Tuesday 31 July 2007

Will I get away with it?

The dream sound check moment ended when ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ realised they hadn’t done a number to check the level of Swill’s acoustic guitar, he wasn’t present at this point so it needed to be done for him. Instead of them stepping off the stage for us to occupy the moment we walked in, we did have to wait while the headliners did one last number.
Fine, not too much of a problem but I stood there mourning the loss of the 'Dream Sound check moment', even if we took the stage in a couple of minutes, we had lost it, it wouldn’t be the same.

I shouldn’t have worried, things were about to get a lot worse.

We eventurally climbed on stage and prepared to run through a couple of numbers to get our levels set, when Chris, our sound engineer came over and gave us the bad news, in an understated way.

“The PA amp has blown, so you can take five minutes as nothing is going to happen for a while. It just burnt out, can’t you smell that burning smell?”.

Yeah we could, but take five minutes? I don’t think the venue is going to get a replacement amp at 7.00pm on a Saturday night in five minutes.
Anyway we drifted downstairs to get something to eat whilst loads of scenarios ran through my head with ever increasing disaster ratings.

The amp turns up late so…

  1. We don’t get a sound check but we get to play and we can’t hear a thing on stage.
  2. We don’t get a sound check, we don’t get to play till really late so we can only do half a set and we can’t hear a thing.
  3. The amp turns up so late that we don’t get to play at all.

This is depressing for two reasons…

  1. We don’t get to play very often and this is one of last gigs so if anything happens to it, we lose a gig and will not be able to replace it.
  2. There are people who have travelled a long way for the concert (Paris, Southhampton and Wales to mention a few) and I cannot bear the thought of them being let down.

Totally out of character for me though, I decide not to let it get me down and I become, witty and charming with everyone I’m chatting to (although they may have judged my behaviour as merely odd). This keeps their spirits up and mine too so the evening doesn’t flag.

Apparently there is a service that is available at a price, to venues in London called ‘Dial an amp’ or something like that, which is an emergency service for venues who have amps blow up at the last minute just like ours.

All they do deliver one in the end, however it is only half the power of the one that has blown.

This is depressing for three reasons…

  1. We won’t be able to hear a thing on stage.
  2. The audience will have a less of an enjoyable experience as the sound quality will be ropey, and
  3. This is just unfair!

We deliberately chose The Spitz to do a final London appearence because of the quality of the venue and PA. This is a prestigious gig and now we are reduced to playing with a PA which would have pissed us off in the Eighties had it been some Wednesday night punk night toilet in Reading let alone here.

But there is nothing to be done than to just get on with it. Now I feel sorry for the ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ because they spent time on a sound check that was pretty much a waste of time. They got to experience the good sound only to have it snatched away from them at the last moment. They are not pleased.

In reality, because we are a three piece (a four piece for the two numbers with Paul) we are a simpler sound for an under powered PA to cope with, plus The Neurotics are dab hands at coping with shit PA’s. We have a degree in it.

In the end, it all worked out fine. We played a brilliant set and the audience loved every minute of it. The way I saw it, there was absolutely nothing I could do to improve the PA but if we could deliver a good performance, we would ensure that the maximum pleasure could be obtained regardless of the difficulties.

I explained to the audience the technical problems we had experienced and asked them if they could hear us ok, to which we got a resounding thumbs up so I stopped worrying and played my heart out, I also got to talk to the people from Paris and they had enjoyed themselves too.

After we finished Clare and I watched ‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’ and enjoyed them immensely, we drunk to really late and then caught a taxi to our bed for the night in Hackney.

It was two in the morning and we knew Rosa will wake us in only a couple of hours.


I really must get some sleep sometime soon.


1963

I moped about in hiding in the bushes for quite some time watching people passing by not knowing I was watching them. I looked into the back gardens of the houses that were the start of the Little Pychons estate and watched children playing out the back before bed time arrived. I wished I lived there instead of where I did.

But all this wishing was getting me nowhere, I too had to be home before bedtime. If I could stop today becoming tomorrow I would have done it because there wasn’t just the going home I dreaded but as the sun set on this Newtown day it would surely rise to bring more dread. Was I going to prison? Will I be taken from my home to be left to rot in a dungeon? I just felt someone was going to come after me, but I didn’t know who.

But I felt It would happen tomorrow.

Back at the house I knocked on the front door and when it opened I entered with my tail between my legs and my head hung low. I was told to go into the living room.
What followed was my father bellowing at me, my Mother interjecting whenever she could get a word in edgeways and we just went round and round in circles with me saying little more than I had already said and telling it all to my lap.
A great big blanket of disappointment hung in the room and it was all of my own making, I had let my mum down, that’s what hurt the most.

It was all my fault, in reality it was, no matter what I said about Billy. Make no mistake I knew I had done wrong.

Trouble was, knowing that made it impossible to ask for help.

And I was going to need it.

I was sent to bed early and without any tea. I lay in my little box room listening to muffled sounds of my dad arguing with my mum, although after a while things simmered down this was now a house of condemnation and when ever I heard a knife drop or a door shut a little louder than it should do I felt it was in anger and frustration at what I had done to besmirch the family name.
Every now and then someone would come up the stairs and I hoped that they would come into the room and say “How are doing? It’s all right don’t worry we forgive you” but they would just go into the toilet and then head back down stairs again. I could hear my sisters still enjoying the freedom of the rest of the house and that hurt too.
This I imaged, was what it was like being in prison, being confined to a small room with the world being angry with you and I knew I couldn’t bear to be like this for very long. I’d had enough now, I didn’t want to go to prison. I wanted this to stop.

After dusk had filled the little room, my mum came up with a drink and said goodnight, she kissed me and stroked my hair, it felt good, but it wasn’t right, it was a jumble of emotions she gave out with her caress.

She left and then I lay awake listening to the Tommy Cooper comedy show on TV drifting up through the floor and up the stairs, it was telling, there was no real laughter coming from my parents. In my room there was just cruel, cruel canned laughter and my sobbing mixing together as a concentrated soup of misery.

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