Prosecco Thursday

 

Last night my friend Daisy and I created Prosecco Thursday. It’s like a normal Thursday, but you add Prosecco to it. And in our case, due to a long-winded saga involving an unredeemed cocktail class voucher, most of it was FREE. A ridiculous amount of Prosecco and an inordinate amount of nachos for a tenner? Sign me up.

And that’s sort of as far as we imagined the evening would go. Fancy drinks, bit of a catch-up in the dim lighting, and tall bar chairs that are quite hard to sit on.

Until, that is, we became aware of an innocent-looking microphone stand nearby. We were witnessing the preamble to an OPEN MIC NIGHT. We were so close to said preamble, in fact, that I was basically sitting in the performance area.

Now Daisy bloody loves live music. Especially if it’s men with guitars; she has a theory that there’s a scientific link between men’s ability to play guitar and women’s desire to have sex with them. Through the evening, she became increasingly rhapsodic, swaying along and proclaiming how youthful she felt. At one point, she said the word 'gnarly'.

I’m a bit more wary of the whole live music thing; I like the idea of it, but the reality is often tricky to navigate. I get preoccupied with ridiculous problems: Are you allowed to talk if someone’s singing? When should you go to the toilet? If anyone really tanks it, should we all do loud appreciative clapping to pretend we didn’t notice the musical car-crash? Or will that be really obvious pity clapping and make it even more awkward?

Now I can’t begin to imagine how brave you have to be to get up there in front of people and sing your heart out, and I have the utmost respect for all the singers and players who performed last night. They were great, and I had a lovely time.

Here are a few of my personal highlights:

~ One performer seemed to be called Fat Panda (excellent name). His performance style involved some very intense jerky movements, rather like he needed a wee. In fact, if you’re familiar with Jeff Goldblum’s cameo in Friends, as a director who makes Joey act when really needing a wee, you’re pretty much there.

~ One of the boy performers clearly really loved one of the girl performers. Daisy and I know this because he spent an actual 5 minutes holding the microphone, offering it to her, pointing it at her face and adjusting it for her. Er, hello? Freudian much?

~ Two hilarious middle-aged women proceeded to get incredibly drunk, incredibly quickly. They propped up the bar, did floaty weavy folky dancing to all the music, and fawned tearfully over the singers. “I loved it. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard in my whole entire life. [Hic].”

~ On a serious note, John Atkinson did some lovely tunes, and you should listen to some of his stuff straight away. John Ainsworth was also excellent, despite an early finish due to a bad throat. He got more noises out of a guitar at the same time than I’ve ever heard before. And our unanimous favourite of the evening was Sobi. Her singing was simply enchanting. Check her out immediately. In fact, when we mentioned how much we had liked her to the compère / guy-in-charge, he uttered the immortal words, ‘See, didn’t I tell you. She’s a chicken-dinner. She’s an all-day-breakfast with extra bacon. Return of the Jedi.’ You heard the man.

~ Said guy-in-charge had initially promised Daisy and I a man who would play a bazooka. Somewhat perturbed by this, I ventured cautiously, ‘A kazoo?’ No, he was adamant, ‘A bazooka. You know what that is?’ Of course, we nodded sagely, not wanting to appear deficient in the latest open-mic lingo. Later, a performer took to the stage-area with a questionable-looking guitar, and it’s the first time I’ve ever turned to someone, raised my eyebrows questioningly, and asked ‘Balalaika?’ NB. I’ve just googled ‘bazooka musical instrument’ and apparently it’s some kind of insane trombone affair. We definitely did not see one last night.

~ My favourite thing about the evening was listening to how people introduce their songs. You expect the usual ‘This is a song about someone who broke my heart’ or ‘This song was inspired by my summer living with shepherds in Northern Italy.’ Not so last night. Here is genuinely what moved these artists to create:

• “Here’s a song about watching American TV.”
• "This is a song about being in a storm somewhere.” (This actually moved Daisy to heckle in the hope of finding out exactly where the storm was. Sadly, it’s still a mystery).
• "This is a song I wrote about working in a café stroke restaurant.” Amazing.

The venue was Cord in Manchester, and apparently we’re going again next week. See you there? It’ll be gnarly. With extra bacon. Revenge of the Sith. Or words to that effect…