Zarathustra's

2001-07-25

I get there for seven thirty. It's still empty. I get a drink and sit behind the PA to tune up.

Dave Russell arrives - hurrah!. I didn't realise he was playing. Meet Peter and Tonya (who's also playing tonight).

I sit behind the PA and noodle, getting increasingly in the way. If you ever need to find me, just look for "in the way", and that is where I'll be. Zaid suggests I set up my chair and microphone, so that I'll be comfortable. I do so. A bongo player then arrives, moves the chair to a different micropone and adjusts the microphone I'll be using. In fact the band that are going to follow me generally take over the space, kind of forcing me out of my hiding place and de-zoning me. No matter how well I prepare, I'm still unprepared. Lesson number one.

A piano player starts hammering out pub-style four-in-the-bar chords. Someone joins in. It turns out to be Every Time We Say Goodbye. A sort of radical reinterpretation. Pub piano, like Smiley, is a kind of ground zero, a container of significance into which you can pour anything and it always comes out as the echt pub piano. He plays for Zaid to do You're 16, You're Beautiful and You're Mine, and then Zaid introduces me.

I start with Mr Wrong. Under some circumstances this works – opening to a hugely noisy crowd with a quiet riff-based song – but there is a cathedral-full of reverb on the guitar, which is feeding back like nobody's business. I have to stop to ask for the reverb to be turned down. Anyway I spend the best part of the song just trying to manage the sound. It's curious, because the nylon-strung classical guitar is ordinarily such a passive instrument, but on occasions (for exammple Jan 1st) it just turns into a monstrous feedback machine.

I also suspect the sound-chap has sliped away for mood-enhancement. I know I shouldn't blame him (it's usually more constructive to assume that something is your own responsibility, as long as you don't beat yourself up about it, after all I can't do anything about highly mood-enhanced sound-chaps, but can work out how I'm going to deal with those sorts of situations myself), but there are places where I'm in front of very loud speakers indeed and the guitar doesn't feed back – for example the 12 Bar.

Do photograph-the-audience thing.

Little Games, which goes as per, except that I have to damp the strings, so there's another operation added to sing, pluck fret. It works, though. Perhaps my normal technique (which doesn't involve damping) is just sloppy. Hmm.

Go for broke and do Obvious. Some people even go Sssh! (to the talkers in the audience, not to me) which is sweet of them and doomed to failure. I think I manage to crank it up to the right intensity, particularly the scat. There may even be a Whoo! I'll say this for young people, it's actually quite nice to get a Whoo! every now and then.

Finish with Comforting Lie, which works as it usually does. I actually feel quite efficient doing it. In fact it works in the opposite way to the Bedford thing a few months agao. Whereas I felt everything slipping away from me there, here I felt better as it went on. Not least because when I started Obvious I knew I was doing something that was, in its own way, uncompromising. That's probably why it usually works .I always do it in defiance.

Big cheer though. Perhaps that's just Young People being enthusiastic.

Feel like I'm being watched, or at least noticed, as I wander around the room. Was I (objectively) good? Rubbish? Do I just look like a dangerous person. Several people come up to express their appreciation, which is nice. Pub pianist comes up and says that I shouldn't play "long meandering" tunes, just short snappy ones. Just play the same three songs over and over until you can do them automatically. Mmm. Been there done that years ago, but I don't say anything to him, because it's not a useful argument to get into Besides, perhaps he's right. Perhaps I need a number of potential three or four hit snappy sets for occasions like this. The problem is that I've only just convinced myself that I can do tunes like Obvious and it would be a retrograde step. I'll try to meditate on the group that managed to bridge the twin problems of playing to a noisy audience and also maintaining a personal agenda – The Tiger Lillies, who built up their not inconsiderable audience at places like The King's Head in Islington.

If you are going to go where people are, they are probably not going to shut up. Deal with it. A little summer project.

It's alright for him, though – pianos don't feed back.

I stay behind to watch Dave – Borderline Personality Disorder and Bus Stop – who rocks the house. I tell him, as he's coming off, "Dave, you rule!" and he seems quite pleased about that.

I have to go home as Rachael and Tom are going on, which is a shame,as I'd have liked to have seen them.