gig review
Mark Foster
night 15th April.
There's small decisions you make all the way through your life that seem
insignificant at the time but can turn out to shape the way your life is
going. I always seem to pick the wrong choice. Yesterday's wrong decision
was to sit on the big stool instead of the small one.
I've been learning how to play Don't think twice, it's alright by Bob Dylan
for the last few weeks. It's quite a tricky finger picking tune but I'd
finally got it good enough to be able to play it in front of a crowd. I did
start off by explaining that my version would be slightly different from the
original; Bob does use an awful lot of notes, not very economical, so I only
use about half of them and he never really lets you appreciate one chord
before he's onto the next, so I'd be pausing between chords so the audience
had time to muse on one chord before we're on to the next. Unfortunately a
tricky finger picking song was made even more difficult by having to sit on
a bar stool with nowhere to rest my feet. I kept on loosing my balance,
which affected my concentration and a few notes and lyrics went missing.
After struggling to the end of the first verse I announced that no one liked
Bob Dylan anyway, the miserable old scroat, threw the lyric sheet away and
moved on to the next song.
My new opening tune was one that it's always been said that you shouldn't
cover. One of those generation defining anthems that mean so much to so many
people that someone else trying to take the place of that band are seen as
being worse than Hitler. The fucker's been dead for ten years though, so
what's he going to do about it, send messages from beyond the grave to his
slapper wife to come round and threaten me with her stinky crotch? Just so
as not to piss too many people off I decided to do Smells like teen spirit
in the style of Morrissey, apart from the "hello, hello, hello hello hello,
how low (quizzical look) part which I did in the style of Lesley Phillips.
This went down well, especially the bit about Courtney Love's stinky crotch.
A change of genre for the next tune, Outkast's Hey Ya. I was slightly
disappointed that only one bloke in the crowd new what was cooler than being
cool. Most of them were puzzling about science "I haven't studied cryogenics
yet", "is it endothermic reactions, or is that the other way round?".
Fucking students. Thankfully there were a few sexy chicks who could shake it
like a Polaroid picture.
On to my own songs. I did introduce Monkey Love as "a song about having sex
with monkeys" but it's more of a love story involving a monkey. A
menagerie-a-trios (or is that birds not monkeys?). The song got a few laughs
so I was happy.
Carrying on the bestiality theme, I then played Ballad of a Pink Penguin.
The unexpected twist in the last verse concerning the polar bear got a cheer
but people were starting to lose interest so I had to bring out That fucking
song to end the set.
My rant about how much I've come to hate the fish song probably had a better
reaction than any of the songs played. I've now realised people love to hear
you swear over a microphone and my next set will just involve me sitting
there swearing for half hour. I thought this was a good opportunity for some
audience participation as more people know the lyrics of the fish song than
Hey Ya. Funny audience though, they were singing along with me until I
stopped for them to join in and they went silent. It took me a while to
explain the lyric to them, "look just say fish every now and again".
Great fun and I'm becoming quite the cult figure with the teenage chicks in
the pub.