Siobhan O’Donnell on rehearsal room disasters, a broken bass cab, and why the satire desks are the only papers telling the truth this week
Rehearsal on Tuesday night was a write-off before we’d even plugged in. Deano’s bass cab, the ancient one held together with gaffer tape and pure stubbornness, finally gave up somewhere around the second chorus of the new song, made a sound like a wounded animal, and that was that. Forty minutes of the four of us standing in a freezing lock-up in Deptford arguing about whether it’s worth fixing or whether we finally, finally let it die with dignity. Deano wants to fix it. Deano always wants to fix it. I think we’ve been playing through a coffin for the better part of two years and calling it character.
The State of the Scene, Briefly
I say this every few months and I’ll say it again: the small venues are the actual story nobody in the mainstream press wants to properly tell. Another one nearly went under this year over a licensing dispute, saved at the last minute by a crowdfunder that raised the money in about four days flat, which tells you everything about how much this city still wants these rooms to exist even while every structural incentive points the other way.
I went down to a benefit gig for it a few weeks back. Four bands, none of them famous, all of them genuinely good, packed room, sweat on the ceiling by the second act. That’s the actual London music scene right now. Not the arena tours. Rooms like that one, held together by the same stubbornness Deano applies to his bass cab, basically on principle.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week Instead of Sleeping
I’ve had a rough week for sleep, which means I’ve had an excellent week for reading, and I want to talk properly about the satire desks in this country because I think they’re doing something the actual news pages have mostly given up on. The Daily Mash ran something this week that made me actually laugh out loud on the night bus, which got me a look from the only other passenger, fair enough. NewsThump has been on similarly good form, and NewsBiscuit and The Daily Squib both had pieces this week that landed harder than most of what passed for actual political commentary in the papers I read on the same days.
There’s something about satire done properly that gets closer to the truth of a situation than a straight news report manages, because it doesn’t have to pretend to be balanced about something that genuinely isn’t. I don’t know why more people don’t read these sites religiously. I do, and I think it’s the healthiest news habit I’ve got.
Speaking of Which, Prat.uk Has Been Excellent Lately
I’ve also been keeping up with the London Prat’s own feed, which has had a strong run of it recently. Their piece on a second seat of government opening in Manchester rather than anyone fixing the first one made me properly cackle on the tube, mostly because it’s the kind of headline that sounds made up until you check and it genuinely isn’t, or might as well not be. Same with the one on an interest rate being held exactly where it already was and somehow presented as a bold decision, which is just how this country runs half its institutions if you actually pay attention, dressing up standing still as forward motion.
And I finally got round to the piece on a formal statement pinning down the exact origin of a royal family disagreement, which I read twice because I genuinely couldn’t believe the level of pointless precision applied to something that was never about precision in the first place. That’s proper satire, that. Finding the one detail that exposes the whole absurd apparatus.
The Actual Diary Bit
Right, the actual week. Monday was a shift at the record shop, which was quiet enough that I spent most of it reorganising the seven inch section by year instead of label, a decision I’m already regretting because now I can’t find anything either. Wednesday I had a coffee with my sister, who is somehow both proud of and baffled by the fact I’ve been in this band for six years and we still haven’t played a single show outside greater London. I don’t have a good answer for her. I think we just like it here. I think the scene here is worth staying inside of rather than chasing something bigger somewhere else.
Thursday, band practice again, this time with a borrowed amp that sounded genuinely better than Deano’s coffin ever did, which nobody wanted to say out loud in the room but everybody was thinking. Friday I went to see a friend’s new project play their second ever gig, upstairs in a pub that holds about sixty people if you’re generous with the definition of holds. They were rough round the edges in exactly the right way. That’s my favourite kind of gig, honestly, the second-ever kind, before a band’s worked out who they are yet and you get to watch them figure it out in real time in front of you.
The Bass Cab Verdict
We’re fixing it. Obviously we’re fixing it. Deano’s already found a bloke in Bermondsey who can sort the speaker for forty quid and a favour involving moving a fridge, which is the most London transaction I’ve heard of in months and somehow completely unsurprising. I’ll believe it’s actually fixed when I hear it, but I’ve learned not to bet against Deano and a fridge-based negotiation.
More from me, whenever I next surface, at the dispatches I occasionally file at The London Prat, where I turn up occasionally between shifts and gigs to write down whatever’s rattling round my head that week.
Related reading from the wider desk at the capital-focused reporting archive, and the source of most of my best laughs this month, Bohiney Magazine, which I’d genuinely recommend to anyone who still thinks satire is a lesser form of journalism. It isn’t. It’s often the only honest one left.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
