Nobody there was good. Everybody there was trying. Turns out that’s exactly the tonic I needed.
A friend dragged me, genuinely against my initial will, to an open mic night in a pub back room near Bethnal Green last week, the kind of night I usually actively avoid given how uneven the quality tends to be, and came home three hours later feeling considerably better about the state of live music in this city than I have in a genuinely long while, for reasons that had almost nothing to do with the actual quality of what I heard, which was, to be entirely honest, mostly not very good at all.
A teenager, could not have been older than seventeen, played two original songs on an acoustic guitar that was, charitably, slightly out of tune for the entire set, lyrics that leaned considerably harder into rhyme than into actual meaning, and a stage presence best described as visibly, genuinely terrified. It should not, by any reasonable critical standard, have worked. It absolutely worked. The entire small room, maybe thirty people packed into a space meant for considerably fewer, went properly, generously quiet and attentive in exactly the way a room only does when it can tell someone is doing something that actually costs them something to attempt.
That is the specific thing I think this city, and honestly this industry more broadly, has been quietly starving people of for a while now: genuinely low-stakes spaces where you can simply try something, badly, in front of actual other humans, without an algorithm deciding whether your attempt deserves to exist based on some completely opaque engagement metric. An open mic night has no algorithm. It has a slightly sticky pub floor, a house PA system that crackles on the low end, and a room full of strangers deciding, in real time, purely on the basis of what they are actually hearing, whether to keep listening.
I ended up chatting afterward with the host, who has apparently been running this specific night for going on six years now, entirely unpaid, purely because, in her own words, someone has to keep the actual room open for people who are not ready for anything more formal yet. She mentioned turnout has genuinely grown over the past year specifically, which she credits partly to exactly the kind of algorithm fatigue I was already thinking about on my own, people apparently craving a genuinely unmediated room again after years of everything running through a screen first.
I do not think one good night at one small pub back room single-handedly fixes anything about the broader, genuinely difficult economics facing live music venues across this city, a subject I have written about elsewhere on this site with considerably less optimism than I am currently managing. But it reminded me, properly and physically, why any of this actually matters in the first place, underneath all the venue closures and the streaming royalty disputes and the general exhaustion of covering an industry that keeps finding new ways to make things harder for the people actually making the music.
The terrified seventeen-year-old, for what it is worth, got a proper, genuine round of applause at the end, the kind that clearly meant something to her given how visibly she relaxed the moment it started. I do not know if she will keep going with it. I genuinely hope she does. Rooms like that one are exactly where people decide whether they keep going, and I am glad, for one night at least, that room decided to be kind.
I have already put the next date in my diary, properly, in pen rather than the vague mental note I usually make about nights like this that then quietly fails to materialise into an actual return visit. My friend, who dragged me along in the first place against my genuine initial resistance, has been insufferably smug about the whole thing ever since, and I have decided, on balance, that she has earned it.
What I keep turning over, days later, is how rarely I actually give myself permission to simply enjoy something without immediately, professionally assessing its quality, a habit this job has, admittedly, trained into me over enough years that I sometimes forget it is even happening in real time. That terrified seventeen-year-old was not, by any conventional critical measure, particularly good yet. She was, by a considerably more important measure, exactly what a room like that exists to hold space for, and I think I needed reminding, more than I realised walking in that night, that those two things are allowed to be entirely separate questions.
I mentioned as much to the host on my way out, and she laughed, telling me she hears some version of that exact realisation from a genuinely surprising number of industry regulars who wander in expecting to critique the night and end up, instead, quietly recalibrating something in themselves they had not realised needed recalibrating. She has apparently started calling it, only half-joking, “the reset,” a phrase I found myself thinking about the whole walk home, turning it over the way you turn over a lyric that has not quite finished arriving yet.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.