I don’t remember the first time I listened to Peter Cat Recording Co. I remember most moments since. In the last few years, their songs have soundtracked the entirety of my existence – the walks, the shared quiet moments, and the general tediousness that accompanies making a life of your own in a city that isn’t. Peter Cat has often been pegged as a band that thrives on not being easily classifiable into one single genre but if you were to categorise them in the vast expanse of human emotion, they’d fit into nostalgia. They make the kind of music that makes me long for a life I haven’t lived, nostalgic in a sense, for a future that is yet to come. Perhaps this is why every Peter Cat song seems so comforting – they have the familiarity of a forgotten childhood memory.
Loving a band when sometimes loving it might be the only consistent thing in your life can be a way out: a means to impose narrative to its aimlessness. This love becomes a time machine to remember moments by, presenting itself as a pocket of hope; a small crevice inside your heart that surrenders into loving something so enormously that it leaves a stain and yet you let it spread. Still, there is nothing earth-shattering about loving a band or a song so hard that you know your way around its curves the same way the novelty of waking up early loses it sheen once it becomes a habit.
But loving a band so much that you show up at their gig is a choice. I often lament about how anticipation – this flux of waiting – is fatal, but overlook that anticipation is also an indicator of desire. It is proof of our ability to look forward to something; a glimpse of hope in the cynics within all of us. It’s why we crave occasions that turn into “nights to remember” and the reason these nights become an event. You come-of-age in the days that accomodate the time between loving a band and being at their gig. You pack all parts of you as checked-in luggage and ask it to be present in a moment despite the wastefulness that signposts your week, month, or year.
Last month on an endlessly pleasant Friday evening, I was in the audience as Peter Cat played live. I stood front-row in a room bursting at its seams with people not unlike me, as Suryakant Sawhney – the band’s vocalist – crooned “I’m This”. He wore an attractively wrinkled white kurta with a flower on it; his eyes remained closed as he launched into the chorus, a piece of songwriting so self-assured in its melancholia that it sparkles. “I’m This” is an admission – one of those songs that feel like a reckoning with the self, similar to that time at night when you find yourself silently assessing your features in the mirror. I used to think that “I’m This” is a song best savoured alone.
But that evening, the song grew into a living, breathing continent, not interested in being limited to anyone’s personal island. In this roomful of others, “I’m This” existed on a synced wavelength that was at once invite-only and open for all. There is no hiding in a crowd that speaks the exact language of love you reserve for bands and songs – things so trivial that your extreme fondness could seem bizarre to people who remain untouched by it. Everyone in that room resided in the same continent, willingly crowdfunding sentimentality for a group of men singing unabashedly about hearts and bodies.
Peter Cat, Bismillah, I’m This, and that evening meant an overwhelming deal to me. But this feeling of elation was magnified that night because it also meant maybe, an overwhelming deal to everyone around me. Going to a gig feels like entering a bubble – not only does the world outside cease to matter but it is also not privy to this moment, which makes it singular in experience. In that sense, the feeling that gigs conjure is a lot like the feeling you get when you stand in a roomful of mirrors. Everywhere you look, every eye you meet, and every smile you match is in a way, a reflection that could easily be mistaken for your own.
On such nights, I’m convinced that fandoms are possibly the last remaining safe space where we permit ourselves to wear the embarrassing emotional honesty of blind belief on our sleeves. Gigs are nothing but the dance floors of this safe space, hosting a never-ending exhibition of our strange, shared obsessions. If there is something everyone knows about me, it’s that I’m a fangirl. My default responses are aggressive excitement or uninterrupted squealing. I’ve been told that it’s infectious to witness. I suppose it's because when I love something, I naturally want everyone around me to love it too. It is why I feel like myself at gigs. This is what gigs tell you: that the act of sharing your love sometimes brings greater joy than loving a thing on your own. This is also what a gig does: it allows you the privilege of inhabiting the moment that encapsulates a piece of music, and then share it with the people around you as an offering but also as a confession.
I’ve often wondered why people sign up to be one of the strangers in a gathering of strangers, unable to quite pinpoint what it is that they take out of gigs. But that’s the thing – a gig is entirely what you bring to it. It is an accumulation of our wants, desires, vulnerabilities, and expectations, all placed on top of one another in a dimly lit room. Gigs are about wanting something that is otherwise out of our means; an expression of the need for human connection, for a shared experience to tether us to each other like threads that make up a blanket. They are the realisation of the possibilities that we are ready to open ourselves to and why it’s impossible to shake off the feeling that every throwaway glance, touch, or gesture is imbued with meaning. These hours that mark a gig isn’t what life is – it is what life could be.
I’m usually very skeptical of the idea of “perfect days”. There seems to be an unsaid agreement that a perfect day must somehow be even better than what is possible in our imagination. More often than not, it is an exercise in wasteful projection that ends in crushing disappointment. But sometimes, some nights offer a reminder that perfect days can exist, that life can sometimes exceed expectations, and that we too, could live a lovely life.