My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 1): 12/11/2007 - Physio & Firkin, Leicester

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There's no such thing as a "wasted gig". A lot of times you'll go out to play, full of hope and excitement, wondering what THRILLS await you this time - a massive crowd who all LOVE you? a rush for the merchandising stand? Mr Big, from Big Records, nodding appreciatively in the corner? - only to arrive to find a promoter telling you you need to go on at 4.30pm, in the shed next door, and that you owe him a fiver.

In my early bands we used to call gigs like that "good practice", and we were right. They were excellent practice for doing really crappy gigs, and we got REALLY GOOD AT IT. If there was an ill-attended gig going on with the ambience of a leaking garage, then we would probably be there. We were the EXPERTS.

So no, I don't mean that a crappy gig is unwasted because it lets you HONE your ONSTAGE CHOPS - there is a LOT more to doing gigs than just going on stage and playing, and anybody who says otherwise is one of those dreary sods who take an hour to soundcheck so that the guitar sound is EXACTLY RIGHT and then is surprised to find that nobody notices. I always think that if you want to do a gig JUST for the sake of playing music then the best venue for you is what we call A PRACTICE ROOM. There you can spend as long as you like twiddling with the "attack" settings (this is a dial that does NOTHING, it's there to distract lead guitarists) and doing "special" tunings (I MEAN SPECIAL IN THE RUDE WAY) and if you really really want to you can even "jam". It will doom your eternal soul to Satan if you do so, but hey! If you MUST play the same thing for an hour while grimacing, then the Practice Room is the place to do it.

If on the other hand you want to do a gig in order to meet people, drink beer, dance around, or frankly SHOW OFF and HAVE ADVENTURES then, as I say, there really is no such thing as a wasted gig. Take this one for example, which happened at The Physio & Firkin in Leicester, right at the very end of the time when Firkin pubs were a proper chain. Younger Readers may not remember them, but their appeal was twofold: they had proper beer, and they had the word "Firkin". When you went to the toilet it wasn't JUST the toilet, it was the "Firkin Toilet". DO YOU SEE? Posters said "Are you looking at my FIRKIN PINT?" HOW WE LAUGHED - truly, it was a simpler time, we had to do SOMETHING while we waited for someone to invent text messaging.

I'd booked the gig myself as a return leg of the gig I'd done a few weeks before in Derby with Rob's band Sienna and so put a lot of effort into publicising it - I spent one Saturday afternoon doing the circuit of Places In Leicester That Take Posters and I printed up loads and loads of flyers, which I handed out a gigs for weeks before hand and pressed into the hot hands of every single person I knew who went to gigs in Leicester. Come the big night I had a mental list of everyone who'd said they'd come, and was gleefully wondering if they'd need to put on extra bar staff to cope with the rush.

I needn't have worried - not a single one of them came. NOBODY. You know how sometimes there's nobody at a gig, then suddenly a huge crowd come bustling in, filling the room with laughter and relief? That didn't happen.

The first act was George, who I then knew only as a pal of Ian The Promoter, and during his set a MAD PERSON came in. We knew he was mad because he was doing that wibbly kneed stagger that the more frizzly haired mad person does, also because he wobbled around the room NODDING at Excellent Points made by various bar stools, then wibbled out. We decided that, with the best will in the world, we couldn't count him as audience. George was so traumatised by the experience it was nearly TEN YEARS before he played a solo gig again.

I went on next and played to Ian The Promoter (who'd put it on), my friend Neil (who'd come to help manage the door!), and the band Sienna (a GOOD THING about playing solo gigs is that if there's no audience, at least you've got more people watching you than the main band - it's MATHS). I ploughed on through, Sienna went on, I apologised PROFUSELY, and then we all headed off home into the night.

It could have ended there and I could have thought "Nobody wants to see my gigs, i must be rubbish at them, therefore i will STOP" and maybe I would have gone off and invented thrilling new kinds of database instead. Instead of that, however, i SAW THE LIGHT. For the past couple of years I'd been doing my bit as a Dutiful Member Of The Leicester Scene. I'd been to nearly ALL of the gigs that other bands had played, I'd paid on the door, I'd stood my rounds - if the local Old Man's Music Magazine had an award for DUTIFUL SCENE MEMBER OF THE MONTH it would have been MINE on a semi-consecutive basis. But for what? I was still giving other people gigs, and never getting any in return. I was handing out demo tapes for free, which nobody even bothered to listen to, and when I put on a gig which didn't feature other Leicester bands, none of them turned up.

It was time for things to change, and change they did - I realised there were other places to play outside Leicester, and NICE PEOPLE in other places who'd put me on. I also saw that, BY GOLLY, i could wait all my life for a kind samaritan to start turning those cassettes into albums, or I could stop hanging around and GET ON WITH IT MYSELF.

So that's what I did - full of RIGHTEOUS IRE me and Neil went clubbing, and the events of that night became a song, "Clubbing In The Week", which was the first single on the record label I formed with Rob from Sienna, which led to forming my lovely band and pretty much every other GRATE thing that would happen to me over the course of the next 10 years, all because I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and go and get DRUNK.

I think there's a moral in that for all of us. Pint?

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