Day 29
Monday August 7
Maja wakes me with a start. We have to go to the gym. Now. No cosy slowly wakey time. No cup of tea – well, we couldn’t do that anyway. And no fun funnel. Because, well, it’s daytime now and there’s no fun funnelling in potential public. We’ve decided. So this is how we have to do this. We have to get up, get dressed and out. And go to the gym. Now. Right now.
As we’ve now warmed up, so has the day, and we find we’ve planted ourselves right in the middle of everything, and it all resembles something of an urban Glastonbury. There are posters for various theatre and comedy shows everywhere, and every few minutes someone wants to put a flyer in your hand and tell you all about their show that starts in five minutes. Adding to the overall holiday-ee festivally vibe is the abundance of colourful street food trucks. As I’m taking all this in, Maja says something that ends up being an ominous foreshadowing. None of the posters overlap. We are about to embark on a day during which we will find out exactly what that means.
But first, and I really should have known this already, I’m stunned by how small Edinburgh is. I knew it was an anomaly in that it’s the capital of Scotland but not the biggest city – that’s Glasgow. But I had no idea how much smaller than Glasgow it was. Which is handy because it means we can take in pretty much the whole festival area in one substantial walking session. That’s a relief because we’ve had some quite destructive hustle sessions and were very conscious of using that experience considering the hustle here could last a few weeks. Don’t blow it in the first day or two. Maybe you remember the Dublin hustle we did last year while carrying all our gear the whole time. It took weeks to properly physically recover from that. This time we’ve decided not to take all our gear. We’re bringing the guitar for possible instant opportunities, but we’re not thinking of this as totally a Now Hustle. We think we can arrange things, so we can then pick up what we need from the car. We’ve even brought our full two speaker and backdrop set-up incase we manage to pull any slightly bigger shows. But out on the street, guitar aside, we’re not massively encumbered.
I’ve thought a lot about how to approach writing this next bit and have decided not to go through it all hustle by hustle.
I won’t name any venues because I’m sure they’re great and that the people we speak to are lovely, but they have absolutely no interest in engaging with us. We are met with something bordering on hostility. Polite and smiling it may be, but we very much feel it all the same. Seriously. We’ve done this in a whole bunch of countries and have mostly been met warmly, often even when being turned down, and as we’ve got better at all this, even the being turned down has reduced; we once did over 10 hustles in a row with a positive outcome; it may have possibly been 15 or so but we lost count. But here? In festival, live entertainment party land? It’s just harsh. And totally, totally closed. I’ve never encountered such closedness at all. Steel. Total steel. I struggle to find the right word but then I think I do. It’s as though we’re actually offending people by approaching them in this way and that we haven’t gone through the proper channels. Right. Give me the proper channels argument all you want. But if you do, you have to show me an act that ever got anywhere without some kind of cavalier attitude. Or attitude at all really. And really, is there anything out of line at all about coming to a festival – A FESTIVAL – thinking you can hustle a little?
To that, we discover that the big sin we’ve committed is to have not booked with the official festival organiser who would then have assigned us bars and shows. Or something like that. That’s it. If you haven’t got themselves on their lists, your name’s not down and you are definitely, absolutely, not coming in. I’m doing it again and I’m not apologising. We’re at a festival. An actual festival. With almost every bar having entertainment. But we’ve never encountered such a totally closed, ‘No’, environment. Nothing even comes close. We were warned – almost to the point of verbal violence – about attempting what we did in Ireland. Smashed it. We were told, with no intransigence whatsoever, that what we wanted to do would be totally impossible in The Hague. We played four shows in the one day we were there. But here. In the current centre of the universe of live entertainment and free spirit. Our names are not down and we are totally not welcome to come in. As we get rejection after rejection, barely able to get our pitch out, we take each one with good grace and move onto the next. Again. We’ve learned this from experience. You will be rejected. Sometimes people will even be horrible. Try not to take it personally, thank them for their time and move to the next one with no lingering feeling of resentment. For a start and in all fairness, they owe you nothing and you’re smashing into their day and time with no invitation or welcome whatsoever. So I totally get it. Second, the next hustle is brand new. It all starts again and must be met with all the positivity with which you attempted on that last horrible one which tried to smash all positivity out of you. Believe me. I’ve felt it. Gone out onto the street all angry indignation. It’s not conducive to good vibes and a continuing good hustle day. And no, I’m still not totally impervious and may well have those moments again but we’ve got better. And I’ve got to say, that if nothing else, our experience here today shows we really have got better at this as we leave each venue with a renewed spring in our step, and are able to shake off most of any bad feeling before even reaching the door. How’s that for taking the positives out of such a day? But the weight does begin to, well, weigh. We do get the one tiniest bit of a something when we hustle the guy who owns Whistle Binkies when we unwittingly try to hustle another bar he owns. He says the bar we’re in right now is mainly a sports bar and that all the music happens in WB, where he’s happy to hear that we’re playing tonight. He then points us in the direction of an outside venue and says they could be receptive. We go across the road and do our thing and are told the manager isn’t around but could well be happy to hear from us tomorrow. But when we look back at the place we’ve just approached, we conclude it would be at best a background music gig. Not one for the three or four song all balls and energy blast we would be offering. We will not be returning here.
