Hitting Stride.

Way back in the mists of time, before digital photos were a common thing, there existed a bunch of out of focus teenagers that started a band based on the fact they wished they were Blink-182. They had one or two gigs and the biggest show they played was at the Trinity bar in Harrow. They even had to sneak in their 15 year old drummer in. That was around 12 years ago. Last Friday led me back there for my next swing at playing a show in their upstairs bar.

There were a number of things that led this to be one of my favorite ever live experiences and I'll go through them in no particular order:

The first thing that springs to mind is the guy who supported me. When playing entry level shows like this it's incredibly rare to be paired with other artists who are even in the same high level genre as you. Because of this it was awesome to meet Andrew McLaughlin, who not only shared half my greatest bands list, but also played similar covers to the ones that I play these days and started off playing when the continuation of Red Rag Front was just a idea floating around in my head.

Andrew was new to the gigging game but is already a much better guitarist than me (not that it's too hard) and had a voice that perfectly complimented acoustic versions of some blinding songs like Bad Religions "You" and Rise Againsts "Savior", which was my favorite of his set. He already sounds great and I think with a little coaching from an old punk who dropped out of a music performance degree then he will be one to watch out for pretty soon.

The next best thing was having an awesome turn out from my friends and family. Nobody can make it in this business without support and to have a whole bunch of people make it down, several of which had already seen me this month, really inspires confidence and helps blow away memories of empty rooms. Of special mention of course is that Shelley my wife also came along, which is nice because half my songs are about her and Summer. She thought I was great, which is pretty much as good as a platinum album to me. I'm truly grateful for any person who takes time out of their lives to support me and if someone happens to like a tune I play along the way then hell that's all the better!

My actual set was a balancing act of positives and negatives. On the one hand I still seem to manage to fuck up and forget lyrics all over the place, however on the plus side I am ready for these moments now and I'm fairly certain I managed to hide the majority of mistakes without crowd members noticing too much. I made a small mistake in buying a set of metal picks to play with too and found that metal picks + sweaty palms do not go together particularly well. The biggest positive though came from having friends, family and my wife there, meaning I had the confidence to really go all out, which I did, and it was quite easily one of the most satisfying and rewarding shows I think I've ever played, even if little things like getting paid for a show are still a far distant milestone for me.

So now I'm on gigging hiatus until I have an EP/the weather cheers up a bit. As far as re-igniting a musical career goes I have achieved even more than I ever thought I would. Not only do I have songs that I and others like, I have also managed to get my gigging mojo back and more importantly have gained friends along the way. I couldn't have asked for a better start to all of this and I look forward to what the future will hold. 

Bad luck or a sign of the times?

I was pretty hyped for my show in London's Nambucca. It's one of those venues that everyone seems to know and everyone has at some point been to. Plus from a practical point of view it is a ten minute bus journey from where I work! So I jumped on a number 43 over there and arrived only to find out I couldn't get in to the place. Now this wasn't exactly right, I could have got into the venue if anyone from there had given me some information in the five days I had to get ready, but the email giving me details only arrived on the 12th, not too useful for a gig on the 11th!!

Not taking this as an omen or anything I ate some food at the bar over the road and tried again half an hour later. This time luckily there was activity in the name of One Fell Down (fellow act) having a cigarette outside so they showed me how to get in and I got myself set up and listened to a pounding sound check from Seethe, the nights headliners.

Now I knew full well that friends of mine weren't going to be at the show. Nobody ever  goes to see the opening act, hell my name isn't even on the flyer! If I were a social person I may have gotten a bit lonely or tried making small talk with the other guys there but hell, I have a PS Vita and I quite happily busied myself waiting around for the doors to open and a bunch of metalheads to come flooding in.

But that didn't happen. Not a single person came through the doors in the hour and fifteen minutes between them opening and when I was due on stage. So I was called over and had to start playing....

...to no one!

Most people have had one or two or twenty of those gigs where there are like five people in the place and they aren't really that bothered by you but you play anyway. Being an opening act means people almost definitely didn't come to see you play and will mill around in the bar area and a few stragglers or drunks may come in and see what racket you're making. But no. There was no one in the place to watch me. I played the first four songs to the sound guy (who to his credit applauded at the end of each song) and then a few of the other band members came in and watched and we joked accordingly about the spectacular turn out. My biggest worry before playing the show had been playing a crowd of hardcore metallers who wouldn't appreciate my upbeat lovey dovey pop punk musings but there was literally no one to care!

 So I finished and packed my stuff up and asked the One Fell Down guys if there was just a bunch of people in the adjacent room, but there was not. They went on and as you can see here, again it was just them and other members of bands that they played to. Now for me a turn out like this is water of my back, I have an oyster travel card so any journey  within London doesn't cost me a penny more than my usual work travel expenditure. But for these guys, they had come from 90 miles away, so they had done a 180 mile round trip and wouldn't even get back their petrol money!

