A new open mic night

When Gez the Keys and Adam the Crooner walked away from the Open Mic Night at O’Donoghues in Marlow something deep in me said they were making a mistake. I don’t know whether it was because the management at OD’s had been good to me over the years, because the management at the pub the other two were going to (just a few yards down the street) was clearly not someone with whom one would want to do business, or because I had always wanted to run my own evening – or all three – but it seemed the wrong thing to do for me.

I suggested that we split the evening, that they take on the new session and I would continue at the old venue. I figured the some regular participants would choose between the two and that others would try to get the mic at both… I was wrong.

Gez and Adam took the whole evening, lock stock and barrel and I never saw any of the old regulars again. Fortunately, I had a couple of contacts and John OD and I made a few calls, which led to Andy the Keys, Nick the Guitar and Skinny Hips Tomkins agreeing to come along to OD’s.

Those first few weeks were quite excruciating. Nick and Andy didn’t do solo material and we had never played together before, which wouldn’t have been a problem had dozens of musos and singers turned up to take a slot. They didn’t, of course, and the three of us bumbled through a few standard rock and blues numbers that we had in common and Skinny Hips has a good ability to keep both a turn and get an audience going – but it was seat of the pants stuff.

I’m not quite sure how, but there were always just about enough people there to keep the show and the atmosphere alive.

Seven months later and OD’s Open Mic Night is thriving. Adam and Gez’s night has closed.

Is this why, then, when a landlord from a pub ten miles away in a small village famous for… er… hang on… Oh, yes, having a large hospital two miles down the road, came and asked if I’d be interested in hosting the same at his gaff on a Tuesday night, I said – without hesitation, I might add – ‘yes’?

Thanks to the high of the successful Thursday nights, I had clearly forgotten the gut-wrenching angst that accompanies the build up to an evening that might well be spent on one’s own, shambling through a collection of songs to a smattering (if you’re lucky) of disinterested applause.

Well, if I had forgotten it, I remember it now as all day yesterday I was moping about thinking that I needed to go to the toilet every five minutes. The car was loaded up shortly after lunch and I must have driven everybody I am connected to on Facebook and Twitter to distraction as I pummelled them with reminders about a new Open  Mic Night at The Plough in Stoke Poges.

By five o’clock I was a wreck and the only thing I could do was lie down and listen to the dulcet tones of Eddie Mair on Radio 4 and try not to think about it.

I set out shortly after six and was there at six-forty. I humped the gear in, accompanied by quiet, smirking glances from the regulars that seemed to be saying ‘wanker’. People came and went as I set up, always maintaining a ‘crowd’ of about six people. I caught one guy's eye as he was sitting at the bar. I smiled. He turned away.

‘Bloody hell! Are we expecting The Beatles?’ commented the landlord at the sight of three mic stands. I laughed, hoping to exude a comradely ‘ho, ho, you old wag, you’, but I think it came out more like ‘oh dear, I think I’ve just pooed my pants’.

Once everything was plugged in, I ran through a basic sound check (you know, ‘one, two, one, two’ in the mics, a strum on the guitars – one acoustic, one electric – a tweak on the eq here and there) and went outside for a cigarette. The guy who had ignored me at the bar ignored me again outside.

I went back in and bought a beer – I needed it – and sat in silence. The clock read ten to eight. I was due to start in ten minutes. I have never felt more alone.

Quantifying the process

Just finished writing my private diary – a good old-fashioned notebook, which I make entries using a pen (gosh! How quaint!). It is something I am trying to make a habit out of, in order to compile something of a record of this final ‘push’ in my life to achieve something I value.

Robert Fripp says ‘to try is to fail’ and how right he is. But my trying here is a step on the road to a discipline and it is more succeeding than failing and it will become less trying and more doing until it is established as a habit. And a habit is a hard thing to break.

I mention Fripp because (a) I always do and (b) because shortly before writing my own diary, I saw this on his entry for April 11th 2011…

The Aims Of The Diaries.

Public Aims:
1. To engage the listening community at an earlier stage of the creative process than is commonly available.
2. To inform the listening community of the practicalities of that process.
3. To de-mystify the process which is, essentially, practical.

Private Aims:
1. To encourage the Diarist to recapitulate their experience.
2. To provide the Diarist with a pointed stick.
3. To expose the Diarist to public ridicule.

And, of course, this is exactly what I had wanted to do with this blog, only hadn’t been able to articulate it quite so succinctly.

Now, some might say it is an act of sensible modesty to consider one’s work with music (which nobody much listens to nor cares about) uninteresting enough to leave well alone, but it is precisely points 1.1 and 2.3 that encapsulate everything I want to do. I want to show that even I can make music and it is no big thing as far as I am concerned (music, is a big thing, but the fact that it is willing to work with me means (a) music is utterly wonderful and (b) music doesn’t care who it works with – it simply wants to work with you/one/etc…

Pont 2.3 explains that, while putting one’s self in the ‘limelight’ by saying, here I am, I am a musician, one is actually still a human being and needs a bit of humility in order to prevent the (oh so frequent) crawling up one’s own arse in search of illumination.

I certainly hope I never do that.

So, blogging will be my public diary. There won’t be the revelations of scandal of anything any publisher might be interested in, in fact, it will all be a bit dull, but it will provide a simple man’s search for music and how that process is available to all.

Tomorrow will see the first public airing of a new auralorama, so please stay tuned, as I feel that it will also herald a new direction – all tied in nicely with the various social faces I have on show and all, hopefully, indicative of normality.

But feel free to ridicule…