I’m rarely one to criticise anybody’s performance at an open
mic night. If it’s reasonably well-attended, you’ll have a wide range of
skills, talents and musical taste that can make for a varied and entertaining
mix. Some people are better than others, of course, and this is usually due to
experience, commitment to developing their performance, or the quality of their
songs; probably a combination of those three factors. I don’t do gig reviews
any more, but even when I did, I was rarely nasty about bands. I made no secret
of it if I thought their performance was below the standard I would expect from
a gigging band, but it was not usually the band’s fault and I would always try
to write my reviews in a way that came across as constructive criticism, rather
than slating them. I don’t review open mic nights (apart from assessing my own
performance) because there aren’t really any standards by which to judge such a
varied group of performers. Experienced singer-songwriters are always going to perform
better than a 14 year-old kid with a guitar just starting out and it would be
unfair for me to compare the two when they both appear at the same open mic. So,
apart from a not-always-kind reflection of my own performance,[1] I
tend to keep my thoughts on everybody else’s performance away from the tender
mercies of the internet.
Until now.
The other night (Tuesday 27th) I was at the open
mic night at The Victoria Inn in Swindon ,
commonly referred to as The Vic, with my girlfriend Amy and our friend Tom. I’d
been there once before in October, and the standard was actually quite high; as
ever some people were better than others but the overall there were some very
good performances that night. I expected much of the same but I was a little
more relaxed about it tonight as I had a better idea of what to expect. I was
third on, and up until that point, the standard had been pretty good.
The fifth guy to go on was a tall guy in a ‘night out’ kind
of suit, a Les Paul-style electric guitar and a haircut that reminded me of Phil
from The Thick Of It (google it.) I say that just so you can picture him. I’m
not going to give him any dignity by using his name; he will hereafter be
referred to as ‘The Douchebag.’ Alarm bells started ringing when one of the
lads he’d bought with him shouted at him to fuck off as soon as he was
announced. Things didn’t get much better when he got on the stage, where he was
clearly drunk, every second word was ‘fuck’ and he made far too big a business
of turning the distortion off the amplifier he was using and announcing his
songs.
Oh dear, his songs. People can write songs about what they
like and I haven’t usually got a problem with it, but this Douchebag appeared
to have written them to sound as much like a pillock as possible. In so far as
I actually listened to the lyrics he was spewing over clattering open chords,
his first song appeared to be about having sex in a taxi, and his second was
about a young wannabe porn star being told to lean on a sofa, take her pants
down and spread her arse cheeks. I only know the latter in so much detail
because in between the two songs, he horrendously over-explained it amid
several more ‘fucks,’ during which his microphone cut out several times. Now, I
would be prepared to believe that this was down to a technical fault. But as
the sound guy was obviously familiar with this Douchebag, and this happened to
absolutely NO ONE ELSE, I’m making an educated guess here that the sound guy
was deliberately cutting him off to make him sound like even more of a plonker
than he already did.[2]
Not that the Douchebag needed any assistance with this. Even
if the songs weren’t appalling, his delivery was; the guitar work seemed to
consist entirely of whacking open chords as hard as possible, and the singing,
well, I would barely even call it singing. If it wasn’t for the fact that it
was slightly more rhythmic than regular speech, I wouldn’t know what to call
it. The best part of his performance was the part where after trying out loud
to decide whether to play a cover or not, punctuated with his usual colourful
language, he made a start on in then appeared to decide it wasn’t worth it and
left the stage. He got a raucous applause from the four or five lads he’d
bought with him, and a grudgingly polite applause from everybody else.
Well, that is quite honestly the worst performance I’ve ever
seen at an open mic in my entire life. Amy found it insulting and degrading
towards women, and I just thought it was pathetic. Tom made an accurate and
concise summary of the Douchebag: “A talentless, pretentious, ego centric
****bag[3]
trying to be funny.” We’ve finally found somebody more ridiculous than those
two lads at the Yardbird a few years ago whose two songs were about running
over a cat and threesomes, because at least those guys could play. With this
Douchebag, it would have been less of a mistake for him to contract laryngitis and try to get through the set
with the guitar still in its case.
‘But hang on Matt,’ I hear you cry. ‘What gives you the
right to say all this? You make jokes in your set as well, don’t you? And you
certainly swear; I’ve heard you. You swear in Bitterness, that’s your most
popular song! And you use the f-word loads of times in A Lonely Night, that one
that sounds so much like Dani California Wolverhampton , you swear loads in that one
as well.’
Yes, yes, alright. My hands aren’t entirely clean here, but
let me explain:
First, and this might sound counter-intuitive but bear with
me, I don’t make jokes lightly when I’m on stage. Being funny is hard. Even
trying to be funny is hard. Look at Will Ferrel. I do make snarky and usually
self-deprecating comments between my songs, but always in context, and always
with a decent-enough song to back it up. And if it looks spontaneous, it isn’t;
it takes me ages to think through how I’m going to deliver a joke in a way that
won’t derail the entire thing. I try to say at least something in between my
songs to keep the audience engaged. I am very well aware that using humour is a
common way of deflecting nervousness, and I’m not so confident when I haven’t
got a guitar to hide behind That’s why I plan out a set list before I go on
stage, that’s why I take so long to decide what I’m going to say when I get
there.
