The greatest shows on earth

With summer gigs reaching a crescendo next week at Oxegen, Brian Boyd, leafs through a new book documenting the biggest, baddest and best concerts of all time

IT'S A sad but ineluctable fact of modern gig-going life that there will probably never be another totemic show, a generation-encapsulating live event, an "I was there" moment. Whether this is due to corporate sponsorship, the fragmentation of social groupings, the rise of DVD or the technology that allows you to listen and watch a show five minutes after it has ended is a moot point.

Elvis on Ed Sullivan, The Beatles at the Cavern Club, The Stones at Altamont, Hendrix at Woodstock . . . all have marinated over the years in a mix of myth and gilded nostalgia. And they existed in a different context, in a time and place where audience members got "high" and the local Hells Angels chapter would look after security. Now it's prawn sandwiches in the corporate boxes.

With Oxegen acting as the starting gun for the summer festival season, the idea of the rock gig as a "life-changing" event seems laughable now - unless the change is lysergically induced. Still, a trawl through music's best live moments shows that, while you can't exactly predict a legendary moment, the process can be greatly facilitated if a certain set of conditions are put in place.

In his hugely entertaining book, I Was There: Gigs That Changed the World, author Mark Paytress collates first-hand experiences (including his own) to illustrate how and why musical magic happens.

At 4.15pm on July 6th, 1957 at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool, two local songwriters first performed together. Hundreds of thousands of Scousers were apparently present that afternoon, and remarkably all claim the credit for first introducing Paul McCartney to John Lennon.

The "I Was There First" card is vital here. Millions saw the first-ever Sex Pistols gig and the whole of Ireland and beyond just happened to be in the Dandelion Market when U2 climbed aboard the back of a truck and amped up.

The problem here is that these gigs are only memorable in retrospect, and too many people have too many boring stories about them. What you should really be looking for here is the "strange location" gig.

The Grateful Dead played at the Pyramids, Pink Floyd at Pompeii. There really is nothing like a pre-Christian civilisation site to up the "legendary" value of an otherwise average live performance. It's something John and Yoko should have kept in mind when they performed their Give Peace a Chance gig from room number 1472 of an anonymous Montreal hotel. Sunrise on a beach in Goa might have helped matters.

If your gig is important enough to signal the end of a decade, you're doing very well for yourself. It's now accepted that the 1960s ended when The Stones played Altamont, an American festival that went disastrously wrong from the start. There wasn't much peace and love in evidence when Jagger was greeted with a punch in the face and a fan was later fatally stabbed.

A lesser case can be made for the 1990s beginning when The Stone Roses played Spike Island. But of course such talk is superfluous when everyone's off their bin on ecstasy.

Some gigs have "legendary" written all over them months in advance. When Malcom McLaren thought it would be a tremendous hoot to book The Sex Pistols into a series of redneck southern venues on their US tour, there was only going to be one outcome: violence directed at the band from the audience and violence directed at the audience from the band, the latter courtesy of the business end of Sid Vicious's bass guitar.

Related events here would be Bob Dylan upsetting finger-in-the-ear folk supremacists by daring to harness the use of electricity and The Jesus and Mary Chain mistaking their live performance for an opportunity to conduct a scientific experiment into what precise levels of guitar feedback are necessary to make a person's ears bleed profusely.

At this point it's difficult to see where the next Bowie-at-the-Hammersmith-Odeon-1973, Nirvana-at-the-Reading-Festival-1992 moment is going to come from. What has this generation got apart from "I was there when Dido played Live 8"?