It’s a lot of work putting on a show. There’s the venue, programming, negotiating the running order, marketing, ticketing then ensuring that technical issues like lighting, background and sound are all in order so that the audience can see and hear the people onstage. Then there’s the operational stuff to check – tickets, sell drinks, serve food and make sure that all the stuff above actually works as planned. I’ve done many gigs and lots of things have gone wrong for us, I’ll never forgive myself for forgetting to light the dots when a piano player couldn’t see them when the sun went down.
Gigs are all about detail and balance and poise and a lack of rigour or a lack of luck prompted me to call it an early night and go home and watch Maigret. So I apologise to Alex Jade Wallace and the production of ‘Just Another Chapter’; I never saw you and I hope you were brilliant, but my plan to come to the Fringe to review the ‘Show, Slice and Spritz’ with Kelly Edgar and Jake Donaldson hosted by Lauren Pattison at 7pm then stay for the next gig failed mostly because I couldn’t hear it and the bits I could either depressed or horrified me.
‘Show, Slice and Spritz’
First a word about the new mysterious venue, ‘The Newgate Social’; it is in fact only upstairs at Wonderbar where my good friend Mad Mick does his pre-match singing boozathons in the season. Unlike most -’proper” social clubs, the audience was extremely kind and clearly wanted to laugh and embrace the young man whoever he was who came on stage to do a routine about an onion on a stool. I have little idea if he was any good as the seats at the front are sideways benches and I’m too tall to get my legs under the table, so had to sit at the back and therefore couldn’t hear him because he didn’t USE THE MIC!
Next up was an excerpt from a play called ’Coming Home’ which featured actors who could project their voices better but seemed to be a running through most of the tired clichés that tend to come along whenever football fans are represented to a bourgeois audience – well they were drinking ’spritz cocktails’. A bit like -’A Night with Gary Lineker’ with a bit of ’Auf Weidersehen Pet’ ( “You look sexy in that football shirt” said Neville to Brenda) with so many clues to the insecurity of the man (drinking, smoking, sex, baldness) that I hoped with no expectation produces a denouement where rejecting the performative toxic masculinity that he seeks to project through fake mateship and superficial fandom he runs away to an artistic commune up a mountain. Or maybe he understands that here in Newcastle being a gentle artist who lives in the hills, supports his team and is respected by all is unremarkable. I know three of four people like that. Fans have been patronised by experts for centuries…
Finally, I saw a big Irish feller come onto the stage. Glory be, I thought as took the stage and grabbed the mic and spoke close, loudly and clearly into it (thus negating the overbassy mix that I struggled with when my cousin’s band played here a couple of years ago and negated the host’s diction). He then told a half funny joke about being friendzoned that heralded an improvement into mid-table respectability.
Oh dear
Unfortunately he then appeared to descend into such utter pathetic misery that I wasn’t sure whether he was indulging his therapist or that someone should stage an intervention. My expression one of mild enjoyment turning to horrified embarrassed guilt at witnessing such abasement but then I was granted an escape by another glitch. The free drink ticket that I’d been given at the door that I was hoping to swap for a lemonade was rejected by an embarrassed barman after he requested my name as he said that “the door had given too many tickets to the wrong people”. “OK mate, it’s fine” said I, thinking that sometimes you just call it quits and, for the record I was quite happy to pay for my fizzy, but this was yet another episode of gig incompetence and I’d had enough, so off I went out the door, downstairs to the best carpark in the city, got my motorbike and rode home through the late sunshine along the Quayside.
Back at the gig, the night probably went down better with its younger and kinder audience than it did with me but a real social club would have paid them off before the interval. It’s a shame, the Newcastle Fringe has a venue here where they could have the Festival Club that it warrants, where performers and audience and tourists could chat in a late bar with performers free to get on stage if they want and people could enjoy that magic of a true festival where it takes on an identity and culture of its own in our beautiful and compact city centre. But it needs lots more work and less praise. Sorry.
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