Imagine twenty thousand girls. Screaming girls. “A screaming comes across the sky,” the opening line of Thomas Pynchon's classic Gravity’s Rainbow, came to mind as I stood with my younger daughter, Anya, age sixteen, surrounded by about twenty thousand thirteen- to sixteen-year-old girls, many of them wearing braces, on a humid mid-March evening at Rajamangala National Stadium in Bangkok, Thailand, waiting for the arrival on stage of the globe's biggest boy band, One Direction (1D for short). Because even hours before 1D finally showed up, the screaming had begun.
There were almost no boys. I counted two in my immediate vicinity, and if I had to calculate I’d say there was one boy for every four hundred girls. Barun, my nineteen-year-old son, should have been here instead of me, chaperoning his sister and making friends, his path free of competition. Wait a second. Of course there was competition: the band we were all waiting for. He stood no chance.
Anya has been a One Directioner since 2010, but she had never seen them live because bands-of-the-moment like 1D don't play India; only those geriatrics whose fans can no longer scream, or even raise their voices without clearing their throats, put up with India's bureaucratic terrorism and visit. By chance we heard that 1D was coming to Asia when my eldest, Mrinalini (twenty-two), teased her sister about a 1D tour poster in Hong Kong, which she saw when she went there on holiday. On the spur-of-the-moment, I suggested that we catch a concert on this tour. 1D would do shows in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Indonesia and the Philippines, but not in India. We opted for the oft-visited Bangkok.
Our family had only once flown out of India for a concert: to watch Coldplay perform at Abu Dhabi's Corniche Breakwater on New Year's Eve in 2011. The kids got spots against the barricades facing the stage while my wife and I stood five to six layers of people behind them. There was a lot of cheering and whooping, but I don't recall any screaming or shrieking. Fans even bounced up and down, and I realized then that I no longer had the energy to attend a concert. An hour-and-a-half to get in, and another three hours or so till Coldplay finally appeared, sapped me. Still it was a great concert and one of our best vacations, so I had no second thoughts about the 1D plan.
Barun refused to go. He disliked 1D, maybe because he looked down on the band as a musician, or perhaps because he resented the fact that 1D had hundreds of millions of devotees whereas his band had a handful of girl acquaintances who landed up at Hauz Khas Village gigs to occasionally whoop but never shriek. Thus, it was just Anya and me in a cab on a Saturday afternoon, heading out to the stadium in Hua Mak, after having left my wife at the Terminal 21 mall in Sukhumvit,
The show was at 8 pm and the gates were to open at 5. Outside the stadium, girls were lined up to get their photo taken with a life-size cut-out of their favourite 1D member. Anya skipped that as we raced into the stadium and onto the grounds where a stage stood with three full-length backdrop screens and two mammoth side screens. Girls had already gotten into the fan pit so we had to settle for being about 15 feet away from the stage. Our pit was to the left of the walkway that led from the stage to a secondary stage, nearer to the back of the grounds and the tiered seating. Now we had to wait. Unlike Delhi, Bangkok was hot and humid at the time, but cold water was distributed freely courtesy the band, which was reminding everyone in pre-recorded announcements to stay hydrated.
I knew nothing about 1D. I knew that Anya loved the band, and that Mrinalini called it “Wrong Direction” or “No Direction.” I prefer less pre-fabricated music, although the first band I ever heard, The Beatles, might have been considered a proto boy band had they not played their own instruments or written about slices-of-life as seen through drugs. Yes, Anya admitted, 1D was assembled by a TV host on whose reality show they had appeared. Like most boy bands, 1D seemed to be focussed on their looks, hairstyle and fashion—all of which were, as the Buddhists say, only in the moment rather than for musical virtuosity.
Suddenly, someone shrieked. I don't know where, but as soon as she stopped, some others shrieked from a different part of the ground, and thus there was a chain reaction of shrieking that went on for a minute or so. Then the stadium returned to an ambient buzz. And then, about ten minutes later, another series of shrieks. I never understood why.
During the interminable and uncomfortable wait, several girls tried to wriggle their way through the sardine-packed pit to the front with the time-old ruse that their friends were “over there.” I didn't care, as I wasn't a real fan, but Anya could get pushed out of her vantage point. What could I do? I was fifty, and some girls were a quarter of my age; even the only other parent I spotted in our enclosure, a mother telling her girls in Gujarati how to gain that millimetre advantage, clearly looked younger than I was. If a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old wanted to squeeze by, then allow them I must. I felt like a rock in the middle of a gushing river. Some girls tried to pass by me through osmosis. After a while I was irritated, and I chided one girl, but immediately felt remorse. It all got futile quickly because the crowd density got so high that even when some fans wanted to sit they could not because there was no space to do so. We had to remain standing.
At 6 pm the side screens jumped to life with music videos. When I was in college in the United States, I was a radio station disc jockey, which made me a walking rock-music encyclopaedia and helped swell my collection of vinyl LPs before the compact disc invasion. (Once, the curious infant Mrinalini saw me holding a vinyl and marveled at what a giant CD it was.) Even after coming to India in 1986 and joining journalism I found some way or the other—in those pre-internet days—of keeping track of the latest rock 'n roll. When I became an editor in 2007, YouTube kept me abreast of new bands. At that moment, however, I had no idea who the bands were. All I could see were handfuls of healthy, happy teenagers—both boys and girls—with peacock coiffure and mock-sexual dance moves singing assembly-line lyrics that all sounded like “Girl/Boy, you gotta let me know.” And each time a video came on, fans would scream. I first thought they were 1D videos, but the faces kept changing and some belonged to girls. What an ignoramus I had become.
