It went okay although I made a few mistakes that I had to work my way out of by diverting attention away from the guitar playing. I had virtually no recollection of how to play these songs, I couldn't focus and I had to rely on muscle memory to move me through the sections. Very strange. A few people watched whereas most of the bar was filled with Saturday Night folks talking very animatedly over my music. Of course, I could blame many things for this - being booked on the wrong night, my own mistakes, the overbearing earnestness of my own songs clashing with the rest of the acts - but quite simply they didn't need a real person to fulfil the function of providing background noise before the bands came onstage. They needed a CD.
The other acoustic act fared better, because he had brought friends along and his songs were lively little ditties about modern life. He said he was enjoying the background noise because a few days before he had played a Hippy Cafe in Camden where everyone was silent and attentive and it caught him off-guard. I watched his set because he watched mine and because his comment had allowed me to put our differences into a wider context. Give me the attentive hippies Glenn, and you can certainly have the bustling Saturday night North Londoners in the palm of your hand.
I chucked him a demo and thanked the promoter for the chance to play, apologised for my Zero door count and bade farewell to Kilburn with my guitar on my back. Then it was onwards to Liverpool Street where some inebriated friends welcomed me. Three bars and an impromptu breakdancing competition later (not between us, obviously), we called it a night and taxied back to Limehouse to visit the world's second most poorly stocked mini-market* for beer and a sausage roll. We then played some table tennis and ate toast.
The next day I discovered that if you're looking for a Full English in London, you're best not alighting at Bank. It's heavy on cigar shops and nondescript banking firms, light on Greasy Spoon caffs. I then found a fry-up near Hoxton and headed central to spend an alarming amount of money at HMV Oxford Street. It's probably the last decent chain music store in the city. They had face-outs of the latest Asva and Electric Wizard records, 'Salvation' by Cult of Luna and the most die-hard of all the Monster Magnet albums, '25...Tab'. Fuck me! I thought, and took a picture. They even had a PoS block that said "Drone" on it. And to think my friend Dan laughed at me when I said I was in a drone group because he thought I'd made it up. But then again, he did also 'guess' the name Megadeth without having heard of the band apparently.
So anyway, the moral of the story is that the new Napalm Death and Phobia records are shitkicking. The End.
*The World No. 1 most poorly stocked mini-market was a Costcutter in West Drayton where most of the shelves were empty or spaciously displaying less than three of any given product. Four men stood behind the counter but only one actually manned a till, and when I asked them for extra slim filters I had to point the box out to them, which prompted a lengthy huddle and discussion in a foreign language. They then asked me how much I usually pay for these things. I was so baffled I actually gave them the correct amount. I have seen archive footage of shops in the last days of Communist Romania that stocked more than this place. I can only assume the four men behind the counter were squatters that had taken control of the shop without working out how to actually order more stuff for it.
