Eleven people paid to hear us and one of them was the sound engineer’s mother.
LONDON, England (Seeker News) – The van is called the Biscuit Tin, it belongs to our roadie Maurice, and tonight it has been asked to do something that no vehicle in east London can legally do any more: arrive.
We have a gig in a basement in Dalston. I want to put the day on record, partly for the archive and partly because if I do not write it down I will tell it at the bar as if it were an epic, and Dervla has asked me to stop doing that.
Half Past Two: The Route
Maurice opened the sat nav, which then sighed. The reason is that Hackney Council has put forward more road restrictions for the area, including a bus gate and extra school streets, as set out in the Standard’s report on the Dalston traffic plans. These are proposals, I should say, rather than a done deal, but they have the effect of making every van driver in the borough feel suddenly like a villain in a heist film.
I am not against school streets. Children should be able to cross a road without being introduced to the front of a van. I am against only the idea that the same road, at the same moment, can be both the quickest way to the venue and a quiet play area for a Year Three, and that Maurice is meant to tell the difference using a small blue sign.
In the end we parked a quarter of a mile away and carried the Duchess in procession, like a very loud funeral. A man at a bus stop applauded. I have not been applauded in years and I did not enjoy it.
Four O’Clock: The Pedal Question
At the venue, a basement called the Sullen Pheasant, our guitarist Clive opened his case and discovered that his favourite distortion pedal had gone. It had not been stolen. It had simply, in the way of all things in Clive’s life, been left on a kitchen worktop beside a bag of lentils.
We had ninety minutes to find another, and Maurice, who knows a man, proposed a car boot sale. I put my foot down. I had read that Metro reported police raids on rogue shops and car boot sales, with 42 people arrested and up to 100,000 pounds of suspected stolen goods seized. That is a lot of fuzz pedals, in theory.
I told Maurice that the provenance of a second-hand pedal matters, and that any pedal sold to me for “a tenner, no questions” would be the one I ended up explaining to a very patient constable. He sighed and said, “It was only a distortion pedal, you wally.” We bought a new one from a shop with a receipt, and a till, and a man who said “Next.” It cost more than the evening would earn. That is called doing things properly.
Six O’Clock: Soundcheck as Marital Counselling
Soundcheck lasted an hour and a quarter, mostly because Dervla and the sound engineer, a young man called Tobias, disagree about what a snare should sound like. Dervla says it should sound like a door being kicked. Tobias says it should “sit in the mix”. The snare, to its credit, ignored both of them and did what it wanted.
Somewhere in the middle, I read a small item in James O’Malley’s piece on the plan to overhaul the technology running London’s 8,900 buses. A brain transplant for the bus fleet. I liked that. I have always suspected that the 38 has a brain, and that it has been using it for evil.
It made me think about how the capital is full of machinery that has been quietly doing the job for decades, and that nobody wants to be the one to ask whether it works. A bus. A boiler. A bassist. All three are one failed signal away from a silent night.
Eight O’Clock: The Paperwork Interlude
While the support act, a trio of teenagers called Mild Cheddar, tuned up with great confidence and no tuner, I scrolled on my phone and found the sort of headline that restores faith in the planet. A farm.fm piece reported that Brazil floods Europe with soy and the EU demands 47 pages. Forty-seven pages. For soy.
I showed it to Maurice, who has to fill in a form every time he parks on a single yellow line, and he went quite pale. “Forty-seven,” he said. “I would never recover.” I think it is the first time we have bonded over bureaucracy rather than beer.
It also reminded me that every authority eventually develops a taste for paper. A bus gate is just a form with a camera on it. A school street is a form with a lollipop. I would write a song about it but I am too busy being moved by a pedal.
Nine O’Clock: The Gig
Eleven people. I counted twice. Seven of them knew us, one was the sound engineer’s mother, and three were a group of tourists who wandered in looking for a cocktail bar and stayed because the door shut behind them.
We played forty minutes. The first song was too fast and the second was too slow. The third was the one about the 38 bus, and the tourists sang along, loudly, in a language I did not recognise but which I am fairly sure was approval. Clive, in the new pedal’s glow, forgot to be an actuary and leapt onto a speaker, then got down again immediately because it was someone’s drink.
- Total takings: 63 pounds, divided by four.
- Broken strings: two.
- Complaints from neighbours: none, because the neighbours are also the audience.
- Number of times someone said “it was better in the old days”: nine.
Midnight: The Walk Back
We carried everything back to the Biscuit Tin through the cold, past the bus gate that does not yet exist, under the school street that is not yet a school street, in a London that is always about to change into something else. Maurice drove home without looking at the sat nav, which is the only reliable way to travel.
When I get in, I read a few more headlines on a London news website with a straight face and then more of my daily notes at The London Prat. On the way I stop to ask myself whether I know the difference between what commentary is and what it is not, and conclude that it depends on the volume.
The Duchess is home. The pedal works. The soy is, at last report, still waiting on page forty-seven.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/