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.
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