75 quid a gig. Is it worth it, he says?

My band, Pocket Rocket, played last night at Tommy Flynn's in Camden High Street. The gig, organised by our drummer Nigel, was for employees of the Wunderman advertising agency that he works for, and is the latest in a series of 'Wunderstock' gigs that he has put on over the last year.

The benefit of playing such gigs is that they usually guarantee a good turn out, and are boozy affairs. Before the recession they would also include a free bar; now, with redundancies imminent, such generosity would of course be insensitive. Maybe this lack of generosity or bad feeling towards management is why numbers seem down tonight?

Still, the pub is full enough. Our soundcheck is short and sweet and we sound fine. The vocals are the only thing going through the PA and there's no stage monitors, so this keeps soundcheck simple. I can't hear my guitar very well because between me and my amp on the small stage is Nigel's drum kit and a lot of cymbals, but I can live with it.

I have my first drink (a bottle of Newcastle Brown) as the band before us take to the stage. They have serious techanical problems with the singer's guitar and I do my best to help him remedy these but with little success. I feel for the guy, who is having a total nightmare but his band do an excellent job of covering.

I take the remainder of my Newcastle Brown and a glass of Jack and Coke on stage, but end up sticking to water while we play. We have a 45 minute set. The first few songs sound great but our aural pleasure is soon spoiled by the gradual introduction of verbal noise into the music. The audience's indifference is evident as the applause at the end of each song dimishes gradually to none. Our third to last song Your Teenage Dream is scrappy and we start to feel we are overstaying our welcome as it comes to a close at about 35 minutes in. With hindsight, I think we should have played our last song at this point and got off, but instead we play a couple to end. After a tune up, the last song Laura sounds ferocious, and would have been a perfect rendition had we not cocked-up the end, which is highly unusual.

Mike, who plays bass, is not happy. I can see it and feel it as we play our way out of the cock-up at the end. He looks demoralised and tells me when we come off stage that the indifference of the audience and his frustration at the rhythm section's lack of tightness, have depressed him. Unfortunately, he let's this affect his view of the whole business of being in a band.

He then proceeds to way up the financial cost of playing the gig by adding up money spent on the two rehearsals before it, drinks and his cab fare on the night. "Tonight's performance" he says "has cost me £75 including drinks. Is it worth it?". "If you don't enjoy it, Mike, it's not", I say.

And technically that makes it a 'pay to play' gig, doesn't it? And an expensive one at that; 75 times by 4 is 300 quid.

My lasting concern is not financial but is that 45 minute sets by unknown bands before indifferent audiences, are too long. 30 minute sets, as I've said before, seem hardly worth playing; Therefore, forty minute sets in front of indifferent audiences or audiences unfamiliar with your material, are the perfect compromise. Let's try that next time, eh? And drop Your Teenage Dream.

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.

Forty minutes in a blue moon

Tomorrow, my band, Pocket Rocket, is playing a gig. It's at the club Sin in London's west end. I mention the venue first 'cos the not-so-rock 'n' roll aspect of it is that we are booked to play an annual fundraising event for the National Advertising Benevolent Society. They call it Nabstock. My feeling is that it's a gig, isn't it? We only play every 6-8 weeks and these days (ie: in our middle age), we would rather play gigs like this because they come with a guaranteed audience mostly under the influence of copius amounts of alcohol and therefore likely to dance to virtually anything. This is preferable to an audience comprising a handful of people we know, a few members of other bands on the bill plus a man and his dog at the Bull & Gate or one of the other toilet-scene London venues. I do miss 'em, really.

Our drummer has recently had an operation on his knee, following an injury sustained during weight-training. As a result of cutting the healing process a bit fine we are unable to do our usual full band rehearsal a couple of nights before. I think we'll be alright though. Our set tomorrow night is to be forty minutes long. We have a safe forty minute set; and a not so safe sixty minute one, which we won't have to struggle through, so that's good. Sixty minutes is almost too long for an unknown band anyway, I reckon.

