Musician’s Dilemma

May 11, 2008

I went to see the Dirty Projectors on Friday night. charleston and spoombung have already given rock-solid accounts of how magnificent it was, and I’d have to agree. I’d go to absurd lengths to see this band at the moment – although, having said that, I haven’t seized the opportunity to see them play with Battles at the Astoria later this week, mainly because it’ll be rammed solid with people, and I prefer spacious venues that are about 2/3 empty.

Co-incidentally, or perhaps not, the Dome in Tufnell Park was about 2/3 empty on Friday night. Which is probably bad news for the promoter, and if the Dirty Projectors were on some kind of percentage deal it was probably bad for them, too, and of course they’d probably rather be playing to a packed house – but for me it was perfect. No idiots blocking your line of vision or screaming at each other or accidentally pouring their pint of Kronenbourg in your bag. In fact, the only major irritant of the evening were the second band on the bill, a French group called Cheveu.

I’ve since been to their MySpace page, and actually they don’t sound that bad at all. But in context they were just profoundly annoying. The night was running late; 95% of the people there had paid their £8 to see the Dirty Projectors, but Cheveu, having failed to have a soundcheck, didn’t just quickly sort out a linecheck and get going. They faffed about – loudly – for about 25 minutes, trying to achieve a perfect mix in their monitors; all the time the clock was ticking, people were looking at their watches and wondering if the gig would actually finish before the last tube left. Then they left the stage in order to make their grand entrance – which no-one really gave a shit about – with the guitarist wearing a large pair of amusing red spectacles. Nice touch. That’s a bit like Frank Sidebottom wearing a pink tie, but at least Frank has a few levels of irony operating.

Anyway, their singer bellowed loudly into three microphones over bog standard bar-chords and Casio beats, thrashing about like a misunderstood genius. While the Dirty Projectors were playing, he also thrashed about at the front like a misunderstood genius, trying to attract attention to himself. He was actually an easily understood twat. So there you go. Gig review over, and mainly about the band I particularly disliked.

*

I emptied my shed today. It yielded up some interesting contents, including half an old sofa, a broken watering can, my grandad’s cut-glass brandy decanter, two small teddy bears that had almost completely perished, 700 Spearmint CDs, 360 Host 7″s, 1200 Free French CDs, 300 Gag 7″s, 50 Keatons LPs and a hoe. Along with those were huge numbers of cardboard boxes that once contained items of musical technology that have either already broken, or are certainly well outside their warranty period. Surveying the pile of junk in our overgrown communal back garden was like a depressing overview of my failure to make a living as a musician.

(But to tell you the truth, I quite like that. If playing in bands is about anything, it’s about glorious, unadulterated failure, the kind of appalling, argument-filled, cash-haemorrhaging f#ckups that made those odd moments of triumph seem like gold-plated heavenly intervention.)

There are few things as funny, in retrospect, as colossal piles of your own unsold CDs and vinyl. You had such hopes, at one point. You actually thought “hey, if I press up 2,000 copies instead of 1,000, the per-unit price is slashed massively – that’s got to be a good idea.” Of course, it was a terrible idea, because you only sold 142 of the bastards. Those spider-strewn boxes you see on the right, behind that tree, are a beautiful symbol of youthful optimism. My former boss and Spearmint’s former manager, Nick Hobbs, used to be very into the idea of having a large stock of ones own back catalogue. It was his opinion that these records would, once you had achieved fame, start to sell steadily, generating you a regular income. To him, these CDs resembled a potential cash mountain. To me, today, they resemble a considerable burden and present a considerable storage problem.

So do I sling them in a skip? Or keep them? Maybe I should keep some of them… but how many? Is it likely that anyone will ever want to buy them? Or in 3 years time, will the CD – or indeed music as a whole – be viewed with the same amusement and scorn that we currently have for the 8-track cartridge, top-loading washing machines or powdered egg? Please provide answers below. I’m supposed to speak at a music conference in Brighton on Friday, and I’m thinking of using this simultaneously depressing and amusing scenario as my over-arching theme.

I've Got My Beer In The Sideboard Here

August 4, 2005

I hadn't been to a beer festival before, so when Will suggested spending Thursday evening in a colossal room in West London, I said yes, alright then. However, nothing had quite prepared me for the sheer scale of the event, or indeed the men. So many men. As the train pulled into Kensington Olympia, huge armies of blokes equipped with guts that would withstand the roughest, peatiest ales marched purposefully towards the ticket gates. Will, Ant and myself looked around, laughing at the dissimilarity between CAMRA's advertising (which features pictures such as this) and the real thing, which looked more like this. We stood in a long queue of men waiting to get in, as other men - wrecked on pints of Wobbly Gob and the like - stumbled in the opposite direction, having spent the whole day drinking, and the last hour of that day fashioning paper hats out of their programmes, and scrawling the word “BEER” all over them in blue biro. You could see kebabs in their eyes as they dribbled their way home.

