Manners will get you nowhere

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I suppose it kind of ties in with the whole ‘Joys of Mediocrity’ subject thread that those who succeed tend to be single-minded, ruthless and altogether unpleasant. This is a sweeping statement that will garner a huge wave of protest and the production of a series of exceptions that go an awfully long way to disprove the rule. But…

I watched the Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll movie a year or so ago (and terrifically good it was, too). In it Andy Serkis’ portrayal of the late, great Ian Dury showed a man so determined to succeed, and so convinced of his deserving success that anyone or anything that stood in his way was treated with such an utter disregard as could easily be interpreted as contempt.

Pop and rock music is littered with such people. David Bowie, Eric Clapton – in fact all three members of Cream – John Lennon, Eminem, Victoria Beckham even… And not just music, of course. A brief look at the life of Charles Dickens will produce a very similar picture. Brian Clough, anybody? Alex Fergusen? Robert Oppenheimer?

Single-minded people tend to work hard and push through obstacles and barriers. The hard work brings them up against more barriers than the lackadaisical, and the stubbornness keeps them battering at them until they give way.

I’m sure to their kith and kin, these people are as lovely as any other person on earth – certainly once they have achieved the important goals they seek – but to the rest of us… Well, we are just potential barriers or obstacles.

I kind of wish I had known this 40 years ago. If someone had had the foresight to instill this into me as an 11-year-old, I’m almost certain I would be far closer to achieving the things I want to achieve by now. I am sure that I would ‘be there’.

Instead, I am still trying to convince myself that it is worth being a little more unpleasant if it means getting what I want. Dammit all, I’m not exactly Mr Popular as it is – why the hell should I worry about what people I don’t really know think?

But I do.

Those of you following the news on the Mechkov website will be well aware that I have been gigging recently with a new band – a covers band playing the music of Cream and Hendrix and the like. This band began rehearsals in February with a mind to start gigging in March.

The guitarists, Nigel and George, were the protagonists in getting this band together and they called upon the skills of me for bass and vocals and Neil for drums.

Problem was, Neil was awful. Bad timing, bad rhythm and just all-round not very good at playing the drums. I kept schtum, thinking two things: first, he could improve if he takes it seriously and rehearses properly. Second, he has been brought here by the guys putting the band together.

Three weeks and lots of rehearsing later, we recorded the band in my little studio. It all sounded ok for the time we allowed ourselves… Except Neil. A friend of mine later said that his drumming sounded like someone falling down stairs… yes it did.

I finally told Nige and George that I couldn’t play with this guy.

“Oh, thank God for that!” they said. “We were just saying to each other that we couldn’t gig with him!”

“So why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.

“We didn’t want to upset you!”

Dear, oh dear! You see? Had I (or any of us) been a little more single-minded, a little more determined to get what we wanted and not let anything stand in our way, we would have ousted the dodgy drummer after rehearsal number one. Instead, we plodded on, wincing and grimacing, hoping that something would change or that someone else would do something to make a difference.

As Britons of a certain age, we are brought up that minding your Ps and Qs is an essential virtue. That might well be so, but no empires were ever built worrying about other people’s feelings. Sometimes you just have to say: “Please, stop. Please, go away! Please! Thank you!"

The end of one rainbow

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Now, why would I have gone to all that trouble of starting to document my task of documenting a new open mic night only to come to a shudderingly abrupt halt just eight weeks into the project.

Well, there are two reasons. First, my wife kept saying ‘do you really think you should be writing a blog when you are earning as little as you do?’ which is, sadly, true on one level.

Second – and if it hadn’t been for this point, I probably would have ignored my wife and continued – I chickened out.

When writing a blog, one needs to be brutally honest and true to one’s thoughts and opinions, however upsetting they might be for the people you are writing about. When organising an open mic night, one needs to nurture relationships and create a nucleus of loyal participants. Pissing people off could well be counter-productive.

The fact is, the main body of support I got for the Plough’s Tuesday evenings included Psycho Deano (a lovely bloke), Sassy Lozza (my wife), The Mafia (nice people, but always tricky in terms of conversation), Jeff the Jock (who is as lovely as he is boring beyond belief) and Not Manic Mark (again, as sweet as honey, but a real effort to talk to and play with). Among this group, only The Mafia would both play and sing. All the others either required me to play and/or sing. But I needed these people to make sure that someone was there in the pub to keep East End Bob happy.