Second, with regard to swearing in my songs, I don’t do that
lightly either. Sometimes it adds to the song, sometimes it makes people roll
their eyes, sometimes it makes people feel uncomfortable, and it appears to
depend entirely on who I’m playing to. I Don’t Care, for example, went down
very well when I played it at Sam Draisey’s open mic at The Rainbow in Coven,
because Sam and his friends live in and around Wolverhampton and knew exactly what
I was singing about. I’ve not played it live anywhere else so I don’t know if
I’d get even close to the same reaction. And I do not swear when I’m playing
live, unless I know it’s OK for me to do so. How do I know? Well, often if it’s
an unfamiliar crowd – as was the case on Tuesday Night, for example – I’ll see
if anybody else is swearing first. Other times I ask the promoter; it’s not
hard. I always try to introduce myself if I can, or say hello if I already know
them, and ask them how we are with Ps and Qs. They’ll either tell me to play
what I like, or keep it civil, but they do appreciate being asked. And I
absolutely never swear if I know there are kids around. I was originally
thinking of playing A Lonely Night on Tuesday but I chose not to because I
didn’t want to play a too-offensive song in front of a largely unfamiliar
audience. Turns out I needn’t have worried after all, because I could have gone
up there and played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and done a better job than the
Douchebag. And that’s a guarantee.
And in case anybody who hasn’t yet seen me live, or is on
Spotted: Dudley,[4]
is thinking of suggesting that I should have called the Douchebag on his
performance on the night, rather than waiting two days and ranting about it on
the internet, I’d like to pre-emptively put a stop to that right away. And
here’s why: In the open mics that I’ve been to, and there have been a fair few,
there is kind of an unwritten rule. That rule is: Don’t heckle people, and if
you do, keep it in context and good-natured. I’ve never heckled anyone on stage
in my life. I’ve taken some good-natured heckling and responded in kind. But
there’s nothing good-natured about anything I’ve got to say about the
Douchebag, or his entourage of friends he had with him. Plus, as it was an
unfamiliar crowd in an unfamiliar town (Yes, I know Swindon
quite well now, but not it’s gigging scene) I couldn’t really count on anyone
for support if it got ugly. It might have done; the Douchebag was clearly
wasted, as were some of his friends. It was not hard to imagine them kicking
off some trouble with the right kind of provocation. And it was certainly
nothing I wanted to instigate.
But the worst thing about it is that I’m struggling to think
of the point to all of this, or even if there is one. It’s not going to change
anything. The Douchebag might have been, well, a Douchebag, but he bought by
far the largest number of people with him that night. He was definitely
familiar to the promoter. Plus, it’s an open mic; short of deliberately
damaging the venue’s equipment he can go up there and play what he likes
without fear of reprisal. It’s not like anybody’s going to turn around to him
and say ‘Sorry mate, you’re rubbish. I don’t want you back here.’ It’s also
ironic, of course, that in my first blog in months, it’s the Douchebag I’ve chosen to write about, rather
than the people who actually did really well that night. They include Sunita,
whose piano-based quirky songs were nothing if not enthralling, Rob, whose
finger-style guitar with a powerful voice to back it up was excellent and,
well, me I suppose.
So to close, a quick summary of my own performance:
I began with continuing my quest to play a Feeder song in
every venue I play, because Feeder are the best band in the world and everybody
should listen to them. I played High, simply because the last time Amy came to
see me I played Yesterday Went Too Soon and I can’t really sing any of the
others that well. It went down OK, but not amazingly so.
I then played We Will Survive, a song I haven’t played since
Vagabonds in 2012. Mark that: I haven’t even played the song since then, never
mind playing it live. I’d certainly never played it on my electro-acoustic
before, so I really had to concentrate for this one. Funnily enough I made it
all the way through without any glaring errors, Amy was happy to hear it again
and Tom enjoyed it as well.
The song everybody else remembered was the one I played at
the end: The Mingulay Boat Song. I’m really enjoying playing this at the
moment. It was a bit of a risk because one thing I hadn’t heard at The Vic so
far was any kind of traditional folk music, but I had some of the other
performers ask me about it afterwards and it seemed to go down the best judging
by the applause.
I chose those three songs because they all have the capo at
the third fret, but I think one thing I am very good at is dynamics. I’ve got
better at playing moderately when I’m carrying most of the song. I can go loud
when I need to lift it, and I can reduce the volume almost to a whisper which,
contrary to what you might expect, has the effect of making everybody in the
room go quiet when used sparingly. It certainly helped during Mingulay – you
could have heard a pin drop.
So, I was pleased with my own performance – my first in a
couple of months – and was certainly pleased that I did better than The
Douchebag. To be fair, that wouldn’t have been difficult. But it’s nice to, if
not set the bar, at least be able to play to a good standard. It’s taken me a
long time to feel confident enough about my own performance to say that without
irony. That’s got to be a good thing, right?
See you next time.
[1]
When I can be bothered, which is not often these days,
[2]
That is a GUESS, not an accusation. I can’t prove a thing. I’m just saying what
I saw.
[3]
Oh yeah, it’s that bad. Not on my blog.
[4]
An absolute cesspit of nastiness where the slightest complaint about anything
or anyone is followed up by seven or eight comments suggesting they should take
their complaints to the person concerned, rather than posting it online. I
don’t know why I’m on it, to tell you the truth.
