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musicandchips
Thoughts from 30-Something London
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Thursday, November 13, 2003 :::
Goodbye perhaps...
This may well be my last-but-one blog entry. It’s not that I want to stop blogging; on the contrary, I find it highly remedial. No, I fear that this Saturday, the 15th of November, 2003, I am going to be publicly lynched. Strung up by the neck until I am dead. Hung from the PA support bars in a basement club in South West London. Beaten to a pulp by a lusty mob of enraged punters. Chased from town to die a slow, painful death, alone in the deserts surrounding Wimbledon.
Why I hear you cry? What possible crime can you commit that would justify such extreme punishment? What kind of behavioural depravity can you sink to that would so anger an otherwise festive crowd of revellers that they would throw off all vestments of civility and react with such murderous barbarism?
The answer is as simple as it is horrifying. The traditional crowd at the bar where I hold my Saturday residency have relatively good taste in music. It’s a posh bar, and they like to see themselves as among Wimbledon’s elite. They spend a lot of time and effort cultivating this image both for themselves and for those whose paths they cross. It means something to them. This Saturday however, the management have decreed that a private party shall be allowed to dictate the music I shall have to play on the night. And to say the very least, the list of requests I have just received from this party will not engender a further bolstering of the self-image of the regulars. In fact, to say it will deliver it a shattering blow would be a most heinous understatement.
You see, there are two types of cheese where music is concerned. There is what one may refer to as ‘ironic’ cheese, that is to say, it’s cheesy, but if danced to just so, with this particular smile of knowing condescension, one is able to project a certain coolness only those really in the know can aspire to. This is the cheese I can get away with. It is the mild cheddar of cheeses so to speak. Then there is the other type of cheese. The Gorgonzola of musical dairy products. There is no possible situation in which being in the same room as this kind of cheese can ever be construed as cool. In fact, were you to bring your cool friends to a venue in which this type of cheese was being played, you would find yourself removed from even the most loyal of email lists. Your mobile would fall strangely silent, and no longer would invitations to openings of celebrity restaurants cascade gracefully through your letterbox. It is the type of cheese that can seriously damage ones social prospects, and as such it is absolutely lethal to play it out in any but the most mainstream of clubs. The punters just won't stand for it. In Bar Sia on a Saturday night it is nigh on suicidal.
Looking down the list of requests I have to play on Saturday I know precisely how Guy Faulkes must have felt on reading the list of charges against him. Or any of Henry VIIIth’s wives on receiving his proposal of marriage. Or Saddam Hussein on watching the World Trade Centre collapse. I am, in short, f*cked.
I’m not listening to any music today, I’m too busy being scared!
::: posted by Andy at 11/13/2003 06:23:00 PM
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