There was no time for a sound check.
This was standard for the New Bands Night at The Bat and Toilet. Rick and Mick the music managers arranged the order of bands according to a sophisticated diagnostic process known only to Rick. Mick's job was to say 'Yes Rick,' which was he was reasonably good at.
Tonight, Mick was pissed off with Rick, because there was a mate of his playing drums in the band that was about to come on, and because of Rick, they were going to have to do without a sound check. Unfortunately, Rick was a nutter and that was life. Also, the other two bands were mates of Rick's.
They started letting people in almost as soon as Mick's mate's band had started setting up. This wasn't as bad as it could have been, because it tilted the balance of the beer-and-urine smell in the room further in favour of beer. People began to gather at the bar and at the back, and to wonder who the hell this was and what would they be like.
It was the band's first gig and they all looked tense.
The keyboard player was very very tense. She looked like she was about to burst into tears, except you couldn't see her face for the mop of long dark hair thrown over it.
The drummer was also tense. He had spent the previous hour listening to Mick bitch about Rick instead of setting his kit up, both of which always took longer than he expected, even when he expected it to take longer. As usual, he was the last to finish setting up.
The guitarist and bassist were fucking tense. Both dying for a spliff, they were chainsmoking cigarettes while they fiddled idly with the knobs on their amplifiers. Assorted 'beep' noises came from their instruments, which made them still more tense.
Most tense of all was the lead singer, a tall, striking woman with short blonde hair, who was marching about the stage furiously, muttering dark things about gaffer tape and the average intelligence quotient of musicians.
Each one was a different kind of tense. They could have been a grammar.
Squawking and feedback began to come through the PA as the soundman returned to his box and began guessing how loud he should set things to. He looked like he was tripping. He was. A jack plug attached to a black wire was lying on top of a socket marked 'Monitors', and there was a bright blue dotted line in the air joining the tip of the shiny silver plug to the centre of the round black hole of the socket. How pretty, thought the soundman. He began to smile even more broadly. He hoped the band would start soon, and sat there wondering idly if anyone was doing sound for them.
'Listen, right,' said the drummer, puffing and blowing and trying to unscrew something arcane attached to his bass drum. 'One of the definitions of infinity is the length of time it takes a drummer to set up. Why don't you just look at it like that?'
'Look, just hurry up, ok?' said the singer, who had said nothing else for five minutes.
'But that's bollocks,' said the guitarist, 'because you always finish, so you don't take an...'
'Right,' said the drummer. 'Thankyou. I always finish. Would you like to tell her?'
'Look,' said the bassist, 'lets just all chill, ok?'
'No,' said the singer. 'Not all. I'll chill, and you'll chill but I don't want him to chill until he's finished setting his fucking kit up. And until he does, this is about as chill as I get.'
'Not very,' muttered the guitarist to the bassist, but he had gone over to give the keyboard player the hug she was so obviously desperately in need of.
People were continuing to file into the room, look at the people on the stage and file out again. A certain air of expectancy failed to materialise. The soundman fell out of his box, and picked himself up again after a while, assuring people that he was alright, and that he was sure that the headphones would be alright too. Rick was explaining to Mick about how good the other two bands were, and how much better they would be than last time, and Mick was beginning to wonder if the band about to come on had brought anybody along at all. He recognised no-one. What the fuck was going on?
'So what's the set list?' asked the guitarist.
'You what?' replied the singer.
'You know, set list. Which songs we're doing, when.'
'We worked it out yesterday, didn't we? You told me you had it written down.'
'I lied,' said the guitarist, lowering his face and biting his bottom lip hard.
'You..., you..., fuck..., shit..., oh fuck you,' said the singer, refusing to look at the piece of paper the guitarist was balancing on his nose. She turned away. The bassist giggled to himself, and the drummer stopped pretending he was setting up his kit and went back to actually doing it. The keyboard player was silent.
'Alright,' said the guitarist, making a big show of sitting back comfortably on his amplifier and relaxing, 'now look. We're going to start in a minute, and we're going to relax and have a laugh. We're not going to give a fuck about that lot over there.'
There was a tense silence.
'Alright,' said the bassist.
The singer smiled and softened suddenly. 'Alright, yeah.' She nodded.
'Ok,' said the drummer, smacking his snare drum at painfully loud intervals. 'I reckon.'
'Ok,' said the singer into the microphone. 'What you are about to hear isn't aaaaaaaghhhHHH!!!' Her voice became overcome by the wail of an unexpected feedback loop. It was all made worse by a second, equally unexpected feedback loop caused by the first unexpected feedback loop scaring her into screaming into the microphone and making it sound even worse, which had initially seemed impossible. In short, a fuck up.
'What you are about to hear isn't happening. It's a sound check.'
Too right it isn't happening. But there was no sound check.
She looked down at the few groups of people in the room, none of whom were listening to her. Why the fuck hadn't anyone they knew got there yet? Why were all their friends bad time-keepers? Why was there so much reverb on the voice?
'Less reverb,' she said through the microphone, waving at the soundman.
The soundman waved back. 'Less reverb to you too,' he mouthed at her.
Yeah, right, she thought to herself.
They started playing and it sounded like mud. After the soundman had finished rearranging all the levels to his taste it became clear what kind of mud the music sounded like. It stank. Up on the stage, the band knew it, but it was too late, and there was nothing they could do until the break, except for carrying on and hoping to be electrocuted before they faced anyone who had heard what they were doing.