Pandamonium! by Simon Williams

Author:Simon Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing

18

PIMPS

Some people ask me how many gigs I’ve been to in my loafy little life. Truth is: I have no idea. 4,000? 5,000? 8 billion? By the time I realised I should keep count of the number of gigs I’d been to, I’d already lost count of how many gigs I’d been to; I was too far gone. But I don’t really care. I’ve never seen going to gigs as a box-ticking exercise. It’s never been a challenge or a chore. In fact, as someone who possesses all the musical talent of a broken gopher and who used to get stage fright putting up the backdrop at the Dublin Castle – in a totally empty venue – I am in awe of pretty much anyone who can get onstage and make some melodies work together in a moderately coherent manner. That’s not to say that some of those thousands of live acts haven’t been totally fucking terrible, but even at their terribly fucking totalitarian worst, a little bit of my soul still looks up at them and thinks, These people are better, shinier and more talented than me.

The other truth is that if any one thing sums up the madness of this entire quiet literary opus it is – quite literally – gigs. With records, you have catalogue numbers and release dates and artwork and press releases, some degree of context based on actual fact, which can trigger specific memories. With gigs, however, it is generally a case of going to see some moderately unknown bands on some midweek night in some fair-to-middling venue and letting the muddlesome madness occur before it all starts again the following night. So forgive me for the general fuzziness surrounding this subject.

That said, if this book is woefully lacking in rock ’n’ roll mythology then this point brings it all home: any ‘research’ into the Fierce Panda story has generally involved me going to the pub to sit and try to remember going to a different pub to see a band or three ten, twenty, thirty years ago, or rifling through boxes and boxes of flyers. Now and again I have taken old friends to the pub, and even stayed with them for a tipple or two as they tried to remember crucial details about my musical life. But their memories tend to be as haphazard as mine, so we just get drunk and promptly forget the few things we’ve half remembered three pints before. Still, at least it saved on having to transcribe hours and hours of mine or anyone else’s jib-jabberings – in my opinion, this book is pretty much entirely my opinion. I haven’t even asked any bands, old or new, what they really think of the label. Ironically enough for someone who runs something as ursine as Fierce Panda, I simply couldn’t bear to hear the truth.

One thing is for sure: after a decade of happily trotting along to gigs and perhaps reviewing some of them and perhaps not reviewing all of them, in 1992 I started to get sucked into the promoting vortex.

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