Nearly New Kids on the Block

'Look,' my wife chuckled, holding her smartphone so I could see the screen. 'Someone dug up New Kids on the Block.'

I squinted at the tiny font and saw that New Kids on the Block were playing at the AT&T Centre on the 16th of May. 'They'll be a bit long in the tooth by now, surely. I'm surprised trades descriptions aren't after them if they're still going by that name - assuming we have something like the trades descriptions act here.'

We both chuckled and then rededicated ourselves to viewing Wheel of Fortune, smiling as a contestant to whom we had both taken an immediate dislike submitted an obviously wrong answer.

My wife's smartphone rang.

'Hello,' she answered. 'What's up?'

'What are you doing on the 16th of May?' asked Will, her brother.

'Well, I know I won't be going to see New Kids on the Block,' Bess laughed. She laughed because she knew that there was no way her brother would be interested in going to see New Kids on the Block, and he'd be sure to find it funny.

Nevertheless, here we are. A few weeks have passed and we're at the AT&T Centre, myself, my wife, and my brother-in-law. The New Kids are still alive, still performing, and are engaged in something called the Mixtape Tour. This means not only the hits, but appearances by Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Salt-N-Pepa, and Naughty by Nature, so it's mostly an eighties nostalgia thing - a concert based on the sort of stuff which would have ended up on a cassette tape, although not one of my cassette tapes which is why both Esplendor Geometrico and Portion Control remain conspicuously absent from the bill. Personally I don't have a whole lot of nostalgia for the eighties, and particularly not the stretch inhabited by the New Kids, but it's a night out and I figured Naughty by Nature might be approximately worth a look.

Will is here because he's a massive Debbie Gibson fan. He's a very complicated man.

I don't know anything about Debbie Gibson, other than that herself and Tiffany were presented as examples of everything which was wrong with music at the end of the eighties by the comedian Bill Hicks. The routine in which Hicks presents this argument daringly goes against the consensus by suggesting that the music of both Tiff and Debbie was ephemeral and therefore inferior to that of fucken' Hendrix, man. The routine was additionally of such macho shithead composition as to put me off bothering with any further Bill Hicks material ever again and, if anything, to leave me slightly better disposed towards both Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, as people if not as recording artists.

Back in the eighties I was in a band called the Dovers. We hosted a competition during one of our gigs - whoever applauded the loudest would win a copy of our album. The punchline was that our album was a copy of Tiffany's debut which Carl, our singer, had come by at his place of work, a design studio specialising in record covers. We never said it was something we had actually recorded, only that it was an album owned by ourselves.

Ha ha.

Tiffany's cover of I Think We're Alone Now was one of the songs on that record. As for Debbie Gibson, the title Electric Youth rings a bell, but her celebrity otherwise passed me by; and I always thought The Right Stuff by New Kids on the Block was a great song, but have no idea what happened to them after that.

Weren't they one of those dance routine based outfits? Wasn't Mark Wahlberg a member? I wonder whether they managed to lure him back to the fold, given that he's clearly a busy man these days.

Anyway, we're here and I'm sure that all of my questions will either receive answers or else cease to matter in the fullness of time. The AT&T Centre is enormous, on a scale sufficient for basketball and rodeo events, and nevertheless the place is swarming for a phenomenon long past its sell by date. It feels as though we're at an airport as we migrate towards the section of the arena in which we are to be seated. It seems incredible that this bunch could inspire such a turn out thirty years since they could legitimately be described as kids. There are a great many women in their early forties who would have been teenagers when The Right Stuff hit the charts, but the age range of tonight's audience varies wildly, including even men. We see a few women togged out in dayglo rap gear with big hoopy earrings - actually more TLC than Salt-N-Pepa, so far as I recall - but mostly it's fans of the New Kids, big gangs of them, possibly even a few hen parties. More than once I'm fooled into thinking I've spotted someone from the cast of Orange is the New Black.

Will is after a T-shirt so we join one of the many queues. After ten minutes I go and buy a beer, then come back. I've had two beers by the time we get to the front of the queue although to be fair I may be drinking fast, and it turns out that this particular concession is out of Debbie Gibson merchandise. We retrace our steps and find another concession, one with Debbie Gibson T-shirts on display.

Some of us grew up listening to NKOTB, reads the shirt of one woman who passes us by. The cool ones still do, is the punchline on the reverse of the garment. I'm apparently on that planet where New Kids on the Block were cool.

Music starts up.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

I wander over to the entrance for the nearest terrace and draw back the curtain. I'm gazing down into an entertainment grand canyon. Termite trails of fans shuffle towards their seats over on the far side. A rapper and a DJ are at work upon a circular podium at the heart of the auditorium, about a hundred feet below where I'm stood. This is the warm up act, Illtown Sluggaz which is something to do with Naughty by Nature without actually being Naughty by Nature. They sport baseball clobber and the DJ wears a cartoon bear head, like a sports mascot. He looks fucking ridiculous and I feel an involuntary shudder of disgust that I, a fully grown man, should be presented with this Disney teddy as entertainment.

