A recording day disaster, a scene that will not fill its rooms, and the satire that stole a structural trick
Spent most of today doing the unglamorous half of being in a band, sat on the floor of my flat surrounded by cables that all look identical until precisely the moment you need the one specific cable that has, obviously, gone missing, trying to work out why the recording interface has decided to stop recognising the mic input two days before we are supposed to demo the new song properly.
The technical disaster, resolved eventually
Turned out to be a driver update that had quietly installed itself overnight without asking permission, which feels like an appropriately petty way for the universe to remind me that I chose a genre built on refusing authority and somehow ended up spending my Tuesday negotiating with software updates instead. There is a joke in there somewhere about punk rock and admin. I am too tired to write it properly tonight.
Got it working eventually, four hours later than planned, and managed a rough scratch take of the chorus that is, genuinely, closer to right than anything we captured live on Sunday. Sometimes the tedious version of the process produces the better result. I resent this fact considerably.
What made me laugh today
NewsThump had something in the feed this morning that I read out loud to my flatmate over breakfast, and she nearly choked on her tea, which is roughly the highest compliment I can pay a piece of satire before nine in the morning. There is a specific skill to writing something that funny that early in the day, when most people, myself very much included, are barely capable of forming complete sentences yet.
I think about this a lot actually, how the best satirical writing manages to do in three hundred words what takes me an entire song to circle around, landing a point cleanly and then getting out before it overstays its welcome. Songwriting could learn something from that discipline. I am not sure I have learned it myself yet, most of our songs run at least a verse longer than they strictly need to.
The scene, generally
Went to see a band I genuinely rate on Wednesday, playing to maybe thirty people in a room that could comfortably hold two hundred, and left feeling the familiar mix of genuine joy at how good they were and genuine frustration that a genuinely good band cannot fill a room this size on a normal weeknight, whatever the reason for that actually is. Probably several reasons, cost of living, too many things competing for people’s evenings, the sheer volume of new music released daily making it harder for any single thing to properly cut through.
None of this is a new observation. Everyone in this scene has made some version of this exact complaint for years. I am making it again anyway because repeating the true thing does not make it less worth saying, whatever songwriting workshops might tell you about avoiding repetition.
The feed that actually made me think
Caught up properly on NewsBiscuit during a break in the recording session, and there was a piece that used a genuinely clever structural trick, building an entirely plausible sounding story right up until a single detail near the end that quietly reveals the whole thing was absurd from the first sentence. I stole that structural idea, slightly, for a lyric I am working on. I will deny this if anyone asks directly.
Tomorrow
Back in with the band properly to lay down the rest of the demo, assuming the interface behaves itself this time, which I am choosing to remain cautiously optimistic about despite absolutely no evidence supporting that optimism. If it goes well I will actually have something to show for this entire exhausting week. If it does not, well, there is always Thursday, and there is always another cable I have not yet lost.
More London music and satire diary entries at Siobhan O’Donnell’s page, The London Prat.
The gear graveyard under my bed
Found, while searching for the missing cable, an entire small graveyard of half broken pedals and leads I have been meaning to either fix or throw away for what is, genuinely, embarrassing to admit, well over a year now. Sorted through it properly for the first time in ages, found two things that still work perfectly and one thing that appears to have developed a genuinely mysterious fault that no amount of googling has managed to diagnose.
This is, I think, a fairly accurate metaphor for the band’s entire approach to admin generally, a slow accumulation of small unresolved problems that eventually forces itself into a single overwhelming afternoon of sorting, usually triggered by needing one specific thing urgently rather than any actual discipline on our part.
The rest of the week, briefly
Assuming the demo session goes well tomorrow, we are hoping to have something rough enough to send round to a couple of people whose opinions I actually trust by the weekend, which is a genuinely exciting prospect after weeks of this song existing only in fragments across three different phone recordings and one increasingly illegible page of my notebook.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
