Tribute Act blues, part 2.

The release of the Freddie Mercury biopic reminds me that I once had a spell playing with a Queen tribute act.

We played lots of gigs and built up a small but dedicated group of fans who followed us around the country. We got to know some of these fans quite well. One of the most devoted was Tessie, a friend-of-a-friend of our drummer. She was quite a big lady with a lively sense of humour and a fondness for pranks. She enjoyed our gigs but, more than anything else, she loved playing practical jokes on the band, invariably involving some spurious ‘emergency’ about one thing or another. On the way to one show, we got a voicemail message stating that the venue could not provide electricity after 9pm (that turned out to be Tessie). The day before another gig, we got an email asking if we could insert a couple of Abba songs into our set as there was a fan convention taking place in the town in which we were due to play (that turned out to be Tessie). Her pranks were occasionally amusing and usually harmless, but could sometimes be a pain in the neck when we were preparing for a performance.   

I remember one gig at a small town on the Ayrshire coast. We arrived late after our van had broken down on the motorway. Not only did we have no time for a soundcheck, but the manager of the venue proceeded to put us under additional pressure by making an unusual request. Bohemian Rhapsody was normally the closing number in our act, but he asked if we could start the show with it. He felt that, because we would be playing to a ‘difficult’ Friday night crowd, we might need something big to get the inebriated locals onside as quickly as possible. After some awkward negotiations, we reluctantly agreed to open the set with what would normally have been our show-stopper.

The last thing we needed at that point was another complication, but shortly before the gig was due to start, we got a phone call from a woman claiming to be from the local bee-keeping society. She told us that they had been using the venue for a meeting earlier that day and that one of their members had accidentally left a large working hive behind in the 'trap room', immediately underneath the stage. According to this woman, we wouldn't be able to start our concert until they had removed the hive, as there was a strong possibility that a sudden outbreak of amplified music would send thousands of agitated bees flying up through the floorboards to attack members of the audience.

Despite the suspicion that this might be yet another prank by our number one fan, we agreed to check out the story. Upon entering the trap room, we came across a large wooden structure, which looked like a cross between a wardrobe and a series of stacked boxes with holes in them. None of us were experts. We might well have been looking at something a professional bee-keeper would use, but it could equally have been a stage prop for concealing a large human being.

Mindful of the fact that we were due onstage in a few minutes to start our show with Queen’s most famous tune, I turned to my bandmates and asked the only question that seemed appropriate:

“Is this a real hive? Is this just fat Tessie?” 

Great news from UEFA

At long last, details have emerged about UEFA’s much-anticipated new ‘third’ club competition, The ‘Equity and Diversity’ Shield, which is due to launch in season 2019-20. European football’s governing body has decided to move with the times, recognising that the old paradigm of competitive contact sport is perhaps out of sync with modern thinking.  

Unlike the other two major club competitions, participating teams in the ‘Equity and Diversity’ Shield will not be drawn from specific geographical locations, but will –according to a statement on UEFA’s website- be selected from ‘communities of interest’, a move designed to “transcend the outdated notion of tribal boundaries, which are intrinsically decisive and oppressive”.

Under the new format, any ‘goals’ which happen to be scored during a game will be only part of an overall qualitative assessment made by a panel of judges, who will mark each team based on elements like: co-operation, social awareness, sportspersonship and cultural sensitivity.

For example, a team which does not score any ‘goals’ during a game may instead accumulate ‘merit points’ by performing an interpretive dance commemorating the historic achievements of indigenous communities, or perhaps by facilitating a series of workshops on themes like racism, transphobia or patriarchal hegemony. 

Any ‘goals’ conceded will be balanced out by an assessment of the inclusivity of the merit activities undertaken, measured against specific performance criteria focused on Equity and Diversity. Additional merit points will be awarded to teams drawn exclusively from communities or groups facing systemic oppression. Points will be deducted if a team is perceived to have unfairly benefited from privilege (for example, if it was discovered that a member of their squad had previously owned a slave plantation or had an uncle who was in the Gestapo).

The tournament will have no outright winner as such, but 16 qualifiers from the group stages will take part in a celebration of Equity and Diversity to be held at the end of each season. The four most worthy teams (as chosen by the judges) will then be awarded joint custody of the trophy for three months each. 

UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said:

“We must move with the times and accept that concepts like ‘winning’, ‘losing’, ‘scoring’ etc. are becoming increasingly inappropriate in the modern world.

Academic studies suggest that the act of ‘scoring’ a ‘goal’ in a football match can be interpreted as an unconscious celebration of heteronormative penetrative intercourse and that this is not always consensual. Depending on the circumstances, members of the team conceding a goal might then be made to feel like ‘losers’ or even victims of abuse.  

Our new rules are designed merely to take a little bit of the focus away from the problematic activity of ‘goal-scoring’ by recognising that there are many ways to succeed in football. That is why the judges will be considering other performance elements, like good co-operation, social awareness, cultural sensitivity and so on.”    

As an avid football fan, I welcome this news. Some reactionary forces within the game will be hostile to the proposed changes, but we should remember that football was once played without goalposts and crossbars; it was once played without referees; it was once played without red and yellow cards. The introduction of ‘merit points’ is just part of the natural evolution of the game. In time, most fans will get behind the new format and support the drive towards equality of outcome at all levels.  