'Everybody put your hands in the air,' suggests the rapper, 'and wave them like you just don't care.'

The DJ segues a few bars of Material Girl into a few bars of The Final Countdown into a few bars of Walk This Way - hits of the eighties, and everyone cheers because they recognise the songs. It doesn't matter that more than half of the songs are shite, because familiarity is the point. To my ears, it may as well be Peter Kay asking who remembers Curly Wurly or Crackerjack. I am more or less watching the twenty-first century version of Jive Bunny

'Everybody make some noise!'

I turn to rejoin my wife and brother-in-law, who has at last bagged himself some Debbie Gibson merchandise. We resume the Tolkienesque pilgrimage towards our section, ascending an escalator to the upper floor past vast stylised murals of the San Antonio Spurs and their mascot, a man in the suit of a chubby coyote with googly green eyes suggesting substance abuse - to me, but apparently to no-one else in the entire city. You would think that being able to afford this futurist space station of a venue, the Spurs could at least slip some grade school kid a few dollars to come up with a less-creepy mascot.

Our seats are on the back row, up against the rear wall, almost in the roof. The incline of the terrace seems perilously steep, certainly more than forty-five degrees, although at least we shouldn't have any trouble seeing the stage, which is still occupied by a man wearing a cartoon bear head playing snippets of Can't Fight this Feeling, The Heat is On, and other crowd pleasers. Gazing upwards, I have a view of the underside of the roof structure criss-crossed with monumental air conditioning, pipes large enough to facilitate escaping prisoners. It feels as though we're underneath the USCSS Nostromo from the movie Alien.

The venue fills to capacity, not an empty seat to be seen. A larger stage is set up against the far side, facing the central podium upon which the Illtown Sluggaz skillfully play short excerpts of familiar songs. This larger stage is picked out in neon strips delineating the shape of a huge cassette tape, and the screen behind is suddenly illuminated. We are shown a short film of the individual members of New Kids on the Block as they are now, mowing the lawn, renewing home insurance, riding a horse, having a colonoscopy…

The crowd go wild.

The face of Donny Wahlburg - brother of Mark, hence my confusion - fills the screen. He holds up a smartphone. He tells us we need to download an app called Appix in order to get the most from tonight's performance, which raises all sorts of questions that I can't be bothered to think about.

'I love you, Donny!' screams the forty-year old woman sat next to me, and she really screams, just like those teenagers in the black and white footage of the Beatles. Now the New Kids take to the stage, five tiny figures dancing upon a giant cassette tape which now has The Way written across it in neon as though by an invisible giant, that being the name of the song they are performing. A woman I uncharitably come to think of as Fat Snooky stands in her seat, directly in front of me, blocking my view. I can see only her silhouette, but what I can see suggests Snooky from Jersey Shore. The women of the three seats adjacent to Fat Snooky also stand. The terrace is at such a profound incline that my knee is higher than the top of the head of the person seated in front, and yet Fat Snooky and her friends somehow need a better view, placing me in the position of being unable to watch something I'm actually not that bothered about seeing, or wasn't until my view was so rudely obstructed.

I poke in the ear plugs as the New Kids go into My Favourite Girl. This reduces the volume, cuts out some of the distortion, and the music actually sounds sort of listenable as a result, even though it's New Kids on the Block. Despite believing that The Right Stuff was okay, they were never my sort of thing. It never bothered me that they were manufactured so much as that most of their material is quite clearly designed to make young girls go week at the knees, and its effect on me is therefore minimal. Beyond that, I'll concede that they have decent voices, and certainly with more actual soul than is the case with most boy bands; but the bottom line is that I couldn't give a fuck about dance routines, and I dislike the sort of blandly efficient corporate emoting which has been normalised by shows such as America's Got Talent and the rest. I thought we'd got rid of it all in the seventies, but somehow it came back bigger and more powerful than ever, much like an X-Men villain.

The writing on the giant cassette tape announces I Think We're Alone Now and on comes Tiffany. She seems older and a little more grizzled, but the on-screen close-up shows the face of a regular person. She reminds me of Wendy. She doesn't look as though she's had any facial surgery, and her make-up is just kind of average. Most surprising of all is that she has a rich, powerful voice, the sort you might associate with a few of the more ruthlessly authentic country artists. I'm sure she didn't sound like this as a teenager in the eighties. I'm impressed in spite of myself.

Tiff is followed by Debbie Gibson who accompanies herself on a piano which emerges from the plastic window of the giant cassette tape. She doesn't seem familiar, aside from a passing disconcerting resemblance to Debbie McGee, wife of the late Paul Daniels. Just like Tiff, she too has a surprisingly powerful voice, and I guess her piano is the only live instrument we'll be hearing this evening. She's knocking out a ballad which sounds like the sort of thing you hear on the aforementioned America's Got Talent. It's not to my taste at all, but I am warmed by just how wrong the late Bill Hicks has turned out to have been regarding this woman's musical chops.

