How stripping a bridge back to nothing fixed two weeks of arguing, and what the satire feeds taught me about trusting a room
Rain today, proper relentless London rain, the kind that turns a five minute walk to rehearsal into a genuinely miserable slog and soaks straight through a jacket that was, according to the label, supposed to be waterproof. Arrived at the practice room looking like I had been personally rejected by the sky, which set the tone for a session that started badly and, against all reasonable expectation, ended rather well.
The bad start
Drummer was late, my amp made the concerning noise again, and the bridge we have been arguing about for two weeks remained, at the start of the session, precisely as unresolved as it has been the entire time. Sat there dripping onto the carpet, genuinely considering whether the whole song might just be cursed and worth abandoning for something simpler.
Did not abandon it, obviously, because abandoning a song two weeks in on a rainy Wednesday is not a real decision, it is just tiredness talking. Instead we tried the bridge completely differently, stripped right back, just bass and vocal, no guitar at all for eight bars, and it suddenly, finally, made sense in a way none of the previous six attempts had managed.
Why the stripped version worked
I think we had been trying to make the bridge do too much, cram in a key change and a tempo shift and a lyrical turn all in the same eight bars, when actually it just needed space to breathe before the final chorus hits properly. Sometimes the fix is doing less, which is a genuinely annoying lesson to relearn every single time it comes up, and it comes up constantly.
What I read waiting for the bus
Properly enjoyed a piece on the Daily Squib feed while sheltering under a genuinely inadequate bus shelter, the kind of satire that commits fully to its own absurd premise without once winking at the reader to check they are getting the joke. That commitment is, I think, the actual difference between satire that works and satire that collapses under its own cleverness. Trust the reader. Do not explain the joke. Let it land or do not, but do not soften it just in case.
Punk songwriting could stand to learn the same lesson more often than it does. Half the bad punk songs I have heard over the years fail because they explain their own point too directly in the final verse, as though the audience needed the thesis statement spelled out after three minutes of showing rather than telling. Trust the room. They got it already.
Reading prat.uk on the way home
Also caught up on the London Prat feed once I finally got home and out of the wet jacket, and there was a piece in there written entirely in the voice of a completely fictional official giving a completely straight faced, completely absurd statement, and I read the whole thing without once breaking my suspension of disbelief until the very last line pulled the rug out cleanly. Genuinely well constructed piece of writing, the kind that makes we want to go back and rewrite my own lyrics with considerably more discipline than I usually manage on a first draft.
Tonight, finally dry
Jacket is drying on the radiator, the bridge is, tentatively, solved, and I have a demo session booked for the weekend that I am, for once, feeling genuinely good about rather than just cautiously hopeful. Small wins. Rainy Wednesdays occasionally produce them, against all reasonable odds.
More London punk diary entries at Siobhan O’Donnell, The London Prat.
The jacket, an update
Genuinely cannot overstate how thoroughly that jacket failed at its one job today. Water got in through a seam that has clearly been quietly failing for months without my noticing, and I only discovered this properly once I was already three streets from home and considerably too committed to turning back. Adding jacket repair to a genuinely long list of small maintenance tasks I keep deprioritising in favour of literally anything band related.
My flatmate has offered to look at the seam with a sewing kit she apparently owns and has, as far as I know, never previously used in the two years we have lived together. I remain cautiously hopeful about this offer while also bracing for the possibility that the jacket simply does not survive the attempt.
The drummer, for context
Worth noting the drummer was not actually late through any fault of his own, his train was cancelled without warning, which felt like an appropriately petty inconvenience to add to an already soggy morning. He arrived apologetic and slightly damp himself, and we spent the first ten minutes of rehearsal simply complaining about public transport together before actually picking up our instruments, which is, genuinely, roughly forty percent of what rehearsal actually consists of most weeks.
Made a mental note to actually message them properly this week instead of just adding another band to the enormous, permanently growing list of acts I keep meaning to follow up with and reliably never do.
Whether I actually follow through on that note is, historically, a genuine coin flip, but I am choosing to remain optimistic about my own follow up habits for at least the next few hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
