It is 2016 and I am doing a solo gig at Blackpool Football Club. Not the Blackpool Football Club, unfortunately, just a Blackpool Football Club. But, in their defence they have their own clubhouse and probably even a football pitch out there somewhere. It is a little bit run down to be honest. I don’t have a dressing room, so I change my shirt in the Gents. There are three grimy and off-putting cubicles. Two of them have signs hung apologetically on them reading ‘Out of Order’. The third cubicle, presumably the one that is ’in order’ doesn’t have a door.
It has been a long tough climb to the top I reflect but I guess most people only see the glamorous side.
I have decided to start with something lively and uplifting. A really well known song not often associated with country music, (tonight is a country gig), but one that has been brilliantly covered by Willie Nelson. Eric, the genial secretary of the club is friendly and bluffly welcoming. “I’ll do a bit of an introduction Nick, first time here and all that. They’re a friendly lot; love a dance, love a bit of the old tempo, if you know what I mean. You’ll enjoy it, nothing to worry about, really”. I had had a sound check, being a consummate professional, Eric had given me the thumbs up after that, the balance was good and the I-pad was all charged up with my set and ready to go with the first track, my own carefully crafted version of a popular classic, in the style of the great Willie. I wasn’t worried.
Why had he said that?
Did I look worried?
Should I be worried?
Confidence is fragile at best.
I was finding that every country gig was following the same disconcerting pattern. I was a bit of an anomaly to be honest. I played piano for a start. This in itself was unusual; they were used to, and more comfortable with guitarists. Very few of my fellow artists actually play their instrument very much I had noticed. They strummed a few chords and the tracks they played to were exact copies of the record. Two acts I had seen didn’t even actually plug their guitars in at all. Of course that’s not true of all of them by any means but it’s true of more of them than might be thought exactly right. At one of the country weekends my wife occasionally puts on (she is a dance teacher, and sometime promoter with roots in Texas) she had booked a guitarist singer she knew. He had just spent a fortune on a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. These are expensive, sought after and very heavy items. After the first song he propped his guitar up against it and there it remained for the rest of the evening, forlorn and neglected. At least he was open about it. Carrying it out later, squinting slightly, he turned to me as he passed and said “Jesus! This must be the heaviest guitar stand in Lancashire”. My tracks all have the keyboard and the solo parts taken off so I can play them live. I have made the tracks myself and they are usually my own arrangements. The backing vocals are me singing and many of the songs are my own. Also, to add to audience’s confusion, I don’t wear a hat. This eccentricity alone locates me near the Bernie Saunders end of the country music spectrum.
A hat is of course, for a musician, a bit of a signifier. In fact it is a lot of a signifier. If it’s a cloth cap type of thing you are probably about to be molested by a folk singer for instance. A small pork pie job and you can write the Blues Brothers based set before they even take the stage. For a country singer not to wear a Stetson isn’t just a bit suspicious and dangerously close to being a liberal, it virtually apostasy. Country audiences are wary, even hostile towards someone who doesn’t wear a hat. It can feel like being Morgan Freeman at a Klan bring and buy sale. I don’t even wear a check shirt either. Setting up one night the organiser took one look at my sharp black suit and skinny tie and sidled up to my wife. “He does know it’s a country gig doesn’t he?” he asked anxiously.
(Musicians learn, quite quickly, to be cautious when a gig involves the audience, rather than the artist dressing up. Its the wrong way round to start with. It isn’t just country music fans of course, my wife and I quite like jiving, so we will go to the odd swing music night. They dress up too. So do ageing punk fans at revivalist festivals or Ska enthusiasts. Heavy metal fans rarely wear their loafers and chinos to a gig. Northern Soulers have their pegtops and bowling shoes. An ex girlfriend of mine, years ago, once had a car break down in the middle of Manchester, an event made considerably more awkward because she was on her way to ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ in full fig. All kinds of music can be an opportunity for a little cosplay, some of it just fun, some of it frankly a bit disturbing. Some of these fans, not all of course by any means, are nothing less than obsessives. When I was doing a bit of country music many years ago in London I remember a guy starting to come to the shows, brought somewhat reluctantly, by a friend. Within a short time he was at every gig. He became worryingly absorbed by it, a neophyte almost. Eventually his wife divorced him. As she explained to a friend of mine, “It wasn’t the western gear; I could live with that, or the fake Montana accent. It wasn’t even the Hank Williams Junior records. I mean we only have a semi in Hounslow with a tiny garden. It was the horse!”