I find this amazing considering they are what I like to think of as an "established" band, they have an album out and music videos and a merch stand and all these things that bands take a long while to procure. So whilst this is a mild annoyance to a guy with nothing to his band but a guitar bag and stand, it must be a massive punch in the nuts for five guys who had to squeeze themselves into a tiny van for two hours to get there.
So how did I end up playing to just a sound guy? Maybe it's because it's January, and it's cold, and people are generally a little strapped for cash? But then surely since these things are advertised so far in advance they would be well aware of a poor crowd attending a show, the promoter contacted me to fill a slot five days before so surely he would have seen that the show would be bad and would have decided to forego a first act? I think all of the above points may have factored a little but more so I think we live in a world where events like this are almost exclusively advertised on social media and all of us are constantly bombarded with invitations to join this and that and after no time at all we just kind of switch off to it. Now that at the click on a button we can send out invites and people can choose to either click on them or ignore them we find ourselves detached from any commitment to the decisions we make virtually.
I'm sure a lot of people just kind of forgot that the show was that night or never really planned to go or maybe found themselves without the means to go even though online they said they would. Such is life these days, when you don't even need to go onto a persons online profile to wish them a Happy Birthday. We have removed any feeling of loyalty to an event invitation by the over-saturation of them in our news feeds.

But anyway, now I sound like an old man rambling about better times, like when you got some poor shmuck to stand on a street corner handing out pieces of paper only to watch the closest bin fill with them!!!

So what's next, well I have a show in Harrow coming up but beyond that I think I'll hang off actively pursuing  gigs until the weather brightens up.

To fill the space in between I have decided I should be a true one man band and build an arsenal of instruments, all of which I can play (badly) and to use them to excellent effect on a recording I can truly be proud of. I would also like to write a song with friends who are in the process right now of recording their own EP. So now I'm looking to be doing vocals/guitar/bass/keyboards/drums and whatever else may come to hand. I'll see how it goes and keep you updated on progress.



If you have any opinions on the state of music promotion, or can think of any extra musical instruments I can play then sound off in the comments.

One small gig for man, one giant leap for Dan kind...

In preparation for this show I made a few pretty critical changes to the way I usually work when getting ready to do a show.
First off I actually practiced, a lot, in the shed. This isn't something I had done much of before purely on the basis that I play each song individually a lot and it hadn't actually occurred to me to try a proper rehearsal.  This also helped the fact that I have been getting pretty lazy with my playing and wasn't quite up to playing 30 mins straight when I started rehearsing.
Secondly of course was my new shiny ever so goddamned beautiful new guitar. I have never owned something quite so fantastic as it so the love and attention I have given it now means I have cared a lot more how everything coming out of it sounds, rather than just seeing a guitar as a necessary accompaniment to what I'm doing.

So show day occurred and I thought it best to get to the venue a little early just to make sure I was sound checked on time and in an orderly manner. This seemed like a good idea until I got there and was reminded that I was performing with various assorted groups of other musicians and of course no one was ready or set up for anything in the slightest when I arrived. So a trip back down the road and a KFC later and I was ready to still sit around doing bugger all for a while. I think some of the newer gigging types assume that artists, whether professional or struggling start ups, just turn up at whatever time they feel like and bust out a banging set but unfortunately there is a lot more tedium to it all than that! Of course I wasn't complaining, as it gave me time to mentally prepare myself for the longest (to date) amount of time I have had to stand on stage alone. Getting a sound check out the way helped clear a few straggling nerves I had and then I met with friends to help pass the time.

  The crowd at the show was sparse to say the least, but I had a few great friends around to cheer me on and that was all that mattered to me. So this time I stepped up on stage with a hell of a lot more confidence than last time and set right to it.
Now when I was in my little dark shed I thought that if I can handle playing in the dark with hands going numb from cold then I can play anywhere, except I didn't think about the fact I was playing in the completely opposite environment. So with that familiar sting of sweat pouring into my eyes and my left hand cramping to buggery because it was slick with sweat and I was having to hold on to the neck for dear life, all the whilst being constantly flash blinded by over enthusiastic stage lighting  I kained my way through my set. Apart from a couple of hiccups of the lyric/chord brain fart variety here and there (of which I hope no body noticed/remembers) I was pretty freaking triumphant. Finishing the set in carefully timed precision (honed for weeks playing to a stopwatch) I was super stoked to have gotten to the end of things and have cheers, even from the odd few other people in the room.

So even though there were scant few people there to see it happen, the fact that I valued those who did make it and the few strangers who witnessed my London gigging induction shook my hand and told me it was great has pretty much made my year already. Now it'll be a case of onward and upward as I see how far I can get before anything starts going awry!!

Also special mention to the sound guy who gave me my favorite compliement, just after the sound check he said "you're all done, nice voice mate" in an offhand way which said to me "I listen to some goddamn shit doing this job and I find you tolerable"........ awesome!

I have a few more shows this month so any thoughts of other projects such as recordings and uber multi-band mashups will have to go on a back burner for now. I'm next playing tomorrow so I'll give another gig round up next week.