Dogging at the Devil’s Arse..

It has been a while.

I’d like to claim that this is because I’ve been carefully considering the future direction of Ferocious Blog, waiting for precisely the right moment to dust it off and start hammering at the keyboard again.

It isn’t. Life happened. Ferocious Dog got bigger, line-ups changed, lockdown happened, and somewhere along the way I stopped being quite as inclined to spend every available weekend charging around the country watching bands and talking to absolutely everybody I encountered.

Then Ferocious Dog announced they were calling it a day.

It was actually Ella who spotted the gig at the Devil’s Arse and acquired the tickets. Which seems fitting, really. Ferocious Dog are fairly directly responsible for me knowing Ella in the first place, after fleetingly meeting her at a gig in Nuneaton and then properly getting to know her and Simon in Harlow all those years ago.

And so, having both finished work a little early, something unusual happened.

I drove.

Those who remember the more active days of this blog may remember this was once entirely normal. There was a time when my car probably knew its own way to Ferocious Dog gigs. These days Ella tends to do most of our driving, but apparently some muscle memories remain.

We arrived in Castleton with loads of time to spare and almost immediately encountered something that felt rather strange.

There were Ferocious Dog fans everywhere.

And we didn’t know them.

Back in the days when this blog was at its most prolific, going to see Ferocious Dog generally meant arriving somewhere and immediately recognising half the people there. Sometimes considerably more than half. The travelling support was a relatively small, mildly dysfunctional family and you’d encounter the same faces in Nottingham, London, Manchester, a field in Derbyshire or wherever else the band happened to be playing.

Ferocious Dog getting to the point where they can fill places with people I’ve never seen before is, of course, a very good thing.

It just made me realise how long we’d been away.

Not that everybody was unfamiliar. On the hunt for food we bumped into Geoff and Adella, before discovering we’d managed to arrive at precisely that awkward point in the afternoon when all the cafés had decided we didn’t need feeding.

Fortunately, there was a chip shop.

While we were waiting Jamie wandered past, and shortly afterwards a succession of little Devil’s Arse 4x4s appeared to collect an absolutely enormous order.

We naturally concluded this must be the Ferocious Dog rider.

Times really have changed.

Suitably fuelled, we headed up towards the Peak Cavern – or the Devil’s Arse, to give it its vastly superior name – and it’s difficult to imagine many more spectacular places to watch a band.

The cave opens up into a vast natural auditorium, with the stage at the far end and the main standing area split across two levels, along with a raised accessible area for people with limited mobility. It looks incredible.

It perhaps isn’t the natural habitat of the kind of raucous Ferocious Dog mosh pit I remember from years gone by, but more on that later.

There were more familiar faces once we were inside. Paul was manning the merch stand, and we probably encountered another dozen or so people we knew as we wandered around. Outside, Neil told us a lovely story about taking his dad to his first Ferocious Dog gig in Stockton, and Ken making a real fuss of him.

And that, more than anything, was always what this whole thing was about.

The music was obviously important – it would have been a bit weird otherwise – but Ferocious Dog somehow created this enormous network of people around them. People met at gigs, became friends, went on adventures together, formed relationships, discovered other bands and generally became embedded in one another’s lives.

I started this blog because I liked a band and thought more people should know about them.

I ended up with lifelong friends.

And Ella.

Anyway. Enough misty-eyed nostalgia. There were bands to watch.

First up were Shanks’ Pony, who of course are no strangers to these pages themselves. These days they’re also great friends of ours, which meant I was simultaneously delighted to see them supporting Ferocious Dog in such an incredible venue and just a tiny bit annoyed that Darwin’s Rejects hadn’t managed to wangle our way onto the bill too.

I’m sure I dealt with this with enormous maturity.

We headed down to the front for their set, and they were superb.

Getting a live sound right in what is, fundamentally, a massive room made out of rock presumably presents one or two challenges. There was a little crunchiness to the sound at times, but Shanks’ absolutely smashed their half-hour set out of the park.