A spokesperson for the BBC has already announced that they will be bidding for the exclusive broadcasting rights for the new tournament.

What goes around ...

I have never really wanted to meet any of my creative heroes, mainly because of the worry that, if they turned out to be twerps, it might put me off the very work which drew my admiration in the first place. Accordingly, I usually find it easy to separate the person from the work. If I first had to approve of the personalities or political views of folk whose music or literature I could enjoy, I’d probably need to ditch about 90% of my books and CDs. 

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a more pronounced example of the gulf between ‘how highly I rate someone’s work’ and ‘how unimpressed I am with them as a person’ than the case of Graham Linehan. I loved his writing for the sitcoms ‘Father Ted’ (co-written with Arthur Mathews) and ‘The IT Crowd’. These shows created surreal worlds wherein events invariably conspired to cock a gentle snook at prevailing orthodoxies, institutions and personality-types. The scripts were often rich in sceptical observations of the kind that could only be made by a thoroughly grounded person. At least … that’s what I thought until I started following him on twitter.   

I soon discovered that, on cultural debates, he came across as … well, let’s be polite and say ‘not a very nice person’. His strident right-on persona dispirited me to the extent that I had to ‘unfollow’ him, worried that continued exposure to his shrill pieties might somehow impact on my enjoyment of his creative work. Earlier this year, he disgraced himself by condemning a fellow comedian (Count Dankula) over his now infamous ‘Nazi-pug’ video. 

It seems, however, that Linehan has now fallen prey to the very thing that he practiced: the twitter pile-on. In case you haven’t caught the story, he has been cautioned by the police for dead-naming (no, I didn’t know that was a thing either) Stephanie Hayden, a trans activist. Presumably looking for something to do after solving all of the local crimes, the police sprang into action when Linehan chose, in an online spat, to mention a biological fact: namely, that the person he was arguing with had been born male. 

Let’s, for the moment, put to one side the chilling realisation that the Orwellian nightmare of thoughtcrime has been eagerly embraced by the British police. 

After cultivating a belligerent online persona, Linehan surely can’t have been surprised by the extent to which people were prepared, in tennis parlance, to return his serves with interest? Having, among other things, slandered Brexit supporters as RACISTS (yes, he did use capital letters) he is now being served with a civil court action for being a TRANSPHOBE (capitals appropriate).

His problem is that, even in comfortable middle age, he has yet to grasp a simple truth that, once understood, ought to inform adult political discourse: namely, that the opposite of a good idea is not necessarily a bad idea; it is often just another idea, imagined by someone with different life experiences and different thought processes. Good ideas not only can, but do (and almost inevitably will) come into conflict. An acknowledgment of this fact should be on the map guiding us through the territory between competing ideologies. Because, to put it simply: how we negotiate that space defines our humanity.

Had Graham Linehan been plotting these misadventures for one of his comedy characters, my hunch would be that the story arc would end with a moment of realisation, after which the chastened hero would be a wiser, more measured, more conciliatory person.  

He must be a smart guy to have written the things he has written.

I hope he has it in him to become as smart as one of his characters.

Tribute Act blues, part 1.

I used to play with a tribute act dedicated to the music of The Steve Miller Band (you may recall hits from the 70s and 80s like ‘The Joker’, ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘Take the Money and Run’). We called ourselves 'The Steve Miller Band' Band.

After gigging for a few months, we noticed that we were getting the liveliest reaction at our shows when we played the songs from Miller's repertoire that were being refused airplay because of what the broadcasting authorities deemed to be 'inappropriate’ language. So popular were these songs in our live set that we eventually decided to ditch all of the mainstream material and concentrate exclusively on Miller’s 'x-rated' stuff.

Accordingly, we changed our name to 'The (banned) Steve Miller Band' Band.

We started to get more bookings and built up quite a following. Things went so well that we started to produce our own range of merchandise to sell at gigs: t-shirts, posters, key-rings etc. One of the most popular items was an encircling strip, made of rubber, which could be worn on the wrist or lower forearm.  

It was, of course, 'The (banned) Steve Miller Band' Band band.

Our gigs were lively affairs. People would often get carried away by the energy of the music, to the extent that inebriated audience members would throw stuff about the place. On a tour of small towns in the north-east of Scotland, we once played a particularly raucous gig at Stonehaven at which a member of the audience had to receive medical treatment after being hit in the eye by a piece of merchandise which had been thrown by an over-enthusiastic fan. We were booked to play at Banff town hall the following weekend, but when the local council heard about this incident, they took immediate action (on the grounds of health and safety), forbidding us from setting up our merchandising stall and selling any of our goods.  Needless to say, the local press picked up on this story and, on the day of our gig at Banff town hall, the North East Weekly ran this headline:

'(Banned) Steve Miller Band’ Band band banned!

Over the next few days, however, news emerged that Banff council had denied issuing any instructions about our merchandise. It was consequently discovered that not only had our manager exaggerated that ‘Stonehaven concert injury’ report, he had also concocted the ‘Banff council outrage’ story in order to generate some publicity for rest of the tour. A spokesperson for the National Union of Booking Agents then revealed that our manager was already serving a suspension for a previous breach of agency rules and actually had no right to be managing any act at this time. After that revelation, this sorry tale came to an undignified end with this dramatic headline in the ‘Inverurie Advertiser’:

Banned band manager planned '(Banned) Steve Miller Band' Band Banff band ban!