Zarathustra's

2001-07-12

I set off to Nadine's, but when I get there and go downstairs there's no sign of anybody. No PA, no nothing. I call up Zaid. I'm supposed to be at the Bedford Arms in Clapham. He told me the wrong place. I manage to catch Simon and give him his CD (and he seems happy enough with that), but I hope nobody else came to see me. If they did, I'm sorry. It wasn't my fault. My motto for the day.

I'm feeling sort of beginnings-of-fluey, so I get a big bottle of mineral water to try to flush the poisons out and reirrigate myself.

So I get on the tube and go down to the Bedford Arms, a much noisier venue than Nadines. I'm on last.

This is Zarathustra's and it is, indeed, something of a Nietzchian evening.

It feels like quite a strain -- the PA is almost distorting with a lot of bass and mid frequencies, very difficult to project through. Because it's the main body of a pub, there is a barrage of noise, but people are sitting close enough and paying enough attention that I forget to just settle back into myself and build a bubble, instead I'm trying too connect with people. Who knows, maybe I do. The thing is I can't tell.

I do feel exposed– I don't feel confident enough to take photographs from the stage area, I am aware of imposing myself onto the other, explicitly drinking, clientele. And tonight they outnumber the audience clientele. Occasionally someone does wander over to the edge of the bar to take a look, but I can't tell whether they are enjoying or whether they are following the same instict that draws people to a car crash. That's not to say that the playing is bad, but that it has to fight with the ambience of the pub. Sometimes it feels like I'm winning at least a foothold in the general consciousness, but then I play a bum note or drop a lyric and I lose them again.

I play Secret Agent's Dream, Little Games, and then go straight to Comforting Lie, and Iodine, and then because I need to do one more song, and it seems that I need another loud one (because the volume of the background conversation is so high) I play State of the Art. Any good work I may have done with the first songs was undone there - it's an old song, a bit clunky and I didn't play it that well. I became aware (unusually) that I have standards and that SotA isn't quite up to them. When I finish playing the volume of conversation drops, because they don't have to talk over me any more. I sould have done better. If I ever hoped to play at the King's Head or Whistle Binkies or some other noisy drinking hole, this should act as a reminder that I have a lot of work to do.

But that, at least, is my responsibility if not my fault.