Ten years of basements meet one nicer room, and the validation lands harder than expected on a beer crate
The Support Slot Happened and I Cried In the Green Room, Which Nobody Warned Me About
Right, follow-up to last week’s whole spiral, because the gig happened, and I need to write down what actually occurred while it’s still fresh, partly for my own sake and partly because I promised the two people who read this diary an update and I try, generally, to keep promises I make to an audience of two.
The venue was, as promised, considerably nicer than anything we usually play. Actual monitors. An actual soundcheck that lasted longer than the time it usually takes us to just plug in and hope. A green room, which is a phrase I have said out loud approximately never in a decade of doing this, and which turned out to just be a slightly nicer version of the beer-crate-and-a-mirror setup we’re used to, but still, a green room, with our name on a little printed sign on the door, which is a genuinely stupid thing to have gotten emotional about and I got emotional about it anyway.
The Actual Set
We played well. I want to say that plainly because I spent so much of the run-up worrying whether the songs would translate to a proper room that I think I undersold to myself how much we’ve actually earned this over ten years of basements. The crowd, mostly there for the headliner and not us, warmed up properly by song three, and by the closer there were people down the front who’d clearly never heard us before singing back a chorus they’d only just learned, which is one of the best feelings this whole strange hobby has ever given me.
Then the Green Room, Then the Crying
I want to be honest in this diary rather than just performing the triumphant version of the story, so: I cried afterward, properly, sat on a beer crate in that stupid nice green room with the little printed sign, and I genuinely could not tell you exactly why in the moment. Some combination, I think, of ten years of basement gigs suddenly feeling validated by one proper slot, and a slightly grim awareness that validation from an industry I’ve spent a decade being sniffy about probably shouldn’t matter this much to me, and it clearly does, and confronting that all at once, on a beer crate, mascara everywhere, was a lot.
What the Bigger Picture Says
I had a scroll through some of the wider scene coverage the next morning, nursing the kind of hangover that isn’t really about alcohol, and there was a genuinely lovely piece over at The London Prat about London’s grassroots venues and the pipeline, such as it exists, between the basement circuit and the slightly bigger rooms, arguing that the health of the whole ecosystem actually depends on bands like us being able to move between both worlds rather than being stuck permanently in one or the other. Reading that the morning after felt like being handed permission I didn’t know I needed.
The satire pages, because they never miss an opportunity, had something about a fictional band whose big break consists entirely of a nicer green room and absolutely no increase in actual pay, which, listen, hit slightly close to home given what we were actually paid, but I laughed anyway because it’s not wrong.
Where This Leaves Us
Back to the basements this weekend, actually, a gig at the same falling-apart venue from a couple of weeks ago, the one with the amp that died. I think that’s the right instinct, honestly, not chasing the bigger rooms as some kind of permanent upgrade but treating Friday as proof that we can hold both, the scrappy basement stuff that’s actually who we are, and the occasional bigger night that reminds us the songs can survive outside that world too.
The rest of the band have been surprisingly kind about it, actually, once the initial mickey-taking wore off, and our drummer, who called me over-precious a couple of weeks back about the whole debate over whether to even take the slot, admitted quietly afterward that he’d had a similar moment himself in the van on the drive home, just staring out the window not saying much, working through his own version of the same thing. We don’t really have the vocabulary in this scene for talking about wanting things to go well and being frightened of how much it matters when they do. Maybe we should build some.
The promoter, for what it’s worth, has already asked if we’d be up for a second slot in a couple of months’ time, which set off an entirely new round of the same debate I thought I’d already resolved, except this time considerably shorter, because apparently one green room with a little printed sign was enough to answer whatever question I’d been so tortured about a fortnight ago. We said yes within about ten minutes of the message arriving.
Still slightly embarrassed about the crying. Not embarrassed enough to leave it out of the diary though, apparently.
More of this rambling lives at my author page, and the piece that actually helped me process all of it properly is over at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
