Coming out as a RHCP fan isn’t going to win me any favours with the bleedin’ edge crowd, saying you like a stadium rock band pegs you as out of touch, or the worst crime of all; being old.

When I was a teenager I fell in with a bad crowd, that’s not to say I was particularly good to begin with or they were particularly bad, we were the cliché misfits you find everywhere but still manage to isolate themselves. They say you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, but I really don’t think you get that much say in your friends – the whole school process is a giant filter shifting out the different grains of dysfunction, the others caught in your trap are ipso facto your friends, like it or not. We burnt a few bibles, shoplifted whenever we could, had the odd joint, and sold home-made wine to the first years, you know, normal kid stuff.

I Don’t remember how but I found Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and loved it. All my friends were listening to the theatrical anger of Metallica and rehearsed pain of Guns & Roses, RHCP offered something different, a model of masculinity that could be sexy without being overwrought and silly without the sneer. My friends didn’t like it and it took a small leap of confidence, a dwindling resource during my teenage years, to say they were wrong and carry on listening to them anyway. It wasn’t a big split but it was enough.

In the space of five years the odd joint turned into speed, the hubris of youth and being part of that tight circle carried me along with it. Looking back we threw ourselves down that path not unaware of the danger but hard for it, smart enough to know that drugs we’re not an instant death sentence like we’d been told, but dumb enough not to know there’s a grain of truth in even the most restrictive lies. When that speed stopped working like it used to, this was back in the mid nineties when you could find decent speed too, the next step was to inject it. I remember dirty mattresses in council flats and defiant punk slogans written on the walls. it was only that candle flame of difference that allowed me to step back. When the speed turned into heroin, I was watching from afar. And when all my friends were gone, mad, in prison, left the city, and, sadly in the case of one, dead, I was alive but alone.

Now I hate to agree with the hipsters and music snobs, but its true that RHCP hasn’t made a decent album since 2002 and, nostalgia aside, I wasn’t looking forward to their recent gig at the MEN which my girlfriend had scored free tickets too. It was only to stop the fourteen year old that lives in my brain from throwing a migraine and the promise of box seats (which never happened) that made the journey to Manchester at all inviting. But it was everything I could have wanted.

After a career of struggling with his voice Kedis finally seems comfortable with being a singer and his frenetic showmanship even made the Emo Hitler haircut work. Chad beat the drums so hard he broke at least three sticks per song and smiled his big American shit eating grin between songs. The new guy, Josh Klinghoffer, showed real chops making the solos his own with a laid back fuzz style somewhere between Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix. And Flea just being Flea, bouncing around the stage like the herald of the Weird Funk Love Army as it Marches triumphant home from the Vibe Wars of 2079.

What I also didn’t expect is to hear songs from ALL their albums, even the early ones. Their policy was described by Flea as ‘one fish, two fish, old song, new song’ but it was more like two or three earlier songs too one off the new album. Not that that was a bad thing, the songs off the new album, I’m With You, sounded much better live, they made sense and worked, unlike the album itself which even now, after the gig, sounds a little flat.

Despite myself, when the simple clear notes of the introduction from Under The Bridge rang out into the crowd, it all came back, the loss, the bad decisions, the sheer waste of essentially kids too smart to be lullabied by a system who’s end game was factory jobs and pregnancy. But too dumb to reach beyond petty rebellion and self destruction. The jumbled second hand hippie philosophies offered by RHCP had give me the chaos theories butterfly wing flap which in my case had diverted the typhoon.

I don’t know if this tour is the final muster, like the last hard-on of a dying man, or the start of a new phase of the RHCP’s career, maybe one where they start not to take themselves so seriously again and produce an album that doesn’t contain mostly filler. But I’m glad I went, not only did I get to see a seminal band perform the songs that mean so much to me. But I finally got proved right, that small difference that saved my life didn’t seem that small, and the life it saved seemed worth saving.