"Who's this?" I finally asked my daughter. “Five Seconds of Summer,” she said, which sounded suspiciously like Thirty Seconds to Mars, Jared Leto's band, whose pirated debut album I had bought back in 2004 at the Patpong night market. Barun had appropriated the CD, so I never listened it, under the vague notion that my kids should have their own music that was untainted with parental approval. The girl band was on the screen again. "Who's this?" “Little Mix,” Anya said, and much later I found out that one of the 1D guys, Zayn Malik, was engaged to one of the Little Mix gals. "And this?" “Olly Murs.” "This guy?" “McBusted.” That sounded like Ronald McDonald being booked for drugs. "These fellas?" “The Script.”
The fiercest screaming happened for a Toyota Vios ad. Why would anyone scream for a car unless it was a Lamborghini, I wondered. Five boys were suddenly strutting around the Toyota. "Who are these guys?" “Oh my god, Papa,” Anya scolded me. “That's One Direction.” Silly me. I wrongly thought they were still teenagers because they were clearly in their early twenties. They must have grown up. They also figured in a perfume ad (more screaming), and before I could ask, Anya said, “Yes.”
The audience was dancing, or rather bouncing, each fan with an arm in the air clutching a smartphone or gesturing that she—or this here, or the cosmos in general—was number one. The humidity and the dancing forced the girls, who had come with their hair open and flowing, to tie it in a knot at the back. Suddenly, all heads had exactly the same knot, bobbing up and down to the beat.
At around 7 pm, a Thai DJ named ONO took the stage and mixed some bass-heavy dance numbers. A DJ had also opened for Coldplay in Abu Dhabi, working the crowd into a frenzy of bounce, and I wondered if we were approaching the demise of the Era of the Opening Band. My deep thoughts were interrupted when the DJ's burly lackeys walked alongside the walkway flicking free CDs into the crowd. I tried to catch one—not out of fandom, but out of Pavlovian greed—however, the thirteen-year-old girls had swifter reflexes. Rats. While I watched the lackeys wistfully, I noticed two girls dancing to my right. They were baby-faced yet their hands swayed in a very adult manner. It was unnerving. Perhaps I should have stayed at home.
The crowd was singing along to a song, and the chorus repeatedly went, “Bangladesh, Ban-gla-desh, Ban-gla-desh.” No, that wasn't right; why would teenage girls in Bangkok be chanting about the Bengali homeland? I asked Anya what song was playing, and she said, ‘All about That Bass,’ by Meghan Trainor. OK, now I got it: “All about that bass, bout-that-bass,” is how the chorus actually went. What had I been thinking?
The girl to Anya's left was complaining to a girl in front of her. “Can you tie your hair please?” she requested in thick Thai-accented English. “It's getting in my mouth.”
The DJ finished at around 7:45 pm and I thought, ah, another fifteen minutes, but the wait went beyond 8 as crew hands for the umpteenth time came on the darkened stage to tune the guitars and drum. Impatient fans screamed for the band, with intermittent shrieks of false alarms. Finally, at 8:30 pm, the lights went out and the three-screen backdrop began showing videos of the band members, and clips of their songs in the background, as a prelude to their imminent appearance.
The screaming went up multiple-fold, the pitch going higher and higher, and just when you thought it had reached a crescendo, the screaming became screamier. And when 1D ran onto the stage, singing their opening song ‘Clouds,’ the shrieking became so fierce that my head spun. I thought I would faint because the shrieking had pierced my ears, my inner ears, and my brain. For a couple of minutes, I could not even hear the song.
Yet the shrieking did not relent. This sort of paroxysm you associate with The Beatles, a band from my infanthood that my immigrant mother loved—perhaps because she liked how English teenaged girls broke into inconsolable sobbing even if they only caught a Beatle-glimpse. This was different. Each scream seemed spontaneous. Once in a while you would hear one blood-curdling scream shoot over the crowd, across the rest. It just went on and on and on—for two hours. It did not let up until the slow number ‘Little Things,’ and that was because the entire stadium sang along (till then, parts of the crowd sang along to their favoured song). I surreptitiously shot a video of Anya singing along, but she has made me promise never to show anyone, not even Mrinalini.
The voices of 1D—Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne—sounded alike, although I'm sure the twenty thousand girls at the stadium would have violently disagreed. Also, the boys did not play instruments, except for Niall, who strummed a guitar for much of the show and presumably saw himself as the serious musician. (Later, I read that he and Liam had insisted that their latest album would take a “dark, edgy” turn. I wonder what constituted dark and edgy for young girls. And presumably the commercial machine was too much for Zayn, who quit a week after the show, making this the final concert of the original 1D line-up.)
Yet the boys sang with great energy. They walked down the walkway to the secondary stage for a few numbers to give their fans in the back a chance to scream it up. They perspired profusely in the Bangkok humidity, but did not let up. Three songs sounded vaguely familiar, but I can't think of where I might have heard them before. They broke between groups of songs for light, genial chit-chat, and to wish a fan a happy birthday—none of the things you'd get at a Deafheaven concert, I suppose—and they sang crowd-pleasing anthemic numbers that admittedly made for a rousing show.
They played for ninety minutes and took a break before a twenty-minute encore. Then it was all over. The screaming continued and kept climbing until the floodlights were turned on, indicating that fans should stop screaming and go home. A lot of worn-out girls dragged themselves out of the stadium like feral beings trudging out of the wild into civilisation. Even Anya's throat was sore. But she was happy. “The best two hours of my life,” she said. “The best father in the world.” Well, I guess standing among twenty thousand screaming girls was a small price to pay to hear that.