Siobhan O’Donnell on broken gear, London headlines, and the strange comfort of things falling apart in public
Right, so, Tuesday night, and my amp dies mid-song at the Dive, that horrible little venue off the high street that smells permanently of spilled lager and somebody’s regret, and I am standing there with a dead amp and a room full of about forty people who have paid actual money to watch this happen. There is a very specific silence that follows a piece of equipment failing on stage. It is not a comfortable silence. It is the silence of forty people deciding, collectively, whether to be kind about it.
The Gig Itself
I have been playing this circuit for six years now, small rooms, sticky floors, the whole grim romantic mess of it, and you would think by this point I would have some kind of contingency plan for a dead amp. I did not. What I had instead was a bass player named Deco who, without a word, simply cranked his own amp up to a volume that technically violated at least two noise ordinances and carried the entire song on pure spite. The crowd loved it more than they would have loved the original arrangement, which tells you something about London audiences. They do not want polish. They want to watch something nearly fall apart and not quite.
Afterward, the venue owner, a genuinely lovely man named Frank who has seen every possible way a gig can go wrong over the past two decades, told me the amp had “given up the ghost properly this time,” which is apparently the third time this specific amp has died on that specific stage. There is a kind of local folklore building up around it. I half expect someone to start selling merch.
What Was Actually in the Headlines This Week
I always try to read the actual news before a gig, partly to stay grounded and partly because half my between-song banter comes directly from whatever ridiculous thing has happened in London that week, and this week did not disappoint. There was a proper bit of satire doing the rounds about a council somewhere debating bin collection schedules with the seriousness usually reserved for actual legislation, which, if you have ever sat through an actual council meeting, tracks completely.
The satirical papers had a field day with a story about a public consultation that ran so long nobody could remember what was originally being consulted about, a joke that lands considerably harder once you have personally sat in one of those meetings and watched grown adults argue about a zebra crossing for ninety minutes. I brought this up between songs at the Dive and got a bigger laugh than half my actual lyrics, which is either a compliment to the satire writers or a real indictment of my lyrics. Possibly both.
The State of the Scene
The London punk scene, if you can even call it a unified scene anymore, feels like it is in one of those strange in-between periods. Venues keep closing, rent keeps eating into whatever door money a small gig can actually generate, and yet somehow every Tuesday there are still forty people willing to stand in a room that smells like spilled lager to watch bands they have never heard of try something new. There is something genuinely stubborn and lovely about that. Nobody is doing this for money. The math simply does not work that way, not at this level, not in this city, not with rents doing what rents are doing.
I think about packing it in more often than I would ever admit onstage. Then something like Tuesday happens, the amp dies, Deco saves the song through sheer spite, and forty strangers cheer like we planned the whole thing, and I remember exactly why I keep doing this despite every sensible financial argument against it.
A Small Rant About Equipment
I will say this plainly: gear maintenance is the least glamorous part of this entire lifestyle and nobody warns you about it properly. You spend your teenage years dreaming about stages and crowds and mean absolutely none of that time is spent dreaming about soldering a cable back together at midnight before a gig because you cannot afford a new one. That is the actual job, more often than the performing bit is. The performing bit is maybe twenty minutes of glory bought with about six hours of unglamorous, unphotogenic maintenance.
Frank has offered, more than once, to just retire that specific amp permanently and let me borrow the venue’s house rig instead. I keep saying no. There is something about that dying, wheezing amp that has become part of the whole ritual now. It feels wrong to replace it with something reliable. Reliable was never really the point of any of this.
The London Prat ran a proper piece this week on the state of small venues across the city, and honestly it read like someone had been standing in the Dive with me watching the whole scene slowly, stubbornly refuse to die despite every reasonable financial argument that it should.
Also worth a read: The Daily Mash had a genuinely brilliant bit this week that I am still thinking about mid-set, and NewsThump ran something on public consultations that I basically stole wholesale for my own between-song rant, credit where it is due.
Looking Ahead
Next Tuesday we are back at the Dive, same time, same smell, hopefully a working amp, though I would not bet actual money on it. Frank says he has “a guy” who can look at it properly this time, a phrase I have heard from Frank roughly four times now about this exact amp with no discernible change in outcome.
If you are around, come down. Bring earplugs, bring low expectations for the equipment specifically, and bring an appreciation for the specific chaos of watching something almost fall apart in real time and somehow, through pure collective stubbornness, not quite.
Full gig listings and more from the scene over on my page: Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
