My first gig: Gordon Harcourt

Gordon Harcourt. Photo / Supplied

Greg Johnson recalls his first big gig, The Police at Wellington Town Hall in 1981.

It was, I think, 1981. The Springboks might well have been in the country, but I was 14 and I had bigger things on my mind - The Police were coming to Wellington.

Back then, my army surplus bag from the shop on Cuba St (now a cafe of course) was scrawled with U2, Simple Minds, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, and The Police. The Police were the biggest name for me.

It was after their Zenyatta Mondatta album (the most pretentious of their album names, and there's some competition) so their big tune at the time was Don't Stand So Close To Me. It's got that line about "the old man in that book by Nabokov", which went right over my head back then, but I knew ALL the words of ALL the songs on ALL the albums by heart.

I knew that the weird laugh at the start of Roxanne was because Sting (or was it Andy Summers, the guitarist?) sat on the keyboard by mistake, but they left it in the recording. I knew that ... well, actually I've forgotten the rest of the crap I knew.

They were to play the Wellington Town Hall and I was terrified of girls, so I asked my mate Andrew McCallum to come, a classmate from Wellington College and Karori Normal School before that. He had flaming red hair and lived on Cooper St.

We sat upstairs in the Circle - that marvellous horseshoe around that beautiful hall, and we were almost at one end, above the side of the stage. The pit below us would have been heaving with blond highlighted mullets and mirror aviator shades.

The gig is mostly a blur, except for a memory of flickering light on awed faces, and just that feeling: "I'm-at-a-real-concert!"

I have no memory of how I got there or how I got home. Dad probably picked us up, I guess, in the Chevette.

The next really big gig was David Bowie at Athletic Park, and I actually went with a girl for that one (she dumped me at the gig I think), but it's Sting and Andy and Stewart at the Town Hall that stays with me.

I still love The Police, and if I'm trawling radio stations in the car I'll always stop for Roxanne, or Wrapped Around my Finger, or Message In A Bottle.

Gordon Harcourt hosts Fair Go, which screens Wednesdays, at 7.30pm, on TV One.