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.”

This isn't a rehearsal

It’s been a while. A sort of ironic while at that. The reason I started this blog was to relate my latest (final?) effort to establish my niche in the music world and I think I might have missed my own point. It reminds me of the famous (apocryphal) tale of the rookie journalist being sent out on his first field report.

“The Deputy Prime Minister is arriving at Heathrow today,” the editor told him. “Go and meet him and get a couple of quotes about the vote in Parliament tomorrow.” Excited, the young hack scurried off to the airport.

A couple of hours later, the editor was surprised to see the journalist back at his desk. “The plane was only due to land half an hour ago,” he said. “How come you are here. Did you get the quotes?”

“No,” said the journalist. “The plane crashed. There won’t be any interview.”

In his focus on a minor piece of grunt work, the journo had missed the chance to scoop the world by being in the right place at the right time.

In my efforts to turn music into a living, I have focused on the minor (albeit delightful) attempts to write and perform my own music, while missing the fact that, since I last made an entry into this blog, I have left my job as managing editor of MI Pro and Audio Pro magazines, formed and performed with a successful function/covers band, taken on an open mic night (and made it extremely successful), appeared at two local ‘festivals’ and successfully formed a medium to large network of local musicians to the extent that I am about to embark upon a new, totally virgin, open mic night some ten miles out of my ‘comfort zone’. I am also learning a new style (for me) of guitar playing.

All of this has had the effect of making me ‘too busy’ to write my blog… Ha! Too busy, my arse. What it has been is a reluctance to make much of what I have actually been doing in order to keep some sort of focus on some sort of pipe dream that has yet to form into anything coherent. The real stuff is already underway and I have been too stupid to acknowledge it.

So, July 10^th 2012 is the day. I am starting a brand new Open Mic Night out of town. Just me, this time. No tradition of several years to buoy me, no friends and neighbours in walking distance of the pub door, just me and the hope that ‘if you build it, they will come’.

It’s at The Plough in Stoke Poges, which in itself makes the weekly event a challenge, as, unlike my current, established Open Mic Night, there is no passing trade here. You are either a regular or not. O’Donoghues in Marlow is smack bang in the middle of the town centre with locals and visitors passing by all the time. In Stoke Poges you don’t ‘stroll past’. You are either there deliberately or not. This means I need to build a tradition that says that this is THE place to be on a Tuesday.

I have absolutely no idea whether this will fly or whether it will plummet. The one thing I do know is that, if the latter, I will have a cool Icarus analogy to relate.

I’ll keep you posted.