Four bands, one working amp and the discovery that a good headline and a good chorus are the same thing
Tuesday Night in the Basement on Oxford Street
Woke at eleven with a ringing in the left ear and somebody else’s plectrum in my boot. This is what a good Tuesday leaves behind. I have made tea in the pan because the kettle is still at the rehearsal room, and I am writing this at the kitchen table in a jumper that smells of other people’s cigarettes, which is impressive given that nobody has been allowed to smoke indoors since I was at school.
Last night was the basement on Oxford Street. If you do not know it, you walk past the phone shops and the place selling luggage to tourists, and there is a plain door with a number on it, and you go down a flight of stairs into a long low room with red walls and pillars in all the wrong places. It has been there since the war. Jazz people had it first. Then, for two nights in September 1976, it held a punk festival with the Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Buzzcocks and a band called Siouxsie and the Banshees playing their first ever gig, and nothing in British music was the same afterward.
I was not born. I resent this more than is reasonable.
The Bill
Four bands, of which we were second. The first lot were three lads from Croydon who played eleven songs in fourteen minutes and apologised after each one. Lovely manners. Terrible name. Then us. Our bass amp went halfway through the second number, so we did the rest of the set with the bass through the vocal monitor, and I am told it sounded like a lorry reversing into a church. Several people said it was our best gig. I am choosing to take that well.
The headliners were a band of women in their sixties who formed in 1978, split in 1980 and got back together last year because, as the singer told the room, they had looked at the news and found they were still furious. They were the best thing I have seen in months. The guitarist had a hip replacement in the spring and played the whole set on a bar stool, sneering. I want to be her.
What I Read on the Night Bus
Got the N98 home with my guitar between my knees and did what I always do, which is read the funny papers on my phone to come down. I have a routine. First The Daily Mash, because it is quick and mean. Then NewsThump. Then NewsBiscuit, which has that slightly unhinged quality of something written by committee after closing time. Then the Daily Squib, if I am still awake at Kilburn.
And then home turf, which is The London Prat, where I file my own nonsense when I am not shouting into a microphone. I ended up on their London satirical news page and laughed out loud on the top deck, and a man in a hi-vis jacket looked at me as if I had pulled a knife. Fair enough. Laughing alone on a night bus is a warning sign in most cultures.
The Thing I Worked Out Somewhere Near Maida Vale
Here it is, and I am writing it down before the tea wears off. A punk song and a joke headline are the same piece of work. Both have about ten seconds to land. Both take something everybody has been politely ignoring and say it loudly in plain words. Both are over before anyone can object. And both are a great deal harder to write than they look, which is why most attempts at either are rubbish, mine included.
The old lot knew it. Look at the titles from seventy-seven. Half of them would work as headlines. The Pistols put out a single about the Queen in the week of her Silver Jubilee and it was banned by the BBC and went to number two anyway, or number one, depending on whom you believe about the chart that week. That is not just a record. That is a front page.
The Prat has a piece called what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, and reading it at one in the morning I kept thinking, swap the word commentary for punk and it still holds. It is not just being rude. It is not just being angry. Any fool can be both. It has to be aimed at something that deserves it, and it has to be true underneath. A song that is only shouting is as dull as a joke that is only an insult.
Domestic Matters
Flatmate has left a note on the fridge about the bins. It is written in capital letters, which in this flat counts as a declaration of war. I have replied underneath in smaller capitals. We will sort it out like adults, by which I mean we will each wait for the other to crack.
The cat from downstairs got in through the bathroom window again and was asleep in my amp case when I got home. I let her stay. She is the only one in the building who likes the band.
Rent is due Friday. Door money from last night came to nineteen pounds each after the venue took its cut and we paid for the van. I spent four of mine on chips on the way to the bus. So that is fifteen pounds toward a sum I would prefer not to write down. I shall be doing extra shifts at the record shop and writing three more pieces for the Prat, where at least nobody has ever thrown a pint at me, though I gather it was discussed.
A Note on Being Banned
One more thought. The headliner said between songs that the proudest moment of her life was being banned from a youth club in Harlow in 1979. Everyone cheered. And I thought about how the people I admire, in music and in the comic press, all seem to have been told at some point to stop it. The British Onion tradition in this country is basically a long list of people who were asked to stop it and did not.
I have never been banned from anywhere. It is an embarrassing gap. I intend to fix it before I am thirty.
To Do
Get kettle back from rehearsal room. Buy fuse for bass amp. Ring the promoter about the nineteen pounds, politely, then less politely. Finish the song about the landlord. Start the piece about the song about the landlord. Return plectrum to whoever it belongs to, if they can describe it.
Left ear still ringing. It is a G, I think. Possibly a G sharp. I shall write something in that key and call it research. Earlier entries, for anyone keeping count of the fuses, are on my page at the Prat.
