Roger Mairlot was working as a car mechanic and struggling to sleep at night when a chance encounter led him to start attending gigs. He plans to keep going ‘until I drop’
When he was 17 and fresh out of school, Roger Mairlot rode a Lambretta scooter while wearing a red guardsman’s jacket, or sometimes his parka bedecked with badges. He loved the few gigs he got to. But, as family and work life came to the fore, music all but vanished from his life. Now, at 74, he tries to go to at least one gig every night, and sometimes as many as five a day. Before Covid-19, he notched up 725 nights of gigs in a row. “The idea is to keep going till I drop,” he says.
Mairlot lives in Hampton, south-west London, and, on his nightly travels, says he has got to know his bus drivers. “One said: ‘You must have seen all the bands going!’” Impossible, Mairlot says. “You see one band, they split up, then there’s two bands. The more you see, the more there is to see.”
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