiling. A gig in a washing machine. Spun us round and spat us out, bruised and soaking wet. They have a song called ‘Five in the Morning.’ They tore through it. When it got to the chorus, “don’t bother waking me at-“ I bounced up out of the crowd “five in the morning-“ I held up my hand for Jason to give me five. He gave me five. Yeah, and I’d do it again, dammit, and probably so would he.

Since then I’ve seen A shit-loads of times and they’ve never once disappointed. A couple of years later at the Astoria their stadium-sized ambitions felt right at home, ‘Monkey Kong’ kicking the entire crowd six foot in the air from a standing start. ‘Bad Idea’ is a punk blast with the same effect as injecting a cocktail of amphetamine and sherbet dips directly into your brain. This is stadium A, a streamlined whirl of sing-along Police-meets-Van Halen chart-shagging genius. ‘Shut Yer Face’ is fantastic, ‘The Distance’ rocks like a rhino, ‘Starbucks’ goes off in technicolour. They get to the gap in ‘I Love Lake Tahoe’, the lights are down, the air is filled with bubbles, the whole crowd starts singing, and when the band come back in it’s the first day of summer again. For the encore it’s the moment half the crowd have been waiting for: top ten single ‘Nothing’ kicks off and nearly takes off the roof. Then it’s the moment the other half of the crowd have been waiting for: the screaming punk rock divebomb ‘Foghorn’ sends the pit crazy. I’m knackered – it’s hard work being sixteen again.

One wicked night: brought to you by the letter A.