I don’t want to be unfair here. After all, I would like to work again at some point in the future. However, if the audience are given to dressing up for a gig it has to be said their tastes can sometimes be, to be kind, a little narrow. The most authentic scene in ‘The Blues Brothers’ movie is the one where Jake asks a bar owner what kind of music they like in the joint. “Hell, we like both kinds”, drawls the owner. “Both kinds?”, says Jake, puzzled. “Yup, Country and Western”. Narrow I suppose isn’t quite the word I'm looking for here. Nazi maybe? but not, you know, in a good way).
So the first twenty minutes of my set is usually played to a kind of bewildered silence and sidelong looks. It was unnerving at first but I guess I’m used to it. I have to say in fairness I have never actually had a bad country gig. Audiences are always, by the end, generous and friendly and actually quite open to a gig with something new and different to listen to. They just wouldn’t go to one out of choice that’s all.
So I have set up my track, back in Blackpool, the keyboard is on all the right settings and I am smiling at the audience, cravenly trying to win them over with my reserves of effortless warmth and charm, temporarily forgetting my wife’s advice to me at the last gig she came to.
“Try not to smile like that at the audience”
“Smile like what? I’m trying to get them on my side”
“Your Hannibal Lecter smile, even I find it creepy”
Eric bounds on to the stage
“Someone new tonight folks” he beamed. “Nick Cornall. First time here, I heard him earlier; you are going to love him. Not a guitarist, true, but”, he brightens a little,”We will be back to normal next week, promise. Anyway just before he goes on”... I was checking the opening number was all cued up and ready when I heard his voice drop a few sombre semitones. “Most of you know, but I believe some of you don’t, that Mavis died suddenly and unexpectedly at home last night”. There was a sudden and chilly silence. My hand froze over the I-pad. “As you know, Mavis was a stalwart for over thirty years here at the dear Old Spur and Saddle club. She was treasurer for most of those years and a dear friend to all of us. It’s a terrible shock and I realise she was like a mother to many of you, me included. Without people like Mavis there wouldn’t be clubs like ours and we owe her a real debt of gratitude as well as our affection. So I’d like you all to stand for a minute out of respect for a much loved amigo and compadre who we will miss so much and hold in our hearts forever”. As one the audience rose with an incongruous clash of replica spurs. Hats were clasped respectfully to chests or paunches. Transfixed, I was ten seconds late before I took the situation in and shot to my feet, knocking the piano stool over with a small explosion of reverb from the microphone. I winced apologetically. I stood there disbelievingly. I could hardly start flailing around on the I-pad desperately searching for a more appropriate track to start with. Anyway, what would be an appropriate track? After a minute that seemed much, much longer I sat down again. A couple of women were draped over each other weeping silently. Some of the men were staring miserably down into their pint glasses. Nearly all had tears running down their cheeks. The nearest table to me looked stricken.
“Anyway, I’ll hand you over to Nick” said Eric, seamlessly morphing into Blackpool’s Bruce Forsyth.
I sat there blankly, looking out at a sea of misery and bereavement. Eric waggled his eyebrows at me encouragingly. “When you’re ready Nick”. I gripped the piano keys,
“Ah-one ah-two ah-one-two............ Bring me sunshine, (plinky plonky plink) with your smile”.
On the way home the car phone rang. It was Brendan. “You’ll never fucking believe fucking this” he began, committing, as usual when angry, GBH on the English language. “I probably will tonight”, I replied gloomily. He went on to rail at his own solo set that night, his usual Saturday spot in a bar on Dean St, Manchester, a somewhat more upmarket gig than mine. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the toilets had doors on them. He played piano there each week in a small cramped corner between the bar and the restaurant. At the bar would be the usual unresponsive Saturday night mix of footballers, liggers and Coronation Street stars and in the restaurant would be an equally unresponsive collection of Coronation Street stars, liggers and footballers. Tonight however, something unusual had happened. In fact it was so untoward he had called me on the way home from the gig to tell me about it.
There had been applause.
Well, not quite applause as such, but Brendan had distinctly heard, behind him, in the restaurant area, someone clap. No-one, in over two years of doing the gig, had ever clapped.
Not once.
Ever.
Two months away from a much needed hip replacement, Brendan stopped playing and shifted painfully round on the piano stool to properly acknowledge the acclaim. Well if not quite acclaim, at least the first display of good manners and an understanding of the social contract he had ever seen in the place. He shielded his eyes and scanned the diners. And there, in the corner, a fat man in a shiny suit, far too old for the willowy blonde he was sat opposite, was determinedly and vigorously slapping the bottom of a bottle of barbecue sauce onto a house special cheeseburger.
At least he wasn’t dressed up.