Our bass player can't make rehearsal 'cos he's waiting in for his wife to come home from work to relieve him of parental duties. So that leaves me and our guitarist. We decide to get together anyway but instead of going all the way to the rehearsal room in Waterloo, I go over to his place, bring him some nuts 'n' raisins and orange juice (protein and vitamins) for him to consume on day of the gig and we go over the set and refresh our memories - It's been a couple of weeks since we last rehearsed as a full band.

Tomorrow night backline is (mostly) being provided; I have to bring a second guitar amp which is a pain though. Sound check is at 5pm. We're on at 9pm.

These are the facts. Now we can begin the hypothesising about how the gig will go? The less you play, the less sure you can be about how the gig will go and how well you will play on the night. It's a one-off. It's a lottery with chance related to factors such as the soundman, equipment, lighting, stage, audience, technical problems, mood, alcohol, clothes, nerves etc etc.

As most of my musician-readers will know, it is not about the performances of the individual members of the group so much as about the overall sound and tightness of the band. This means that you can play well (as a whole) and have a shit gig (personally). At our last gig, as a whole, we played well. Post-performance though, opinions of the show differed. I, for instance, thought I sang well but played guitar like a muppet, or at least a beginner. I was torn by my performance. I was loving singing 'cos the PA was so good - a good on-stage vocal sound, nice room acoustics - so I sang my little heart out. I just couldn't get into the swing of my guitar playing. I was having tuning problems, which made me panicky and self-conscious about my intros. As a result, I dropped out alot of the verse guitar parts coming back in for bridges or choruses which always heightens the dynamics but was intermittent enough to further stifle my swing.

A sound-desk recording confirmed how I felt abou the gig. My guitar was sort of out of tune in parts. Not too bad but just enough to bother me. And my singing was spot on. Really strong and clear.

So, we'll see. Another forty minutes in a blue moon. Watch this space for my post-gig analysis.

Call me, just don't wake the baby

I was effing peed off yesterday after making a call to a promoter who I am chasing for a gig booking. We played a successful show at the venue he manages a year ago so the gig's on the cards; I'd just like to finalise a date. I have called this guy numerous times and on each occasion he is too busy to deal with it. Fine, he's busy, and sounds just a little stressed, so I agree to call again each time.

Yesterday, I call and he answers:
"Who's this?"
"It's Toby from Pocket Rocket", I say
"Nice timing mate", he replies, "you just woke up my baby... I can't speak now, I shouldn't have answered the phone...
"I'm sorry", I say, "I'll give you a call another time".
Click.
Drone.

So effing rude. Too right you shouldn't have anwered the effing phone.
I was peed off at myself for being so apologetic. I hate that about me. I know dealing with a baby is stressful, I've been there. So why is it sleeping by the landline phone?

This testing and frustrating process of trying to get a gig, gives me day-mares me of the times, in the late-80s, that we had to go out to the telephone box at the end of the road in all weathers to call promoters. After having queued for ages to get into the phone box, naturally the line was engaged or he wasn't there or he had a pay-to-play policy (which we didn't agree with because we simply couldn't afford to do it) so all our efforts were in vein.

As my late-grandmother used to say, "Never give up". So I bloody won't.

A right knee's up (for at least ten days)

Our drummer injured his right knee recently pushing an excessive weight with his feet in the gymnasium. On Friday he had to have an operation to fix it. He has been advised to spend the next two weeks combining rest and physiotherapy to complete the healing process. The thing is we have a gig booked in about ten days. He is determined to recover in time. We have a rehearsal a couple of nights before the gig, which is at a club called Sin in the West End and is in aid of the National Advertising Benevolent Society. A bit odd, I know, but it's a gig and with a guaranteed audience who will be quite well-oiled by 8 or 9pm, I'm sure. I shall keep you posted about his progress.