Managing Those Tough Gigs

[Happy Jack]

Aaaargh! Good spot ...

[bassace]

And it's not only pubs. I was at Oxford town hall in the late fifties - may have been early sixties. It seemed the whole audience started fighting each other. The very few who didn't want to join in got up onto the stage for safety. Humph, for it was he, said his band played much better when there was a fight going on.

[MarkW]

[quote name='Norris' timestamp='1435608872' post='2810624']
At gigs where the audience isn't really interested we tend to mess around musically, putting in accents, rhythms and recurring themes to keep ourselves amused. Nothing that the punters would notice unless they were actually listening of course. It can make a dull gig fly by and have us in stitches
[/quote]

Up until my late teens I played the bassoon in a number of orchestras. We once did a series of concerts where we were conducted by the pompous composer of some god-awful piece of pretentious atonal tripe (think Alban Berg) in front of an equally supercilious audience. I used to express my contempt by playing the theme from Ivor the Engine over and over again, and as far as I could tell no-one ever noticed.

[tauzero]

It's a gig. I never treat an audience with contempt (well, almost never) and see every gig as having the potential to spawn more. I don't start artificially trying to gee up my fellow band members, we all approach gigs with as much of a professional attitude as any band that carries their own gear does.

[bassace]

Oh sure, me too. But there's a great story about the London pit musicians who, whenever they do a show by by a, ahem, 'well known living composer' mark up their score with the title of the original tune that the particular passage is cribbed from. I'm told the score is covered in pencil by the time the show ends.