So, taking the micky in a blog might not be the most conducive method of mollification of my muso masses. With these guys coming regularly, anything else was a bonus.

And so the Tuesday evening chugged on through up to Christmas and into the New Year, becoming stronger and more defined with each passing week. In order to keep East End Bob happy and in control, I agreed to a pay cut, but he was decent enough never to pay me the minimum amount – always adding a little extra on and often giving me the full fee.

Then the last week of March was upon us and – after a couple of quiet evenings – no-one came! For the first time ever, not a single person showed up. I was gutted. East End Bob was mortified.

This stung me into action. I immediately got on to the Slough Observer and wrote press releases, gave interviews and sent over pics (taken by The Mafia). The lovely people at the paper promised me good coverage.

Then I got a message to ring East End Bob…

“I think we’d better knock it on the head,” he said… At least I think that what he said. It could have been ‘a thud with berry knocker on the air’, but I took it to be the first one. The second one was just ridiculous.

The next Tuesday some 15 people turned up having seen the article in the Observer. I wasn’t there. I just smiled a knowing smile and thought to myself: “Bob, you chickened out. We’re as bad as each other.”

Open Mic: Just ridiculous

When running MI Pro magazine a few years ago, I interviewed a local musical instrument retailer who had just set up shop at the peak of the credit crunch, with the dark forebodings of recession on everybody’s lips – particularly the business media (I still wonder whether the resulting recession was just as much caused by Robert Peston and his ilk as it was by the greedy, robber barons of the financial world).

“Are you mad?” was the basic angle of my questioning. “Well, if we make it through this, then we’ve definitely done the right thing,” came the confident answer. (Three years later, by the way, Westmount Music in Marlow Bottom is thriving, I am very pleased to report.)

Scale down the annual turnover by several thousand pounds and the activity to creating a new open mic night at The Plough in Wexham (Stoke Poges if you are East End Bob, the landlord) and you have a very similar situation. Starting a new open mic night just as the London Olympics are about to begin, in the peak of summer with all and sundry off on their hols and one does have to ask one’s self whether, indeed, one is mad.

I guess I must be… a bit…

As I mentioned in the first of this series, there is still, decades after my first performances, this dreadful grating and churning of the stomach before a show. Will anybody show? Will I be playing to an empty house? It’s an unpleasant state of being, but one that has clearly resulted in good news rather than bad or I wouldn’t still be here telling you about it.

There has never been a time when no-one turned up… Never, that is, until two weeks ago. Sassy Lozza was away on business and Psycho Deano was on night shift. That was my two regulars gone.

Imagine my delight, then, when Andrew Williams turned up, guitar in hand. At least I would get a break, I thought. Diva Emelia also showed, but that meant I would still be playing.

As the organiser of an open mic night, I think, you need to be ‘on the shop floor’ as it were, as much as you need to be ready to support anyone who needs it. It is important to get to know people, to weed out the quiet types who would never approach you, to get the feedback of the general punters. Stuck at the mic all night is a performer’s dream, but not helpful for an open mic night.

So, after a half an hour of noodling through some well known tunes, I handed over, gratefully to Andrew and went over to Emelia to see what she wanted to do. As we discussed songs, suddenly everything went quiet. Andrew had stopped.

“Everything all right, mate?” I asked. “They’re talking,” came the odd reply. “Who is?” “These people.”

And indeed, there were a group of large and (let’s be fair here) not very intelligent men loudly indifferent to what was going on in front of them.

“Never mind,” I said. That’s what people do in pubs.”

“No, I don’t like that,” said Andrew and promptly unplugged, packed up his guitar and left.

Needless to say, I didn’t get away from the mic again that evening. It was a good show, I thought. Emelia sang, an old mate of mine from drama days turned up and did his idiosyncratic version of House of the Rising Sun, East End Bob did his regular couple of shouty numbers, but the rest of the evening it was just me.

As I said, as a guitarist and singer, it was lovely to have the stage to myself for the evening. As an open mic, it wasn’t quite what it said on the tin.

I must be mad.

Still, it’s September now. Autumn and the short days are upon us. I have survived the worst of times and now it is time for the best of times to arrive…

Open Mic Nights: The sublime to the sublime

I left you last time with the thought that an open mic night needs some element of tradition, a knowledge or certainty among both the muso and punter communities that an event will take place each week – no exceptions.

