Roger Mairlot loves music. Now there is hardly anyone who hates music – but with Mairlot, the passion takes extreme forms. The 74-year-old Englishman goes to a concert almost every evening.
“Music is serious business,” he told online magazine Vice. One for which he therefore invests a lot of time and money. While others his age curl up at home, play with the grandkids and then go to bed early, he is a very regular hitter of London’s bars and clubs. The declared goal is to go to a concert every evening.
Shortly before his 60th birthday, on a family outing, he happened to run into two music fans who were on their way to a Joan Baez concert. Mairlot told them he’d always wanted to see the singer live – and they invited him to come along. That was the beginning of an almost excessive passion for concerts. As a pensioner, the former car mechanic can’t get enough of live music.
His son showed him how to find bands and dates for gigs on the Internet – at that time still on MySpace. Since retiring in 2008, he has been on the road almost non-stop. Before the Corona break, he had a total of 725(!) concert evenings in a row, that’s almost two years. Sometimes he even managed five bands in one night. Then came the pandemic, which with its lockdowns and restrictions caused concerts to be stopped worldwide. But since everything has gone back to normal, Roger Mairlot has been back with his old enthusiasm. “Some people climb mountains, some run marathons, and I’m an extreme concert goer,” he says.
Mairlot is mainly active in the indie and rock scene, he knows almost every band in London. His trademark is a black military jacket. He documents his visits on Instagram and Facebook, often with somewhat blurred pictures. There he calls himself the gig slut – a nickname that a singer once gave him because he wanders from concert to concert and from band to band. And he doesn’t want to stop that any time soon: “The idea is to keep doing this until I drop dead,” he explained to the “Guardian”.
Sources: Guardian / Vice / The Gigslut on Facebook
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