My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): 15/5/2004 - The Blue Posts, London

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This gig was a PRIVATE BOOKING. Every now and again someone will, perhaps foolishly, ask me to play at their birthday party, wedding or general DO, and I am always VERY happy to agree. Playing at someone's PARTY is VERY difficult to mess up - everybody there will pretty much definitely be ALREADY drunk, ready and willing to have a good time, and even if you're rubbish they can't boo or throw things because you were specially invited by THE BIRTHDAY BOY! Best of all, if things DO start to go downhill you can always get everyone singing "Happy Birthday" and sneak out the back way, LEGGING IT for your escape vehicle.

This handy emergency plan was unnecessary on this occasion, although it was Slightly Scary in other ways. The DO was to celebrate the 30th Birthday of Mr S Hewitt, also known on the interweb as Carsmile Steve. The FRIGHTENINGS came when I took to the stage (i.e. the corner of the room where we'd cleared some space) and realised that the room was full of MUSIC BLOGGERS. At the time this was something NEW, EXCITING and on the very WISPY WHITE WATER bit of the CULTURAL WAVE, Web 2.0 was just a reading on Spiderman's measuring jug, and if you wanted to have some kind of online diary/log book then by jiminy you had to work out how to do the HTML yourself.

This technological barrier had TWO effects on the kind of writing you got online - firstly it made it difficult (though not impossible) for GORMLESS WAZZOCKS to treat the world to the full list of videos of people being sick that made them ROFL, and secondly it meant that those who DID have the facilities to give opinion tended to be a bit EGGHEADED.

I was probably exaggerating internally for effect, but as I looked around the room I was SURE I saw people STEEPLING their fingers, raising quizzical eyebrows, and GAUGING the ALLUSIONS contained within MY OUVRE. I began somewhat NERVOUSLY, gradually persuading myself that they probably weren't ALL thinking "His use of simile is naive at best" and that the people looking the MOST INTENSE probably just needed a wee.

Earlier on I'd been talking to someone who'd broken off halfway through a sentence to say "Hang on... aren't you MJ HIBBETT?!??!" (JUST like that, with exactly that punctuation) and as we went along I realised that the BENEFIT of an audience who were actively interested in obscure music was that they might actually have heard some of my songs before. With this reassuring thought duly logged everything went FINE, especially when we got to the end and discovered together that Serious Music Bloggers know ALL of the words to "Boom Shake The Room", and are not afraid to SHOUT them.

I "came off stage" (walked towards the bar) and suddenly found myself transported BACK into a PARTY. It had felt like a gig, SOUNDED like a gig, but as soon as I'd ended the last song I'd found myself WREATHED in sweat with adrenalin HIGH while everyone else turned back round to their tables went back to their in-depth arguments about Top 10s and ROCKISM.. I felt like I had been badly photoshopped into somebody else's FLICKR set.

This feeling was soon EASED by the application of several pints of delicious, also CHEAP beer. The Blue Posts is a Sam Smiths pub, a chain which seems to pride itself on being THE place to take visitors to London who keep going ON about how expensive beer is in the capital. It shuts them RIGHT up - Sam Smiths do have pubs outside of London, although I don't think the effect is quite as great there.

The other thing about Sam Smiths pubs is that nowadays they have a NO MUSIC rule. They SAY that this is so they don't have to pay PRS, also to allow CHATTER, but I couldn't help noticing that this policy came into force mere WEEKS after I'd played this gig...

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