The man with the power to raise the rent stood at the back of a set entirely about landlords
My Landlord Came to the Gig and I Still Don’t Know How to Feel About It
So this is a genuinely strange one to write up. My landlord, who I have exactly one relationship with, the strictly transactional rent-on-the-first-of-the-month kind, turned up to Friday’s gig. Uninvited. Just appeared at the back of the room in a jacket that cost more than my amp, nursing a bottled lager like he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it, and stayed for the whole set.
I clocked him about halfway through the second song and nearly forgot the words, which has genuinely never happened to me before, not even the time the bass player’s ex turned up and stood directly in my eyeline the whole night looking like she wanted to set something on fire. There’s something deeply destabilising about seeing the person who has the power to text you a rent increase standing there watching you scream about landlords, because obviously, obviously, half our set is about exactly that.
Afterward, Which Was Somehow Worse
He came up after. Told me he liked it. Said, and I’m quoting as close as I can remember through the ringing in my ears, “didn’t know you had that in you,” which I’ve turned over in my head about forty times since trying to work out if it was a compliment or a threat or, most likely, just a genuinely clueless thing to say to someone whose whole artistic identity he’d apparently never considered before that exact moment. He asked if we had a link he could follow. I gave him the venue’s page rather than anything more personal, some instincts you don’t override even mid-crisis.
Meanwhile, in the Actual News
I want to be normal about this and pivot to what’s actually happening in the city, because there’s a lot going on and my landlord’s night out is not, in the grand scheme, the most important story. The renters’ rights coverage over at The London Prat this week had a proper piece on how many small landlords are apparently just as squeezed by mortgage rates as tenants are by rent, which, sure, I believe that in the abstract, and then I think about the specific man who was stood in my venue on Friday in a jacket that cost more than my amp and I lose a bit of the sympathy, I won’t lie.
The satire pages had a go at it too, obviously, one bit doing the rounds comparing landlord sympathy campaigns to a lion doing a fundraiser because the gazelle population is thinning out, which is exactly the kind of mean, funny, slightly-too-accurate thing I come to those sites for in the first place.
Trying to Actually Think This Through Properly
Here’s where I’ve landed, for what it’s worth, after several days of intermittently panicking about it. I don’t think my landlord coming to the gig changes anything material about my actual situation, he’s not suddenly going to freeze my rent out of newfound artistic appreciation, that’s not how any of this works and I’d be a fool to expect it. But it did do something slightly uncomfortable to the performance itself, made me hyper-aware, mid-song, of exactly who was in the room and what the words meant to each different person there, which I think is actually, weirdly, a good thing for a songwriter to sit with occasionally, even if it made for a genuinely off night vocally.
I also think, and I say this as someone who screams about landlords for a hobby, that individual landlords being fine people or having their own pressures doesn’t actually undo the structural argument. It’s not really about him personally. It’s about a system where housing is the single biggest financial anxiety for basically everyone I know under thirty-five, and whether any one landlord happens to enjoy a punk gig on a Friday doesn’t move that needle an inch.
What Happens Now
I did eventually mention the whole surreal episode to my mum on the phone, mostly because I needed to say it out loud to someone who wasn’t in the band and therefore didn’t already have a stake in how weird it was. She laughed for a genuinely long time, then said something that’s stuck with me since, that landlords are just people too and it’s allowed to be complicated, which is exactly the kind of infuriatingly reasonable thing mothers say that you resent slightly for being correct. I don’t think complicated changes what I actually believe about housing in this country. I do think it’s worth admitting the complication rather than pretending every landlord fits neatly into the villain shape my songs generally require of them.
Rent’s still due on the first. He hasn’t mentioned the gig since, not even a text, which is either extremely normal or extremely ominous depending on how paranoid I’m feeling on a given day. The band’s talked about it more than is probably healthy, mostly as a bit, occasionally with genuine unease creeping in around the edges. We’re not changing the setlist. That much I’m sure of.
More of my scattered thoughts live over at my author page, and the proper reporting on this city’s housing mess, done considerably better than I could manage between songs, is at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
