The Unicorn gig

We are asked to be at the Unicorn pub for 6pm to soundcheck. We arrive at 7:15. This is largely because some of us have jobs to leave and/or children to deal with, so we couldn't possibly get there by 6. Experience tells us though that 7:15 will be just fine.

And it is. No-one has started soundchecking by the time we arrive. There's a band on stage setting up, but that's as far as they have got. There is supposed to be 4 acts playing. And when a third band arrives at 8-ish, it becomes clear that we are a band down. This is good news. Less panic. More calm. Longer set?

The booker clearly doesn't give a shit about the bands being well matched 'cos we got a 30-something grunge band headlining, then us - a 40-something English indie/rock band, and a teens to 20-something Strokes/ArcticMonkeys/Franz Ferdinand-sounding-band, opening.

The soundcheck is the usual thing. The room has a tall ceiling so the sound is echoey and muddled. The venue has a vocal PA which is fine cos the amps and the drums are loud enough without miking. We just have to watch our amp volumes a bit. But not as much as my guitarst does - more later.

We follow the youngsters, who have brought nobody. We bring in the most people - 8. There are a few bar-flies, the other band members and a mad bloke that looks like an extra from a street scene in Merlin, collecting the dregs of people's drinks in a jug and pouring himself pints of it all night long, to make up the numbers though.

We play well enough. The area in front of the stage, which could do with about 100 people in it, is empty except for two shadowy figures at the back. The audience remain at the bar beyond. The room is great to sing in, so I enjoy that and my guitar stays in tune, which is always a bonus 'cos I can move quickly from toilet flush end to intro, avoiding uncomfortable silences in the room as I tune up.

We make two noticeable cock-ups but apart from this we play well and are firing on all cylinders. Word on the floor post-gig is that the last 3 songs sound the best. Two of these are new.

I come home depressed though, because of my guitarist His guitar volume and sound has been so inconsistant of late and tonight it is very... too quiet. This is particularly noticeable when he is soloing. IAnd I couldn't tell you how well he played, 'cos I couldn't hear him. I fail to understand how he fails to notice this.

I realise that I have to have a word with him because it's not the first time this has happened. To be fair to him, it mostly happens at rehearsal where after a set or so, he gets his levels right. Tonight, though, we don't have time to wait for him to get it right.

I still feel grumpy when I get up this morning. I ring him today and tell him he must sort it out 'cos he's letting the side down. I don't like doing it but I am often too forgiving and tolerant of his shortcomings. He is suitably apologetic but has a few technicial explanations hwich are too complicate to comprehend. It should be this complicated. I tell him that I don't care about thee details but that it must be resolved.

I truly appreciate my 3 mates, my wife and her 2 mates, and my guitarist's mates coming out. But you have to wonder, was it worth it? What was that gig for? Who is it for? On one hand I enjoyed it, on the other, I could have done without it. You rehearse and you still make mistakes. The guitarist rehearses and performs with the same amp and still can't get his own sound right.

You go to bed. You can't sleep. You wake up in a mood. You write blog to get it off your chest.

Forty minutes in a blue moon, Part two: Forty becomes thirty.

We arrive at the club Sin at 5:30pm. It is a sprawling rabbit warren of a club hidden away behind, underneath and above a row of shops on Charing Cross Road. We don't have to wait long to soundcheck but we do have to do it without our bass player who can't make it down in time. The soundman is stressed probably 'cos he's running behind schedule. The soundcheck is brief but satisfactory. I try not to worry too much about soundchecks anyway 'cos the sound you get at them often bears no resemblance to the one you hear during performance. It's just good to get a feel for the stage size and layout though, as well as arrange ourselves and our amps and set volume levels and stuff.

We are due to play at 9pm. We are the warm-up act before a 'battle of the bands' style competition, that I'm pleased we're not a part of. We are informed that we're gonna get thirty minutes on stage and not the forty that we had been promised. No surprise there.

The room we're in is long with the stage at one end and a bar down the left hand side as you walk in at the other end. There is a dance floor in front of the stage. This remains empty throughout our performance. We take to the stage with bass player in place and we start our set. The sound is good on stage, including the vocals. There's very little coming through the fold-backs but the amps are loud enough and well-positioned on stage so I get a good mix where I'm standing, at least. The lighting is a bit more of a problem for me 'cos I soon realise that I can't clearly see the dots on my fretboard. As I'm playing the first song I'm distracted by solving this little problem. I try standing at various angles until the light catches the top of my fretboard. I can't find a good position so I'm forced to lift the neck of the guitar into the light for certain chord changes.

The crowd of fifty or so people are congregated on the other side of the dance-floor and are too busy talking to even notice us, let alone applaud us. This doesn't disconcert us though, it does the opposite. We play with more and more vigour and I raise the vocal dynamic a notch or two to try and interupt conversation. This is to no avail but I enjoy the process anyway. In the early part of the set we make a few sarcastic remarks about their deaf-ears but then drop these in favour of a more magnanimous gratitude.

We are all veterans of this type of gig. Most bands on the way up or down play them. This particular crowd is made up of advertising industry-types in their twenties, maybe early-thirties. They aren't here to see us. They are here to get drunk and hang out with their colleagues. You can be disheartened by this experience or turn the negative into a postive. I mean, these days (you should understand what I mean by this expression by now) it's not often that we get to play through a top quality PA on stage like this. So we just enjoy ourselves. It used to wind me up. But maybe that's what maturity does to you. You stop giving a damn what people think and even whether they listen. It becomes about being able to make music. It's about the opportunity. The night out, the boys-night-out-ness of it. The camaraderie associated with being in a band. It about perpetuating the feelings you used to get as a teenager when playing music on stage. It's keeping the dream alive; and the older I get, the more tightly I want to cling to that dream.