[In the 1980s I was working 8-5 as a wood-machinist (which is why my right thumb is now shorter than my left thumb – in those days you weren’t considered a woodworker until you’d lost at least part of at least one digit) while still supplementing my income as a semi-pro musician. It’s not an accurate representation of one particular gig, but as a general impression of a semi-pro soloist’s experiences in London, it might have some merit. (Maybe at some point I’ll dredge up some recollections of my adventures with bands in London, but those were generally less demanding and manipulative than the West Midlands circuit – see below.)]
08:00: Stagger into work under the weight of at a brace of guitars and a very small PA. (itemized below) and a couple of small but heavy rucksacks, stuffed with accessories. The rucksacks, not me.
12.00-13.00: lunchtime sandwiches in the wood-mill followed by a turn or two around the fretboard in the hope of being relatively ready to play later on. This, of course, is accompanied by banter from a couple of passing chippies about sharing the workplace with Eric Clapton, and how do I manage to play two guitars at the same time? (Answer: the same way you work a screwdriver and a chisel at the same time…Different tools for different jobs…)
17.00: Clock off and stagger over to Tube station, even more unsteadily after a healthy eight hours of honest labour (less one hour for lunch and 20 minutes for tea-breaks). Presuming that non-carnivorous fodder won’t be available at or near the venue (at that time I was vegetarian), so invest en route in a healthy, invigorating bag of greasy, warmish chips before taking train and/or other transport to some far-flung corner of the Metropolis. Well, maybe not that far-flung, since I hardly ever found myself playing South of the river. But there are plenty of places in North London that aren’t blessed with a convenient Tube or overground station, too.
18.45-ish: Reach nearest station/bus-stop to the venue. Search rucksacks in hope of finding London A-Z among assorted jack-leads, batteries, foot-pedals, set lists, spare strings, power leads and sockets, not to mention cassettes and poetry chapbooks that no one will want to buy.
18.55-ish. Find A-Z in anorak pocket. Set off for an invigorating game of Hunt The Venue.
19.30-ish: crawl into the right pub, aching in every muscle from a day spent shoving timber around and an early evening burdened with guitars, amplifier and accessories. The organizer hasn’t arrived and the upstairs room is locked, and the landlord won’t let me in there on my own. So I sit in the bar trying not to get drunk and incapable even before the organizer arrives. I now have nothing to do except examine my stage fright (which is in prime condition) and worry about whether I should reorganize my set list. By about 20.30, my muscles are less bothersome, but those chips are sitting very heavily on my digestive system, and my second pint is having a similar effect on my bladder. Of course, I haven’t been to the loo as I don’t want to leave my gear unguarded.
20.45: The MC has arrived. My muscles start to complain again as I carry my gear up to the room, unaided, of course: the MC is weighted down with the key, a small cashbox and the membership register. I start to set up. About two minutes in, the MC decides that there are already enough people there to start the evening and off he goes. I finish stuffing jack-leads into any old socket and get out of the way, resigned to spending the first few minutes of my set alienating my audience by finishing off setup instead of talking to them. Down to the bar to get another pint and fantasize about escaping. I now have nothing to do but revisit my set list, obsess about stage fright and wait for some warning that I’ll soon be on.
21.30: Still waiting for early warning when MC says “And now for our guest for the evening…” He gets my name wrong, but then so did Time Out, which sometimes can’t be persuaded that I’m not Steve Harley* or (inexplicably) Vin Garbutt**. City Limits and Melody Maker generally don’t mention it at all, or put the gig down as being on a different day or at a different venue. It was, of course, arranged too late to get it into Folk London.
And… well, it’s a gig. I’m not usually as bad as I was frightened of being, occasionally I’m almost as good as I wanted to be. Usually, no one heckles persistently, or calls me out on minor fluffs, I don’t get too drunk to play or remember my words, and there is a small but not too hostile audience, though there was on one occasion an unpleasant exchange of words in the interval with someone who seems to think that I must be some sort of bizarre, bearded drag artist, or maybe an aging rent boy.***
Even better, the organizer isn’t usually reluctant to pay me, which is a nice change from when I played with dance bands – the organizer in those days eagerly seized on any excuse to reduce the fee. “You only played two and a quarter hours.” “You were too loud.” And my favourites: “I thought you were a country and western band” and “I thought I was paying for a five-piece!”
If only it wasn’t such a long way home…
* To be fair, my friend Josephine Austin, who organized a yearly poetry festival in Hastings at which I regularly read my own verse (for many years alone, but in later years as a double act with my daughter), introduced me at least once as Steve Harley, which at least gave me the opportunity for a fair-to-middling adlib about his being my grandfather. To be even fairer, she knew the Cockney Rebel bloke as well as me, so a little confusion under the stress of compering was understandable and forgivable.
Less forgivably, I’ve become aware through various experiments with ChatGPT that while it does a fairly good job of impersonating me in the context of writing about security, it gets hopelessly confused between me, Steve Harley, and another musician called David Harley. Certainly, I won’t be encouraging it to write my songs.
I suppose it makes a change from having my surname misunderstood. On one memorable occasion in a hospital in Windsor I was called by no less than three surnames, none of them mine…
I don’t have a copy, but there is a photograph somewhere of me reading at the Hastings festival with my very small daughter in my arms, she holding a balloon animal someone had given her earlier. I’m not sure whether the squeaking of the balloons added to or detracted from the impact of my immortal verse. When I mentioned this to the poet and songwriter Bernard Puckett, in two of whose bands I played for a while, he reminded me of the dangers of working with children and animals, especially both at the same time.
** Vin was a lovely chap (much missed in the folk world) and a great performer and songwriter, and we once spent a happy half hour or so together on Shrewsbury station while he checked out with my newly-acquired tenor banjo, but our respective approaches to music were very different.
*** As I remember it – and it was many decades ago! – the gentleman in question buttonholed me in the bar to give him a light and then asked what was going on in the room upstairs that people (admittedly, not many of them) seemed to be migrating to. When I said “only me” he seemed to think I was propositioning him. Sadly, my best responses came into my head ten minutes after I’d just shaken my head angrily and walked away.
Wheal Alice Music 