For all our water-off-a duck’s-back-ness, around 5pm we take a break and sit down somewhere to get something to eat. We joylessly chew on burgers that are probably good but, well, who cares, and with something approaching reluctant incredulity, conclude, there’s just no point being here. We are totally wasting our time. We have totally wasted our time. And an enormous amount of effort and charged up positivity and invested energetic excitement. We look at each other and the same thought is just spontaneously there. As obvious as if we’d both just fallen into the same pond. Let’s leave. Let’s play our open mic at Whistle Binkies tonight, then just leave Edinburgh tomorrow. After all that planning and organisation. And yes, anticipatory excitement. I’m repeating myself a little bit now but I couldn’t care less. This has just been the absolute biggest let down and waste of time and effort I think The Diaries have ever been involved in. Listen up everyone. We’re having a festival of entertainment. A wonderful, chaotic, free spirited enterprise. A mecca for entertainers – or so I’ve read it so described at least once. Come one and all. But if you even think about not organising before you get here, just don’t bother. We don’t want your sort here. Fine. We’re getting our coats.
Oh, another one on that proper channels thing. These things are all email and/or online application. We’ve done so many emails and applications and 99 point whatever decimal you want to put in here, no-one ever gets back. Not even people who have specifically requested an email. I’m not saying we’ll never email anyone again, but most of the time by this stage I don’t. I think this is something we just have to do ourselves. Hence the Now Hustling. As different and as lively and as effective a live force as we are, and with the songs to match, not to mention the track record, the world just sees another acoustic guitar/songwriter act, and goes, ‘Great. Just what we need. Another one.’
OK. Back with it. If not Edinburgh, then what? Well, before we’d even thought of this we’d been talking about possibly doing a tour of Scotland. We’re here now. Why not do that? Right back to the original plan. Brilliant. Yep. Maja says she’s always wanted to see the famous Loch Ness, around four hours drive from here. So that’s the vague plan. Head up that way, maybe stop and hustle and stay in the vicinity of a venue or two. The apex of the trip will be the enormous Loch Ness, around which we’ll spend a few days maybe. The big plan in all this is to do something we never quite managed in Ireland. Take a trip to an island. A really small one with just one pub. Hustle that pub and of course hopefully play there. Then the trip will be truly replete. Then start to make our way back to London, maybe breaking the trip up into a few more hustle days as we pick our way through a different route through Scotland to the one that brought us to Loch Ness. But before any of that, we have our open mic at Whistle Binkies.
This planning of a tour has been a lovely way to use the time between deciding we were no longer doing Edinburgh to arriving at the time to head off to whatever tonight is going to bring us. We’ve also been intermittently texting with our Edinburgh friend and he says he thinks he’ll make it down tonight. Not only does he totally come through with that, but he brings a huge surprise. One of Maja’s London colleagues, and a guy I’ve also hung out with, who just happens to be a massive music fan and who also just happens to be in Edinburgh right now. Amazing. So, me and Maja have got ourselves on the list. We’re going to be first, as soon as the full live band finishes, which is warming up the room very nicely. While that’s happening, the four of us hang back and hang out in the bar area. Then, when the band finishes we make our way to somewhere near the front of the stage area.