East End Bob, the landlord at The Plough, has been a bit moany the last couple of weeks. I don’t really think it is behaviour reserved specifically for me, but he has had something of a point. Not many musicians turned up after the first couple of (unexpectedly good) weeks, which had Bob a bit perturbed, it has to be said.

He’s a morose sort of bloke at the best of times, which often leads to a sort of laconic delivery. Add to that his hard east-end accent and a Churchillian speech defect, it is sometimes hard to decipher anything.

“I got a good crowd in Friday and Saturday… Well, not that good…” might easily have been: “I got a good cow in before I sat… Well, Noah Goo…” which can leave the listener a bit bemused. Fortunately (or unfortunately) his favourite phrases of ‘diabolical’ and ‘where are the punters?’ never seem to disintegrate into unintelligibility.

So it was that, after an evening (August 7th) that can quite legitimately be described as ‘quite good’ having had a good half dozen turns show up and perform to a good standard, East End Bob was forced to admit a pleasant evening, but (on the physical evidence of very few paying customers that were not musicians or singers) had to ask ‘where are the punters?’

Now, having performed – to some degree – all of my responsibilities, I was sorely tempted to say: ‘I’ve done my job, Sir Bob, now it’s time for you to do yours.’ But that, of course, would have been churlish. Instead, I pointed out that, after just five weeks, we had begun to establish our own crowd – nothing to do with either my regulars from Marlow, nor East End Bob’s regulars. A new crowd – The Plough’s Tuesday Night crowd.

Keep these people happy, I explained, and they will bring more people: more musos and more muso friends. ‘But why don’t my regulars stay?’ he asked (or was that ‘Brian Moore Wreckless Day’?). And the answer is (to the real question, not my silly corruption): ‘because they are not interested in small-time musos, their music, their egos and their friends.’

Forget them. For one night a week, I said, surely you can live without having the same old faces and the same old (let’s face it) ill-aimed and sorely lacking attempts at humour and socio-political commentary. For one night a week, let’s build a new, different crowd, all of whom are interested in small-time musos, their music, their egos and their friends.

And so it is coming to pass. After that initial 8 o’clock angst worrying that no-one will come, by 9 o’clock there is now a hardcore nucleus that will build into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Tuesday nights now sees good old Andrew Williams, along with Sassy Lozza and now Coolhand Sean seems to be something of a regular, as well as his mate, Falsetto Si, his singer, Carly Allie – and they have in turn now brought along a member of the Russian Mafia, Ilya (who does a mean Johnny Cash) and the delightful Whispering Heather. Add these to Diva Emma and Shakey Amy and you have the seed of a great, ongoing evening.

Once their friends start coming along, too, The Plough’s open mic night will be the talk of the town. It’s still going to take some time, but we’re getting there.

East End Bob spent most of the time I was packing up at the last evening saying: “But it’s hard work.” It certainly is, Sir Bob… That is unless you were actually saying: “But it’s artwork.”

Open Mic Nights: The ridiculous to the sublime

In the last post, I pointed out that for an open mic night to be successful there is a critical mass that combines the right number of musos, the right number of punters and the right amount of talent. The number of musos required is more or less the same each time – there are only so many hours to fill. Punter numbers are variables, mostly dictated by the size of the venue.

The OD’s evening enjoys a snug, fairly small pub, which makes it that much easier to hit the right numbers. To make an evening work in terms of musicians, any event needs at least five different acts with half an hour of material. This means each turn gets two goes and the evening is filled nicely. This, however, is only ten people at most. Not really enough to keep the bar staff busy. On top of this, there needs to be paying customers. OD’s is pretty full with about 50 people in it, so another ten people means you have sufficient to get the party started.

At The Plough last week, there were a good half a dozen people inside and another dozen outside. For OD’s this would have been good, but The Plough is that much bigger and you have to have a good 20 people inside the pub to spark things off… Okay, yes, I know, we only had four musos last week and one of them was a drummer, the second left after his set and the third was a singer. This kept me quite busy to say the least.

Last Thursday’s OD’s session saw ten acts show up (excluding Nick the Geetar, Skinny Hips Tomkins and me). A great number of good people turned up to listen and it was a blinder. I mean this, really. It was a great night. At least three people mentioned to me how high the level of talent was – and it was.

This brings me to a third factor – and in many ways the main reason for this blog. Another difference between OD’s and The Plough is the fact that OD’s (previously known as the Carpenter’s Arms) has had an open mic night on Thursday nights (with a few short breaks) since 2004. The various management over the years have stuck with it to the degree that musos and punters alike can be as certain that there will be a gathering in that place at that time as that the sun will rise in the morning.

