The Malt Shovel Drighlington: Superset Live! 8th Jan 2010

Ah… pub gigs. The bread and butter of any workaday band who has given up on loftier callings. “Pub rock” is the kind of withering epithet flung at any band that is loud and kind of blues-y, but it also speaks to the wheels-within-wheels snobbery in the local music scene.

Basically, you have “proper music venues” and you have pubs that put on bands. Weirdly, proper music venues are actually the kinds of places where bands are ground into the dust. These are the places with a 3 quid entry fee, a robbing bastard ‘promoter’ and a resident sound guy. I’ve touched on this before – such places are fine when you’re young and can pull in a few dozen of your mates at almost any time. When they get older and their interest wanes, that’s when you discover some kind of truth about how much you actually want to play music rather than chase notions of stardom.

I know quite a lot of people who are barely 30 who are letting their guitars and amps gather dust in a corner somewhere because they got sick of it. As the rewards for playing ‘proper music venues’ are pretty scant, it gets pretty to lose heart with your fellow musicians and, worse, music in general.

You turn up somewhere, play in front of nobody and get no money. Who’s to blame? Maybe the guitarist didn’t bother telling his friends on Facebook… maybe the set’s wrong… maybe this, maybe that. Those are the kind of nitpicky rocks on which friendships are broken. I look back at good little bands we used to play alongside and I bet maybe 2% of them are still going – and probably 100% of the failures were down to trying to play proper music venues and somehow ‘make it’.

It’s also accompanied by a constant low-grade resentment of bands that do make it – that tiny, tiny fraction of pretty unremarkable bands who have a break of fortune and find themselves with a 6 year, 3 album career and a support slot on tour with the Kaiser Chiefs this one time. At the back of the mind of bands, who don’t get that kind of break, it fosters a self-affirming set of beliefs that all those bands are shit… that the public are mere sheep… that record companies are evil… that it’s all so commercialised that there’s no room for art. Sound familiar? If so, it’s because you’ve spent time with someone whose band never quite made it out of the local gig circuit.

There’s truth in these observations, but you only really feel it when you’ve got the could’ve-been-me syndrome. I know, trust me, I suffered for years. If I ever get around to carrying on with the History of the Band, I’ll tell you how we came this close all those years ago and why I’ve never forgiven Embrace and the Stereophonics for taking chances that should have been ours.

Now look at any pub band. They’re still playing at 40 and 50 and enjoying the shit out of it. Free from the responsibility of an imagined future on the cover of the NME, they just play whatever the hell they like. They play pubs which have an entertainment budget, so hand over a bit of cash at the end of the night, regardless of whether the band bullied and cajoled a few friends to make the journey to Batley on a wet Thursday night. If you can’t see any nobility in that, then your misanthropy has overrun your optimism.

Anyway, this was a proper pub gig. The snows were falling heavily enough to make it touch and go as to whether we’d even get there. But inside, the welcome was warm and we played a fairly decent set. £150 in pocket too. That money’s going straight on monitors (basically speakers facing the other way to let the band hear what’s going on) because I could hear about 1 note in 6 that I was singing. Before we got to do an encore, there was a town-wide power cut and an outbreak of fun and freedom as people fell over equipment in the dark and went outside to hear the silence, see the dark and throw snowballs at each other

But we’re starting to book a few of these gigs in now… nothing fancy, just pubs. We get to play our music and some songs that we all like in front of people who generally stay to listen and we get some money thrown in for our troubles. I guess that makes us a pub rock band.

Set list – Covers

1. Substitute – The Who
2. Honky Tonk Woman – The Rolling Stones
3. Shakin’ All Over - Johnny Kidd and the Pirates
4. Come Together – The Beatles
5. She Said, She Said – The Beatles
6. Seven Nation Army – The White Stripes
7. Queen Bitch – David Bowie
8. Can’t Explain – The Who
9. Suedehead – Morrissey
10. Be Bop A Lula – Gene Vincent
11. All Your Love – John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
12. Waterfall - The Stone Roses
13. Walk on the Wild Side (kind of!)  - apologies to Lou Reed

Set list – Originals

1. Until Tomorrow
2. Bottles of Pills
3. Everything I Want
4. In The End
5. Blind (Or a Tory)
6. I Was Confused
7. You Got it in You
8. Sorrow for #1
9. Unamerican
10. Mississippi Fishcake Blues
11. I Still Don’t Understand
12. Here Come the Mandarins
13. (I Want you to) Be My Sunshine
14. No Flies on Me