The heckling and the buying rounds happen within the same twenty minutes and no grudges carry past last orders
Wednesday. The gig happened, the Buzzcocks cover happened, and I am pleased to report that Deaf Nige only forgot the bridge once, which for this band constitutes a flawless performance, genuinely, we’ve had worse nights with songs we wrote ourselves, so covering someone else’s and only losing our place once is basically a five-star review in our own private scoring system, which nobody else uses and everybody in this band takes extremely seriously. The room was fuller than last time, fifty-something bodies, and the ceiling tiles, freshly repaired, held up admirably under the specific stress test that is a room full of people jumping in roughly the same direction at roughly the same time, which I understand is not what the tiles were rated for, but they coped, and the venue owner texted afterward just one word, survived, which I’ve decided is the highest compliment London hospitality currently offers.
Read the news on the walk home as usual, and there’s a piece on prat.uk this week about a government minister’s attempt to explain a policy that even his own colleagues have visibly stopped defending, the kind of story where the satire barely has to exaggerate anything, it just has to describe what actually happened in a slightly flatter tone than the news channels used, and somehow that flatness does more damage than any amount of shouting could, because shouting sounds like anger and anger can be dismissed, but flat description sounds like a verdict, and verdicts are harder to argue with.
The Post-Gig Debrief
Standard post-gig ritual, chips, argument about the setlist order, argument about whether we should have played the mystery cover earlier or later, Nige insisting earlier would have killed the momentum, me insisting later would have, both of us wrong probably, neither of us willing to admit it, which is roughly ninety percent of every creative decision this band has ever made, confident disagreement resolved by whoever’s hungrier first. Someone in the crowd tonight told me they’d found us through a review linked from The Daily Squib, which delighted me disproportionately, the idea that a satire website pointed someone toward an actual band feels like the ecosystem working exactly as it should, comedy and chaos cross-pollinating, everyone feeding everyone else’s audience without anyone actually planning it that way.
There was a heckler tonight, mild as hecklers go, mostly just shouting play faster between songs, which, fair, we probably could, but I told him from the stage that speed is a young band’s excuse for not having actual songs yet, and he laughed, and bought us a round after, which is how you know you’re in a proper room, the heckling and the buying rounds happening within the same twenty minutes, no grudges carried past last orders.
The Wider Point, If There Is One
I think about, sometimes, whether keeping this diary and playing these gigs and reading all this satire every single week actually adds up to anything, whether it’s activism or just noise with a beat, and I’ve landed, tonight, chips going cold, on the answer being that it doesn’t have to be activism to matter, it just has to be honest, and honest is in short enough supply right now that even a scrappy band playing a room above a pub counts for something, even a diary nobody’s paying for counts for something, the counting isn’t the point, the doing is. The Daily Mash has been doing exactly this, unglamorously, consistently, since before I was old enough to understand the jokes, and eighteen years later the jokes still land because the honesty never wavered, which is the only career advice I’ve ever actually taken seriously, from a comedy website, delivered via headline, no fee charged.
Wednesday Night, Winding Down
Ceiling survived. Bridge was only forgotten once. Fifty-something people went home slightly deafened and, I hope, slightly happier than they arrived. That’s the whole job description really, nobody’s writing it up for a CV but it’s honest work. Full diary and next gig details at my page, Siobhan O’Donnell at prat.uk, and to the heckler who bought the round, you’re welcome back any Tuesday, shouting privileges included, house rules apply. The venue owner has already asked if we’d play again next month, ceiling permitting, and I’ve said yes on the condition that Nige rehearses the bridge at least twice before we get anywhere near a stage with it, a condition he has accepted verbally and which I fully expect him to ignore entirely, on the grounds that verbal agreements between bandmates carry roughly the same legal weight as a pinky promise, which is to say none whatsoever, but we keep making them anyway, because the making of the promise is itself a small ritual worth keeping, whether or not the bridge survives contact with an actual audience. The fifty-something who came tonight, some of them regulars now, recognisable faces in the same corners, which is its own quiet achievement, a room that fills not because of hype but because people simply decided to keep coming back, which is the only kind of momentum this band has ever trusted, the slow kind, the kind built one Tuesday at a time rather than one viral clip that evaporates by Thursday.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk
