Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 14
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 14: Ligging for a Living
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
Lig: verb
To take advantage of free parties, travel, or other benefits offered by companies for publicity purposes.
"instead of touring, the band spent all their time fighting and ligging"
It’s 1996 and I am about to make the absolute most out of a situation that can possibly be made by one individual in a short space of time. My position as head booker of a former toilet in Tunbridge Wells which is now an integral part of the thriving live music scene means that if you’ve got a guest list you want me to be on it, and I quickly agree to attend anything above the opening of an envelope if there is fun involved. I also decide to exploit this opportunity to its fullest in that most ancient of the arts, wooing a partner.
There has some times been a heated debate about guest lists for live events, but the reality is they exist for a very specific reason: Simply put, the grassroots sector is massively underpaid for the work it does, and the inability to pay a reasonable living wage has, over the period of the last sixty years, resulted in a set of replacement ‘perks of the job’. These include large amounts of free alcohol, occasional spreads of food, and, most predominantly and most well known, being added to the guest list. In 1996, there was no way at all I could have afforded to see two or three small to medium shows every week, plus six or seven festivals and a whole heap of arena events. Agents, managers, promoters and artists all know this, but unable to find a mechanism whereby the money most of us can earn in the sector can be increased we have settled into a neat arrangement where one of the things I most want to do is freely made available to me. I don’t have two pound notes to rub together, but I do have access.
Having ascertained that the Arts Officer’s tastes are not limited to minor league mod bands, I survey the available upcoming dates for one that I think is going to most impress her, taking account not just of the nature of the band, she has fairly broad tastes, but also of my own ability to totally take the absolute mother of all michaels out of what it is I can get someone to give me and a venue that they can give it to me in.
The Astoria at 157 Charing Cross Road was built on the site of a former Crosse & Blackwell warehouse and opened in 1927 as a cinema. It was designed by Edward A. Stone, who also designed subsequent Astoria venues at Brixton (now the Brixton Academy), Old Kent Road, Finsbury Park and Streatham. The original interior was styled as a square Proscenium theatre consisting of a panelled barrel-vault ceiling supported by large columns, a viewing balcony and had false viewing boxes, which actually contained the organ pipes. The venue's interior was re-designed with a plainer, modern style in 1968. In 1977 it was converted for theatrical use. The venue went through another period of conversion when the theatre closed in 1984. It reopened in 1985 as a nightclub and live music venue with a capacity for 2,000 people, and then in 2000 was acquired by Mean Fiddler group.
The semi-legendary upstairs of the Astoria contains a bar haunted by the entire music industry any time its open, the Keith Moon Bar, where it would be an unusual evening not to accidentally spill the pint of a BBC Radio DJ. Just passed this bar is the upper balcony, a theatre style row of seats in which you can find the live music industry telling lurid tales about who has been signed and who has been dropped. In front of this gossiping gang sits an exclusive line of tables across the full stretch of the venue, each with four seats, and the bums on those seats belong to minor indie royalty, the head of the record label, and the closest families and friends of the headline act. It’s these strictly exclusive seats I’ve got my eye on as my opening statement to the Arts Officer that you should stick with me because I can make stuff happen. I spot that Gene are due to headline on 29 January, so I phone Red Until I Die, their agent, and gradually up the ante, moving from ‘can I get a plus 1’ through ‘can I get a backstage pass’ on to ‘I’ll need aftershow of course’ before finally popping the magic question ‘oh, any chance of reserving the table seat on the far right of the balcony?’ I remind him several times that I booked Gene to perform their first show outside of London, purely on the basis that drummer Matt the Hat and guitarist Steve used to be in Spin, who I’d also booked several times.
While Red Until I Die doesn’t doubt my faith in the band, or more specifically the individual members of it, he isn’t at all sure about this. There are actually famous people coming, or people who do something which actually matters, and they might have a slightly more valid reason why they should have an uninterrupted view of the stage in a prime spot with easy access to the bar. However, I’m quite determined on this point, eventually confessing that I am trying to impress a potential new girlfriend. Quizzed as to who it is, I offer that its the local Arts Officer, and that I’m really quite keen.
“Ah” says Red Until I Die, “The Bird from the Council” and gives me the reservation.
I phone the newly christened Bird from the Council and invite her. And she says yes. Again. This is starting to be a habit for her.
On arrival at the venue we attract puzzled looks from the promoter, who keeps checking his list to see if there’s been a mistake, but there hasn’t, and for some reason I have the table normally reserved for visiting dignitaries or household names, of which more later, and he reluctantly hands me the three different passes and the table accreditation with a suspicious look. We pile through the Keith Moon bar, me making sure that I am seen by and waved at by as many people as possible to ensure that it is clear that I am a very important person who knows everyone, and then there we are, 8pm, front row of the balcony, at a table with a sign on it that says ‘Mark Davyd - BFTC - Reserved’, pints galore piled high. The first band wanders on, consisting of a small Irish fellow, a clarinettist, a violin player, one keyboard player each side, a bass player and a drummer. They start up and immediately the Bird from the Council says ‘oh, it’s the Divine Comedy! I saw them supporting Tori Amos!’
While I’m a firm believer that you make your own luck, there is such a thing as fate. All the different strands of my life can be funneled through this specific moment, colliding and bouncing into each other recklessly and thoughtlessly before they would, eventually and over a long period of time, crystallise into a personal life and a career that are so deeply entwined you’d need a microscope to spot the dividing line. My first ever date with the person who I would go on to share the rest of my days with took place at The Astoria, a venue that would be closed by incredibly stupid and inappropriate development, watching The Divine Comedy, quite possibly my all time favourite band, from seats I only got because I have no sense of my own limitations.
We built our relationship on the solid foundation of shared nights out at ever stranger places with ever stranger people, culminating in the long weekend in March we officially recognised we were a couple courtesy of three nights in the company of Longpigs, Divine Comedy, My Life Story and David Devant & His Spirit Wife. Our lives since have been constantly soundtracked by these artists, and hundreds more, that brought us together and still bind us. Music does that to you; it’s like sound superglue, sticking people, places, times, together with aural wizardry. In our case, our love for music turned into love for each other and The Bird from the Council was rechristened in my head as The One. Although to this day Red Until I Die still greets her cheerily as the BFTC.
Across the period of the next 9 months The One and me played snooker with Shed Seven at the Scala, compared stomach sizes with Robbie Williams in Finsbury Park, hunted down the secret bar within a bar within a bar in the Electric Ballroom with Menswear, argued about epaulettes with Pulp in Shuttleworths underneath the Phoenix Theatre, and we hooted and hollered at Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller attempting to have a fight outside Dingwalls. London was in full swing and we were right in the middle of it. I was still booking all the bands for The Forum, and sitting in my little balcony with the mixing desk most weekends, but increasingly I was drifting back towards the capital city, the place I was born in and where I still feel a tingle, every time, when I cross over London Bridge. Tunbridge Wells had been very kind to me, but increasingly my life was out of step with the people I worked with or socialised with. Yes, it was all a bit frivolous and stupid looking back on it, but I was back to being a Londoner and aware that the late nights and the milk trains were no substitute for being able to walk home.
Into this vague feeling on my part of not belonging, The One started looking for a new job and almost immediately found something almost ideal. In fact it was completely idea except for the single almost part, which was that although it was a significant step forward for her career in arts development, it was based in Barking and Dagenham. You could certainly make a very strong case that Barking and Dagenham was desperately in need of some arts development, and the council had decided she was the person to do. She timidly approached me one morning to ask what I thought she should do, little expecting that my answer would be ‘perfect, let’s move to London’.
We moved to London in 1997, bought a house in 1998, got married in 1999, and, her being a massive over achiever in most things she has a go at, had twins in 2000. Somehow in the middle of all that she managed to find time to teach me a few things, not least of which was when she sat me down and showed me something called The Arts Council. In 1997 the Tunbridge Wells Forum did something really quite radical for a grassroots music venue at the time; it successfully bid for a sizeable Arts Council grant to put on a more varied line up. My name was at the bottom of the bid as the applicant, The One’s words and knowledge filled all the spaces above it. With the £80,000 she had magically pulled out of thin air we were able to book things like John Cooper Clarke and Benjamin Zephaniah, artists that didn’t fit our existing profile but who would help us to redefine the Forum as a proper, respected, arts space. We spent some of it on a Comedy night, bringing acts like Jimmy Carr, Andre Vincent and Milton Jones into our line up. Every single comedian that ever played there always, and I mean always, walked out on stage and started with the line ‘So this used to be a toilet…. hasn’t changed much’.
We booked Japanese drummers, South African Welly dancers, and solo artists from Tibet, including a chap whose music was so extraordinary and unusual to the audience that he was greeted with rapturous applause after plucking away at a single stringed instrument for five minutes only for his tour manager to lean into the microphone and politely announce ‘Phuntsok has finished tuning up’. We began loosely discussing how unrecognised these spaces we loved and had created were for the work they did, and considering different ways of thinking about them and how they might achieve cultural parity with arts centres, galleries, museums. These were just small ideas we occasionally threw around at the time, but they were there bubbling away in the background as early as the late nineties, and would later ferment into a much more forceful and developed demand for that respect.
I learned something very important from the process of that first application to Arts Council England, something that still resonates today with many of the music venues and grassroots artists that I work with now. When we opened the Forum we had done it with our own money, effort and time, mostly the last two, and we had done that because we simply did not believe anyone else would be interested or support us. We knew funding for the arts existed, but it was for other people. Public funding for the arts was for Opera and Ballet, not for putting on hardcore punk bands in a former public convenience. It was The One who listened to all this, heard us moaning about how unfair it was, and then asked the question I am still asking music venues today: “Well, did you apply?” And the answer, of course, was no. People like us didn’t make applications to people like the Arts Council, it was so far outside our envelope of what we thought about ourselves and about our work that it had simple never occurred to us as a possibility. ‘Did you apply?’ is the first question I now ask anyone who complains about the distribution of public funding, or tells me that there’s no money for their type of music, for their alternative culture. It’s such a commonly held feeling and belief that we have an acronym when discussing it with venues or artists and trying to gauge if their anger about not being supported is valid. DNA. Did Not Apply. Positive change is possible, but you really have to ask for it.
It’s 1997, I’m living back in London, I’ve found The One, and I’ve started to build a professional reputation both within the music industry and within the cultural sector. People start phoning me up and asking if I want a job, or if I want work, but I’m still closely tied to The Forum, driving down most weekends and then driving back in the early hours through the deserted streets of South London. I’m still booking pretty much all the bands and doing about half the sound engineering, but the venue is now a solid proposition, part of the local furniture, and increasingly feels like a thing I’ve done rather than the thing I am doing. It has a life of its own, and strangely, despite how incredibly hard it is to run a grassroots music venue, we sort of know how to do it.
I’m nearly ready for something new, but first let’s spend a couple of years being distracted by how much fun two people can make together.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here: