Siobhan O’Donnell on Britain being more divided than Brexit, Google reading the nation’s homework, and finding harmony in distortion.
The amp died mid-chorus. Not a noble death, not a blaze of feedback, just a sad electrical sigh and then silence, like a politician realising the microphone is still on. We stood there in the sudden quiet, three musicians and a room of strangers, all of us briefly united by the universal London experience of something we rely on simply giving up.
Unity, Of A Sort
Which is funny, because the news this week is all about how Britain is now officially more divided than it was during Brexit, with experts bravely recommending that we all argue more calmly online. More calmly. Online. These experts have clearly never been online. Telling Britain to argue calmly on the internet is like telling Thames Water to consider, as a fun experiment, holding the water. It is not in the nature of the thing.
But here is what I noticed in that dead-amp silence: a room full of people who disagree about everything can still stand in the same basement and want the same broken machine to work again. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the entire secret of a good gig. You do not need everyone to agree. You need everyone to want the noise back.
Google Has Been Reading Our Diaries
The story that genuinely unsettled me, though, was regulators ordering Google to stop quietly copying the nation’s articles without permission. As a writer, even a writer whose main output is shouting rhymes about the Victoria Line, this hits a nerve. Someone took the work, fed it into a machine, and gave nothing back but a flush of unwanted pride. I know that feeling. It is called being in a support band.
The Open Rights Group has done solid work on exactly this question of who owns what we make online, and it matters more than people think. Punk has always been about ownership. We own our masters because no label would touch our masters. We own our merch because we screen-print it ourselves in Pidge’s nan’s garage, fumes and all. The idea that a giant machine could just hoover up everything and call it search is, to me, the least punk thing imaginable. It is the establishment with better servers.
The Honest Distortion
Here is my theory, formed over a warm cider while Degsy resuscitated the amp with the tender violence of a man who has watched one YouTube video. Distortion is honest. A clean signal lies to you. It says everything is fine, everything is smooth, the pipes do not leak and the country is not divided and the Prime Minister has not reset Europe seven times. Distortion tells the truth: there is too much going through the wire, it cannot all fit, and the result is glorious mess.
Britain right now is heavily distorted. Too much going through the wire. And rather than turn it into music, we keep being told to turn it down, argue calmly, form a panel. I refuse. The whole point is to crank it until the truth screams out the other side.
Resurrection
Degsy fixed the amp. It came back with a roar that knocked a pint off the monitor and a tear, I will admit, from my eye. We finished the set. The divided room cheered as one. For three and a half minutes, nobody in that basement was on the left or the right or the fence. We were just loud, together, and alive.
Then the lights came up, everyone remembered they hated each other, and we all went home on separate night buses. But for three and a half minutes. That is the job. That is why I do it. That is more unity than the experts have managed all year, and we did it for the price of a fuse.
Afterwards, The Chip Shop
Every gig ends the same way: four sweaty musicians in a chip shop at midnight, reviewing a performance no one filmed, agreeing it was either our best or our worst, with no possible way to ever know. This is the purest form of memory left in Britain, unrecorded and therefore unfalsifiable, which is more than can be said for the rest of us now that the machines have been quietly copying everything.
Pidge argued the gig was transcendent. Degsy argued it was a shambles. They are both right, because a punk gig is a quantum event: transcendent and shambolic until a witness collapses the waveform, and our only witnesses had left to catch the 134. So it remains, gloriously, both. We finished the chips. We caught separate buses. The amp lived to die another day, and so did we.
One last observation, scrawled on the night bus home past a closed venue with a TO LET sign already up: London keeps losing the rooms where the noise happens, and nobody in charge seems to notice, because the people in charge have never needed a sweaty basement to feel alive. The Musicians Union keeps sounding the alarm about grassroots venues vanishing, and they are right. Every closed door is a band that never forms, a song never shouted, a bruise never earned. I will keep playing until they run out of basements, and then I will play in the street, and they can fine me for the privilege.
Find more of the noise at The Poke.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