Still. We hadn't started yet, so we walked past a bag check and up to the ticket desk. I was on my phone, and I was just saying “hang on a minute” while I bought a ticket, when a fat, odious man (I won't use the adjective “fat” any more in this entry, by the way, as it will quickly become redundant through over-use) said “No, we don't serve people on their mobiles, next please” and beckoned to the person behind me. I stabbed my finger into my phone to end the call, and gave him a few choice words. He avoided my furious stare. This made me feel extremely big and manly, which was a good start, as I was to become bigger and more manly as the evening progressed.

The stands were divided into regions, with the Scottish, North Eastern and West Midlands ones being particularly busy, and the East Anglian and Welsh ones rather less so. At each stand you were confronted with a bewildering array of beers with abysmal names: “Fine Soft Day”, “Takin' The Pith”, “Hop-A-Doodle-Doo”, and, er, “Tea”. CAMRA supplied you with a beer guide, but in the cut and thrust of activity at the bar, any referring back to the guide for tasting notes immediately relegated you to the status of poofy wine-sipper, so you just pointed at a barrel and slammed the money down on a table. Attracted by the prospect of a beer that tasted like a bumbling vicar, I had some Nimmo's XXXX, which was sh!t, and I had to ask them to pour it away. “Isn't Derek Nimmo dead?” asked Ant. “Yep, I think so. Good that they're keeping his memory alive, though, isn't it.” But we couldn't reach a consensus on this, so I texted AQA, who replied that yes, he is dead, an answer which cost me £1.

It was time to eat something. The most common substance in that building - after beer, of course - was pastry. So much pastry. And, after the pastry, meat. So much meat. Amidst the pastry and meat was a solitary stand dedicated to healthy eating and called “Olives And Things”. The queue for pies stretched across the front of the stall, while the solitary stallholder despondently stirred a few kalamata around in some brine.

After pies, of course, it's time for fun! This is provided for in abundance at the festival, with table skittles, barrel rolling and a number of Heritage Pub Tombolas. Pick a ticket: if there's a “1″ in the number, you've won a prize! We did well, coming out of it with 2 packs of cards, 2 bottles of beer and 2 pint glasses for a small outlay. It felt more like we were stripping the heritage pubs of their contents than doing anything to help them survive. Will had a go at some kind of primitive wooden 10-pin bowling thing; he was rubbish. “Rubbish!” I shouted. Will smiled, manfully. We were all being manly, by this stage.

After fun, of course, it's time for Chas & Dave. We were lucky to have chosen the night when a US chart-topping band were playing, because the acts on the other nights looked distinctly ropey: Paul Young (I thought his vocal cords were covered in nodules? Maybe he's playing xylophone or something these days) or, uh, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra. Chas & Dave were introduced by a compere, whose words were translated into sign language by a woman to his left for the benefit of the hard of hearing. We hoped BEYOND HOPE that she might stay onstage throughout the set, and we might see her sign the words

yup yup rabbit yup yup yup rabbit rabbit bunny jabber yup rabbit bunny yup yup yup rabbit bunny jabber yup yup yup rabbit bunny jabber yup yup bunny jabber rabbit

But she didn't.

We went back for more pie to sustain us through the final hour, and at a nearby sausage stall a slender woman was standing in front of hordes of pissed men who were staring at her, firstly not comprehending the presence of a slender woman in the building, and subsequently forgetting what it was they had actually come for. “For god's sake, come on, you GANNETS”, she screamed.

With several thousand men getting increasingly devoted to their beer, and with increasing amounts of vomit on the floor having to be covered up with multicoloured batches of sawdust, it became clear that soon some brave soul was going to have to call time. Imagine. Imagine telling this lot that they couldn't have any more. In the event, everyone filed out reasonably quietly, with occasional bursts of singing and chanting. No doubt most of that lot will be back for more, today. Today, incidentally, is “Hat Day”. This has been introduced by CAMRA in order to inject a note of fun into the proceedings, by encouraging attendees to wear an amusing hat. When Will advised me that Thursday was Hat Day, I asked him which day he was thinking of going. “Oh, probably either Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday or Saturday,” he replied. Of course, he's right. If you've drunk enough beer, who needs a hat?