Salt-N-Pepa are up next. I actually have a few bits and pieces of Salt-N-Pepa in my collection. They date from the era of mainstream rap having been mostly annoying and reliant on cheesy nursery rhyme style hooks, and there's only so much of that stuff I can listen to. Salt-N-Pepa give us the hits and are actually pretty entertaining. They perform with an authenticity, a certain rough, lively edge which I hadn't anticipated. It's also pretty clear that they're having a whale of a time, and the audience picks up on this too.

The New Kids return to the stage.

'You know, they said we wouldn't last,' bellows Donnie.

They would presumably be the critics. I don't specifically recall anyone doubting the longevity of New Kids on the Block, the major criticism being that they were manufactured and therefore shit, but never mind. The performance suddenly takes a peculiarly post-modern turn as we're treated to a slide show of other boy bands, everyone from New Edition to the Stylistics, reminding us that the form has occasionally thrown up a song which even miserable cunts such as myself have to grudgingly admit is decent. This is a preamble to Boys in the Band, a new song celebrating the history of boy bands, which is easily the weirdest number of the evening.

Next they tell us how happy they all are to be right here in San Antonio, which pleases the crowd no end. Houston and Austin are both called out as having played host to previous evenings of New Kids magic, which is greeted by good-natured booing from the audience of one-hundred thousand. Anyway, the point is that they like  Texas, a declaration prompting a verse of Deep in the Heart of Texas, but all I can hear are the four quick handclaps which conclude each bar and remind me of The Birdie Song. Next comes the Selena tribute - which of course we've all been waiting for seeing as how Selena was a local and all, and which is essentially karaoke, mostly sung by one lucky young Latina randomly picked out of the audience. I suppose it's the thought that counts.

'You know, life is precious,' Donnie waxes philosophically as preface to a ponderous spoken interlude, doubtless inspired by Selena's passing, and the truism that we're none of us getting any younger.

'I love you, Donnie,' screams my neighbour.

The boys briefly jig to the very worst hits of the eighties in illustration of our all having been younger than we are right now - Living on a Prayer, Eye of the Tiger, and others I would ordinarily cross the road to avoid. Naughty by Nature take the stage, and I realise I had erroneously recalled them as having incorporated Nature, the Queensbridge rapper who famously worked with Nas.

Naughty by Nature are best known for their hit OPP, the central thesis of which is that one should keep an open mind when it comes to nobbing persons already confirmed to be engaged in a sexually monogamous relationship with a third party. I have OPP on some CD somewhere so I've heard it plenty of times, and yet I still don't remember the track. I don't even remember how it goes right now even as it is being performed live on the stage in front of me. The rest of the set is convincing and energetic, but I still can't quite get away from it being just a couple of blokes rubbing their lips together on a podium accompanied by a twat in a cartoon bear head. The words are just a pointless rhythm from where I'm sat.

Blu-blub-blublu-blu-blu-bluh-blu-bluh! That's right y'all.

Salt-N-Pepa return, and then it all begins to blend into a gushing noise that's been going on far too long, unless you're here for more sincere reasons than I am. I have a notebook on my person, and I've been scribbling away for the duration of the performance, the current stretch of which is acknowledged thus:

We conclude with some spiel about how the best people are those who grew up in the eighties, then a song along the lines of you're my eighties girl, which somehow begins to feel a bit Readers' Wives; and then everyone is on stage doing everything at once for a while.

Fat Snooky and her pals make their way to the aisle. Three hours of their bobbing ponytails have left me with an impression of four young girls with Croydon facelifts - even that I've spent this time back in south-east London - but in profile I see that none of them are much younger than myself, and we're still in Texas in the year 2019. We've all had a great time, even if I've had a great time for the wrong reasons; and Will particularly has had a great time, which was the main point as this has been something to do with his upcoming birthday. The woman sat in the next seat along has apparently spent the last three hours hitting on him, but he found her advances a little weird, which is understandable.

He settles into one his monologues in the car on the way back, softly spoken and very witty with the confidence of a man who has more than earned the right to not give a shit about what anyone else thinks of his dedication to Debbie Gibson. The monologue is born from notes compared about staying at Edi's house when she used to live in Houston. Bess recalls a home which was quite different to that which Will remembers. His story expands to include a period of infirmity at Edi's place, confined to bed watching a stretch of late night television dedicated to Mariah Carey; then finding himself somehow about to buy a Mariah Carey album.

'What am I doing?'

He recreates his own reaction, disbelief mixed with horror, leaving me laughing for more or less the rest of the car journey. As with everything, not least being New Kids on the Block, I guess you had to be there.