Rollercoaster provided one of those wonderful moments when the audience properly takes over, the singalong echoing around the cave, before the inevitable closing carnage of Moshpit Waltz. It’s always a highlight of a Shanks’ set and, frankly, if you’re going to finish a set in a cave then you might as well do it with a song encouraging everyone to hurl themselves around a bit.

There’s something particularly satisfying about watching your mates play to a big crowd and absolutely nail it. Although admittedly it does nothing whatsoever to alleviate thoughts of we could’ve supported this, you know.

Then it was time for Ferocious Dog.

And they were on really good form.

For us, unsurprisingly, it was the older songs that particularly hit the spot. The Glass, Quiet Paddy and Too Late were all very welcome, while Freeborn John proved that reports of the demise of the more energetic Ferocious Dog crowd may have been slightly exaggerated when Kaysharr got herself up on the surfboard.

Some traditions, happily, remain intact.

But it was probably the songs from From Without that landed hardest.

That album arrived right in the middle of what I suppose was our peak Ferocious Dog period. We were travelling all over the place, this blog was being updated at a frankly unsustainable rate, and the band and the people surrounding it occupied a fairly ridiculous proportion of our social lives.

So hearing Gallows Justice again was particularly welcome. There are songs which you simply like, and there are songs which somehow become attached to a particular period of your life. A fair chunk of From Without falls firmly into the latter category for us.

And, of course, there could really only be one way to finish.

Slow Motion Suicide.

There are songs that acquire a significance beyond the recording itself because of everything you associate with hearing them live, and that one carries an awful lot of memories with it. Hearing it blasting around the Devil’s Arse was a pretty spectacular way to round things off.

We also discovered a useful Devil’s Arse gig-going tip during the evening: the sound is actually better if you move further back. Perhaps that’s the acoustics of the cave doing their thing, or perhaps standing immediately in front of a large collection of speakers has never actually been the optimum way of appreciating musical subtlety.

Who knew?

Moving back also gave us a chance to survey the crowd and notice another difference from the Ferocious Dog gigs of old.

Where were all the mosh pits?

There were certainly flashes of the old chaos – Kaysharr had already demonstrated that – but there was nothing quite resembling some of the seething masses of bodies we remembered.

Perhaps the unusual layout of the venue discouraged it. Perhaps the Ferocious Dog demographic is changing.

Or perhaps we’re all just getting old.

There was a time when getting battered around a Ferocious Dog mosh pit was an absolutely standard component of an evening out. These days I found myself looking at the space where one might have developed and wondering whether my back would actually tolerate it.

Character development, apparently.

It would be easy to get overly nostalgic about all of this. To look back at the tiny venues, familiar faces and chaotic weekends and conclude that something has been lost as Ferocious Dog have grown.

But that wouldn’t really be fair.

Things change.

The band got bigger. People came and went. New people discovered them. Lockdown interrupted the habits we’d built our lives around. I became less relentlessly sociable than I once was. Other things came along – not least ending up playing in a band myself rather than merely standing around watching them.

The old scene didn’t disappear.

It just evolved.

And standing in a cave in Castleton, watching Ferocious Dog with Ella, Shanks’ Pony having just played a storming support set, surrounded by a mixture of old friends and hundreds of people I’d never met before, felt like a pretty good demonstration of that.

When I created Ferocious Blog back in 2015, the About page ended with:

“Other than that there’s no grand plan – let’s just see where it leads!”

Well, now I know some of where it led.

It led to ridiculous journeys around the country. To festivals and fields and pubs and venues I’d never otherwise have visited. To countless bands I might never have discovered. To friendships that have long since ceased to have anything to do with whichever band happens to be on a stage.

Ultimately, it led to a life that would look meaningfully different if I’d never encountered Ferocious Dog.

And it led to Ella.

Which isn’t bad going for a music blog.

This isn’t quite the end, either.

We have tickets – again courtesy of Ella – for Ferocious Dog’s final Rock City show in November.

Because it would be rude not to, really.

And maybe, just maybe, there’s one last mosh pit in me.

Assuming my back’s up to it.