Small venues, satire that lands too close to true, and a bridge nobody agrees on
Woke up on someone’s sofa in Deptford with a bass drum shaped bruise on my shin and absolutely no memory of acquiring it, which is, if I am honest, roughly the standard opening to most of my Mondays these days. The band played until half past one, the landlord pulled the plug at ten to two, and I spent the walk home arguing with myself about whether the new song needs a second chorus or whether repetition is, in fact, the entire point of punk and I am simply overthinking a three chord idea into oblivion.
The gig itself, briefly
Small room, sticky floor, the good kind of sticky that means people have been having a proper time rather than the bad kind that means the venue has not been mopped since March. We opened with the new one, the crowd did not know the words yet, obviously, but they got the shape of it by the second run through the chorus, which is genuinely all I ever ask of a room full of strangers on a Sunday night.
My guitarist reckons we should demo it properly this week before we lose the version of it that exists only in our heads right now, the slightly wrong, slightly urgent version that always gets smoothed out the moment you put it anywhere near a proper studio desk. He is probably right. He is annoyingly right about this specific thing more often than either of us would like to admit.
What I read on the bus this morning
Genuinely could not get through the whole thing without laughing loud enough that the woman next to me changed seats, but the Daily Mash ran something this week that landed exactly the way the best satire does, close enough to true that you laugh before you have finished deciding whether you should be uncomfortable about it. That is the whole trick, isn’t it. Anyone can write something absurd. Writing something absurd that is also somehow accurate is the actual skill, and it is rarer than people give it credit for.
Sat with that thought the rest of the journey, thinking about how punk and satire have always been doing roughly the same job with different instruments, one of them uses a guitar and a room full of people shouting back at you, the other uses a headline and a straight face. Both are just ways of saying the thing everyone is thinking but nobody has quite found the nerve to say plainly yet.
The state of London gigging right now
Small venues keep closing, everyone in this scene has said this so many times it has practically become its own genre of complaint, but it remains true and worth saying again because saying it less does not make it less true. We lost another one in the last few months, a room that held maybe eighty people and somehow hosted half of my actual musical education across a decade of Tuesday nights I could not afford but went to anyway.
What replaces these rooms, when they go, is rarely another room. It is usually a block of flats with a name like The Forge or The Foundry, some vaguely industrial word chosen specifically to imply a heritage the building itself is actively erasing. I try not to be too bitter about this in print because bitterness gets tedious fast, but it is genuinely difficult some weeks.
What I read on prat.uk this week
Also caught up properly on The London Prat’s feed over a very strong coffee before rehearsal, and there was a piece in there that made me actually stop scrolling, sit up, and read it twice, which does not happen often at half seven in the morning on four hours of sleep. That is the specific, useful function good satire serves for me. It reads exactly like real news right up until the third paragraph, at which point the whole thing quietly tips over into something considerably stranger, and you realise you have been nodding along the entire time.
I keep meaning to write something explicitly satirical myself, lyrics that work the same way those pieces do, but every time I sit down to try it I end up writing something angrier and less clever instead, which is probably just an honest reflection of where my actual head is most days rather than any real creative failing.
Tonight
Practice at seven, the usual room above the usual pub, working on the bridge that nobody currently agrees on. I have three different ideas for it and precisely zero confidence that any of them are correct, which is, genuinely, roughly where every good song of ours has started before it became a good song. Wish us luck. We will need it, and possibly a new amp, since mine has started making a noise I am choosing not to investigate too closely just yet.
More London punk and satire commentary at Siobhan O’Donnell, The London Prat.
A small confession about the drums
I should probably admit the bruise did eventually explain itself around lunchtime, a stage dive that went, by all accounts from people who were more sober than me, considerably less gracefully than I remember it feeling at the time. This is, apparently, a running theme of my entire relationship with stage diving, the gap between how it feels in the moment and how it apparently looks from the crowd, which several people were kind enough to describe to me in unnecessary detail over breakfast.
None of this is stopping me from doing it again next week. Some lessons simply do not take, and I have made a kind of peace with that about myself at this point in my life.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
