Right now.
You know a lot about music. I want to ask you a question...come with
me. I want to take you to this really neat place I've found. Let's
call it the Totally Democratic Bar. The beer is great, good
selection, cheap mixers, excellent food and bar snacks and the bar
staff seem to know what they are doing. The place is filled with
loadsa right-on interesting hip dudes, seriously cool lighting and
the vibe is hot, hot, hot.....at least it says so in this free trendy
Places To Be Seen guide. And here's the clincher....it says on the
chalk board outside that they've got LIVE MUSIC! Oh yeah, Give Me A
High Five! Let's Party!
Ok, so
far? Just down this side street, follow that rather worrying and
insistent bass drum noise and the wailing guitar feed-back. Free
admission? Just gets better, my friend. Mine's two pints of Old
Fred's Armpit and I'll have some of those really expensive crisps in
an arty bag. No change from a Tenner? WTF?
Do you
know this group playing? Nope? Neither do I. They seem to have a lot
of their mates and relations here judging by all the children shape-throwing at the front.
Ok. Settle
back my friends. The beer is fine and the bar staff are indeed pretty
good - but....
rather
quickly, we exchange glances and our eyebrows move in unison...the
band is awful, terrible, unspeakably bad. They are hopeless. They are
so bad I can't even recognise the cover they said they were playing.
They are playing at Eleven on the dial. The singer is out of tune.
The three chords the band are playing seem to be the wrong three and
the beserk drummer's mother should not have let him out of his
bedroom. Let's hang on a bit and see if they get better....oh, go on,
you know you want to..
Sorry. I
don't think I can do this. My ears are bleeding. I fear I am being
fatally damaged in the taste department. I can no longer think
coherently as this sound has damaged my hearing brain. I'd rather
listen to a mash-up of Lee Marvin's 'Wand'rin' Star' and Richard
Harris's 'MacArthur Park' done by Tiny Tim than listen to this stuff.
My grandad did an accordion version of 'Donald, Where's your
Troosers?' that's better than this. Oh God, please stop – I am too
young for the seventh circle of hell...
But we do
nothing. They don't stop. We say nothing. Often we will vote with our
feet and move on., Occasionally, we will mutter and grimace to the
barman who will nod in sympathetic agreement and give you a Gallic
shrug. It is, after all, The Totally Democratic Bar and that's not
his Department.
Why do we
do that? Why does no one get up and stop them? In parts of the U.S we
would lob our beer bottles on to the stage or at the chicken wire.
Once in France I saw a punter walk on stage, to huge applause and
unplug the amps. On a football terrace they would get twenty three
verses of 'You're Crap and We're Not Paying'....even in Milan
nowadays the opera fans boo rubbish when they hear it.
Here in
the Totally Democratic Bar, we just continue to be Britishly
Phlegmatic. I did once attend a gig at the Royal College of Art where
everyone piled on stage and had a fight...but that was an early Clash
gig and it was part of the performance. But, I fear the norm has
become 'grin and bear it and move on'.
We have
this sense of Fair Play. Every musician has to start somewhere. Why
offend someone when you have the option of ignoring them? It's easy
for our esteemed radio DJs – if it's bad, (or even just not very
good) it doesn't get played. It's not too difficult for reviewers
either...you have to kiss a lot of frogs that come through your
letter box or appear on a small stage at a festival, but you don't
have to review them. Move on, tomorrow is another day and nobody
dies.
Now wait a
minute. Maybe you should try and advise them. Would it be better to have
a quiet word and tell them to get some vocal tuition, some instrument
lessons and go away and not come back until they are through the
worst? How damaged would you be if you were giving it your all, in
the confident and possibly misguided belief that you were good and
someone told you not to bother. The argument goes that if it was
someone whose view you respect that would be ok – but what if it's
just someone from the audience and you had no idea who they were? Not
so easy eh?
The blues
world is, for the most part, extraordinarily tolerant. We like to
give everyone a break, a decent hearing, a proper go in the knowledge
that practice and talent have together continually polished and honed
the goods and we have seen the emergence of stars who never fail to
deliver on a public stage. You know them well, you remember their
faltering first steps and you can list them as I write. That, though,
does not solve the problem of the genuinely deluded.....those people who have been thrust forward by their friends and
relations into an X factor/live performance dream that doesn't and
couldn't possibly exist for them – because they are just no good. The gap
between the pretend bedroom microphone, the karaoke bar, the cruise
ship and the real live attentive and knowledgable audience is a
million miles and will never be bridged.
Perhaps
you are one of those special people who feel they have a mission to
put others out of their misery, however much pain is inflicted.
'It's for their own good' you will say. Nul Points Sunshine, you're
rubbish. There's the Door. Please don't cry. Next. There are not
many of us who can, or even want to do that. I suspect that for most
of us The Quiet Life and Moving On are the chosen options even if
that means a lot of very average bands and soloists will carry on in the
belief that they are special. Is that such a bad thing if you don't
have to listen to them? Surely, market forces will prevail and
eventually they will fail. In the meantime - you go over and tell
them. No, you go. No, I'm not going to....that would be unfair and I
don't want to upset anybody. Let's just go to another bar...
Pip Pip!
The Blues Man in The Hat
(No embryonic egos were cracked in the making of this blog.)
Thanks Banksy for the image,