22. Sebastopol
Surya
27 February 2013
I find myself somewhere off the sketchier end of Pentonville Road, being dragged into a club whose USP is that it is “eco-friendly”. What this amounted to, apparently, was that the dancefloor generated electricity the harder you boogied. The very concept of it could only have been the product of too many hipsters on too many beanbags. A venue powered by self-congratulation and sweaty millenials awkwardly shuffling to save the planet. I don’t know what annoyed me more, the pseudo-scientific nonsense of it all or the fact that I briefly considered whether my mild swaying was helping towards the lighting rig. Either way, it made me mildly irritated and pondering whether the carbon credits I notionally earned this evening could offset my own cynicism.
However, I'm here with a mate who, to my knowledge, wouldn’t know a bassline from a clothesline. A self-confessed lover of “happy music”. A man more likely to own a matching teapot and anthology of post-war poetry than any vinyl. Left to his own devices, my friend would be far more comfortable at a dimly lit café, sipping absinthe, solemnly nodding along to a haiku about Jane Austen as a tool of the patriarchy. Which begs the question: why are we here?
The simple answer was his mate was the drummer. A part-time percussionist, part-time Spectator sub-editor, which is as niche as it sounds. The kind of man who probably owns a vintage waistcoat and has strong opinions on fonts. I had a sneaking suspicion this gig was less about music and more about supporting an underpaid freelance writer lifestyle.
One lone bartender wrestled with an entire room's worth of orders, so overwhelmed and pulled in so many different directions, he was practically a pretzel.
The band looked less like they’d command the venue and more like they’d hold a crisis meeting about someone’s “tone” in the group Whatsapp channel. They had the collective stage presence of an editorial roundtable. You could practically see them drafting a think piece on “The Post-Colonial Impacts on Afternoon Tea.”
Musically, it was… fine. Enthusiastic. Earnest. Roughly as tight as a pair of M&S socks. The venue was small with acoustics that turned every song into a sonic blur that likely killed several thousand hertz of upper-register hearing.
But the real challenge came afterwards at the bar, trying to say something nice to the drummer. The poor lad stood there, sweat-soaked and hopeful, pint in hand, waiting for affirmation. So, I did what anyone with a heart would do. I lied. By the time I’d finished, with the level of creative fiction I served up, I should have been eligible for a column in The Spectator myself.