The Plough session is new – very new. It is also a little off the beaten track. In order to give musos and punters alike the certainty that OD’s does, it needs to be around for a similar amount of time. I told East End Bob that he needs to give it six months at least (a message I know he has taken on board because he kept repeating it last week as he looked around his empty pub).

The thing about a tradition is that there is only one way to achieve it. Keep going!

Has East End Bob got the nerve? I’m not sure, but hopefully the six months he has given me will be enough to get a regular enough crowd along that can form the foundation of a tradition…

Open Mics: Grinding one out

What was that I was saying about it all turning out ok in the end? Well, not always. It seems my wee experiment with launching a new, distant, previously unheard-of open mic night (at The Plough, Stoke Poges, every Tuesday from 8pm, by the way) is somewhat mirroring the life of Orson Wells in that it is living its life backwards.

(It’s an old Spitting Image gag (for those of you old enough to remember the satirical foam puppets). Orson Wells gathers the great and the good into a cinema to reveal (posthumously on film) that he lived his life backwards, starting his career as an old man making sherry adverts, fumbling through an average career as an actor, director and producer, making some critically sneered-at Shakespeares, then climbing to success through a stunning radio adaptation of the War of the Worlds (which had the southern states’ redneck population driving around with shotguns looking for ETs to shoot) and finishing off with his masterpiece, Citizen Kain – a film that turned cinematography and art direction on its head.)

It has always pleased me, that sketch. Maybe not so much now as the first OMN at The Plough was a scintillating party with drums, bass, sax and more artists than you could shake a rainstick at. The second was a good, solid evening, slow at the beginning, but growing into a perfectly reasonable (and much appreciated) jam at the end.

The third week… Well, where should I begin? Probably at the beginning…

Sassy Lozza came with me this week and helped unloading and setting up – and this, make no mistake, is how the tireless OMN organiser makes his or her money. That, arranging the turns and striking the stage again at the end. The OMN organiser has to be ready to forego his or her set list at any moment – and then we sat down outside with East End Bob, the landlord (more of him in a later post).

Psycho Deano turned up, armed with his very own cajon, and Andrew Williams – armed with nothing but an ability to dissemble. Lozza and I began to play and sing to the near-empty pub at about 8:20. Surprisingly, even the half dozen punters there still managed to produce a smattering of applause after each number – no small achievement that early in the evening, I assure you.

At about nine, by which time there has normally been an influx of musos and singers, the ratio of four performers to six punters had remained unchanged (another ten or so were sat outside, enjoying the first of this summer’s sun). No-one had left (a good sign) but no-one had arrived, either (definitely NOT a good sign).

I invited Andrew Williams up to do a few. He took my acoustic guitar, went through his usual routine of explaining how he couldn’t hear anything and being told it sounded fine out front, to which he invariably says that he is deaf anyway. He then proceeds to tell anyone within ear shot (without the use of the microphone) that he only knows obscure songs. “Ah! Here go,” he says with glee, “you won’t have heard this one.” He then launches into a rendition, almost totally devoid of discernable rhythm, of a song that, indeed, no-one knows… Well, a song that you are aware of from somewhere in the dim and distant past that you might have heard once or twice.

His voice is tremendous. He can scale great heights and he sounds not unlike Roger Chapman of Family. His guitar playing, however, is that rare thing in public performance that involves a good knowledge of chords, but an inability to move from one to another, so each song he performs tends to stop and start in mid-flow as he contorts his hand into the next chord shape. Often as he reaches the chorus, he gains some momentum and flow, but then the verse and the middle eight rear their ugly sequences and he returns to his staccato, arrhythmic rendition.

Each song is separated by his explanation (less microphone) of where that song came from, where the next one came from and how we might have heard of it, but probably not…

Bless him. I love his voice and he is certainly a regular and loyal participant of both my OMNs. Long may he ramble on.

I took to the mic again and played a couple of self-indulgent numbers using my looper (Boss RC-300 if you’re interested – marvellous piece of kit), then I got Psycho Deano up to accompany me, then Lozza, then me, then Andrew Williams left, and so we chugged the evening away, just the three of us. Deano sang a couple of numbers (White Wedding – acoustic version – and Sit Down) and mighty fine they were, too. He is a pretty good singer and he has a natural rhythm, which makes him highly sought after at my evenings.

Thus the evening drew to a close. We finished off with 500 Miles and Perfect Day, Deano picked up his cajon and made his way home, and Lozza and I starting packing up. (Did I mention that this is how OMN organisers earn their money?) East End Bob came over. “Well, that was diabolical!” he said. I knew what he meant, but still said, with a delicate amount of surprise and hurt, “What?!”

“Oh, not you, you’ve earned your money tonight, but we’ve got to get more people down here…” And off he went on an explanation of how this is all about getting punters and musos into his pub. I wanted to explain how I know all of this, but that we had spoken on many occasions that sometimes it will fall a little flat. I needed to point out that the first two weeks had been beyond our expectations and he had had good takings from a full pub – in the main because of me. I wanted to say that next week would be better for him. All of these thoughts scuttled around my head, but remained there. There was no point. East End Bob is not one to use his logic or his ears very much. He speaks from instinct, very much in the moment.

After the first two sessions, he kissed me goodbye. There were no intimacies this week. (Actually, I was quite pleased about that.)

The great thing for me was that I got to play as I wanted to play – and God, I enjoyed it.

Open Mics: Keeping Going 2

As I have tried to explain, there is no real rhyme or reason to an Open Mic Night, but it always seems to turn out all right in the end. How does this happen? I’m not sure, but I am determined to get to the bottom of it. At present, I am working on the idea that there is a window of opportunity at each gathering, through which (providing there are enough musicians and punters) enters the perfect blend of alcohol, material and talent, which then combine to create a great atmosphere.

Last Thursday’s (19th July) session at OD’s in Marlow was yet another variant on the theme – I’m beginning to wonder how many there can physically be!

The usual opening – with me, Andy Keys, Swampy Bass and Nick Geetar – was performed to about six or seven people. Sassy Lozza joined us after three numbers to do Mad World, Night Like This and Sweet Dreams and I got Skinny Hips up to take his regular introductory slot as I headed out to sort a running order. By this time a whole host of musos had arrived and I begged a pen and a piece of paper from the bar.

Harmonica Phil had showed, so Skinny Hips kept Andy and Nick and Swampy up to do a short blues set with him – and I’m grateful that he did.

The running order grew as I wrote it, as more and more musos arrived. In the end I had Andrew Williams, a new guy called Mario who did a couple of Nick Drake numbers, The Incredible Bailey Boys and Sassy Ann (five numbers combined), Jack the Laid Back (“this is a song about a friend of mine who is no longer with us”… Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh!), the wonderful Atomic Mutton, Slowhand Sally (bloody brilliant – stole the show that night with her cool versions and honeyed voice), Sandy the Power (usually the show stealer, but just pipped by Sally this week), Bill the Blues (in fine form), Country Frank and Big Billy, Slowhand Rob and then (hopefully, I was thinking) Diva Dad John to finish things off.

Phew! I don’t actually ever recall such a collection of worthy and eclectic performers. The variety was good, but the numbers were right there at the limit. I knew we would have to run over the half eleven ‘witching hour’.

Everyone was good, but (and here’s where my theory sneaks in) the party really got going when Atomic Mutton took the mics. The previous acts were great, but the alcohol wasn’t quite there. The alcohol reached optimum as the Bailey Boys and Annie performed, but Jack the Laid Back’s set didn’t have such well known songs. Atomic Mutton always sing classics – and with near-perfect harmonies – and this tipped the balance.

After this, it was a whirlwind of trying to get people up to the mic and then, very soon after, trying to get them off.

Poor old Frank and Billy suffered the most as I insisted that they perform just three songs together, but they took it well… I owe them one.

11:25pm and it is Slowhand Rob’s turn. Rob is a great singer with a loose guitar style and usually fits in nicely half way through the evening as a calmer. This week it looked as though he would be headlining and the last thing we needed was a calming set.

To his great credit, he read the situation perfectly and produced three big singalong numbers (Can’t take my eyes of you, Sweet Caroline and one other) and the audience went bloody crazy! It was a sight to behold. I don’t think there was a single person there not singing at the top of their voice.

I tried to get the band back up, but John OD was making savage finger movements across his throat. We had run over already by 15 minutes, the punters were up for anything and we had to draw the curtain.

Poor old Diva Dad John (and the late coming – and by ‘late’ I mean 10 o’clock, which would normally be ideal! – Diva Lizzie) had to go without. Sorry guys. Next time.

Gosh!