A little after 10pm and the open mic begins as sound technician and open mic organiser Nico calls us to the stage. This is a similar setup to what we experienced that time in Hamburg when again the event was run by a sound engineer. That guy pretty much kept himself to sound duties and just told people when it was there time to go up and had very little involvement with on-stage duties. You know, saying nice things about the act coming up or going off. Engaging with the crowd. That sort of thing. No. That wasn’t that guy’s sort of thing. And neither is it Nicos. But he does run a very tight open mic, and you can see he’s really running around to make it work the best it can, and then he really, really makes sure the stage and any act on it has the best sound possible. As a result, if you’re just casually watching, it just seems as though things are magically running themselves extremely smoothly with no hitches and a great sound. There’s a reason it appears like that and his name is Nico. From somewhere out in the room – I only hear him through the monitors, I have no idea where he is, he runs us through a quick on stage sound check. Here, I smash the guitar like I mean it. This is no basic line check. This is someone who has no idea what we sound like so he has to be given a solid representation of what he’ll have to work with. So I just hit that E chord hard and rhythmically. Already people are starting to take notice with some even moving a little to what I’m playing. Is that anticipation I see? Maybe. Afterall, the room is packed. This is Edinburgh. And the two people on stage have never been here before, are facing a roomfull of festival strangers and acting like they live in here. That kind of confidence makes an audience feel confident. They know that, whatever is about to come out of those speakers, the people about to do it look like they know what they’re doing. They’re not yet fully on our side, but they look like they would like to be. That still depends on us taking that final transaction over the line by giving them something they can get behind. We’ve come prepared. We’re going to begin with one of our what we’ve come to call Room Owners. We have a lot of them by now. Songs that make you sweat. Then a good number of mid tempo bouncers, a few real strong singer/songwritery sing alongers, and a handful of slow laid backers. Tonight we’re going for two Room Owners. We’re going to open with Make Me Shine, then we’re going to hit them with I Like You (Better When You’re Naked).
Make Me Shine is just a pummeler, smasherer of a song. One that people joyfully allow to pound them to the floor and hold them there. At first we think we’re going to just hit it out straight away. There’s no count in to this one. Just Maja shouting ‘Go!’ Then straight into the enormous, celebratory chorus followed by its infections singalong chant. An instant double chorus really with vocals and guitar immediately all in at the same time. Like you’re dropped straight into the middle of a song that didn’t want to wait an extra split second for you to get comfortable. Oh, you weren’t ready? Too late. It’s already happening and you’re here with absolutely no say in the matter. So yeah, we don’t go straight into it. Instead, Maja decides she wants to say something. The crushing disappointment of a closed city has meant that we can now claim the kudos of having traveled all the way here from London and then slept in the car purely for the purpose of playing this open mic tonight. And Maja uses every bit of it. Just mentioning the fact that we have come from London tonight pulls up a huge cheer. We haven’t played a note and she has made them already ours. ‘Go!’ And we’re off and the crowd is truly and instantly launched. We’ve started on the stage – we did have a bit of a discussion about whether to do that or not – but by the time we reach chorus part two we’re heading out onto the floor to get right into the whites of our audience’s open and eager eyes. By now we have people clapping along and it seems the people out there are starting to crowd in a little more. Oh yes. We have them. There are huge smiles from people with that smile being part bemusement, part entertainment, part, what the hell is happening here, all, oh balls to it, I’m in. And, somewhere in there, they also appear to say, ‘I can’t quite believe this is happening.’ And all among it, people are looking around and seeming to say, ‘Are you getting this too?’ With all that going on, of course when we finish the eruption is spontaneous and deafening. Yes. They were with us. Yes. They are with us now. And yes, they will go with us wherever we decide to go next. Edinburgh is famous for having some of the fiercest grassroots crowds you could ever find. We have walked right into the middle of one and come out with it totally in our hands. It is ours. Again, we were going to smash straight from one song to the other. Instead, Maja decides to do the talky thing again. People are still clapping and cheering when she begins. When she again says, ‘We are The Diaries,’ a cheer goes up again. She strides straight into the middle of the room that she now indisputably owns and declares, ‘We have one more song coming up. Then: ‘So, we traveled all the way here from London yesterday. We slept in our car. We decided. We’re. Doing. Edinburgh. I hope you appreciate it.’ With that, a cheer rises up again. ‘We’ve got two songs. And we’re so happy to be here. The cheer rises higher, with Maja raising a triumphant fist and letting out a cry to join it. Me: ‘Here we go.’ Guitar: ‘One two…one two three four…’ Maja: ‘I. Got something to say to you.’ And we’re off. I Like You (Better When You’re Naked). Halfway through the first chorus and we’re in among the crowd again. With that, I leave her to command centre room while I go out and play right in front of some of the people right at the back, moving around the room and almost from person to person as I do so. She then comes out to meet me and we play just to ourselves there at the back of the room, almost ignoring the audience and seeing only each other as everyone else just watches us do that, knowing they are now the backdrop to us, almost an actual part of the show they are, at the same time, watching. Into the second chorus and people are actually spontaneously screaming out. I mean, really screaming. Then the most magical moment comes. As we fly out of that last chorus and instantly put the brakes on to go into gentle mode. With that, the whole place melts in cheers and applause as they continue to ride our wave. Now I return to the stage, which is all of a sudden the private place to be, as Maja soaks up every last bit of attention in the centre of everybody and everything. Outside and right now, I think the entire Edinburgh Festival is revolving around what we are doing in this room. Then there’s the launch into the second part of the final verse. More screams and more faces of sheer delight and glee. People are even laughing in disbelief, some almost bouncing randomly. Just, how am I supposed to react to this written all over their faces. This is a totally unknown act that has been thrust into their worlds, and all they are seeing is, well, stars. Fully formed. Right in front of their eyes, walked in right out of the Edinburgh night. Then we end. A final shout of I like you better when you’re naked. Then the room truly explodes as people scream to the ceiling as high as they can and the applause goes on and on and on and people keep pulling all their spent breath in and screaming again. Two songs. We’ve been up there less than six minutes. In that time we’ve owned everything and this has been everything we could possibly have wanted from Edinburgh. All the planning, the journeying, the car-ing, the not caring. It’s all been totally worth it because we got to come up to Scotland, right into the middle of Edinburgh festival and do this. We have just put a huge Diary sized mark on the place and I think it’s going to last. When we leave here, our imprint will stay. Only one show. Only two songs. Only six minutes. But yes, we really have out of all of it, pulled out exactly what we came here to do. And have the video that shows it all thanks to our Edinburgh friend who does an amazing job of capturing what we have done here tonight.
Maja finishes by saying that we’re going to be around. And that we are. We go and join our friends who now have somewhere else to be, so it’s a goodbye and thankyou very much as well. As we approach them they are looking at us with a new wonder. They had faith in us I’m sure, but they had no idea that was coming. Last time we were chatting to them, less than ten minutes ago, we were Mark and Maja, two people who apparently fancied themselves as some kind of songwriters. Oh OK. On you go. Aw, ain’t they cute? Now we have returned as stage warriors. As conquerors of Edinburgh. The pivot around which all else turns right now. As we’re talking to them and, indeed, making our way to them, we can barely move a second pace without another congratulatory handshake or back pat. And having said our goodbyes and plonked ourselves gratefully and still breathlessly at the bar, a guy comes up to us who has a lot more to say than well done. He does that too of course, but then his voice goes serious and he says, ‘We need you.’ Which I take to mean – and the course of the subsequent conversation proves me right – that we, the wider world and society in general needs The Diaries. You can Not stop. He says. You Can Not Stop. It may be hard, you may get doors slammed in your face but you absolutely have to keep on going. Wow. Thankyou. We will. There’s no anyone inviting anyone to join anyone. Instead, the three of us kind of spontaneously settle in all together at the bar. And a new part of the evening begins. Through this, he tells us that we are totally new and far ahead of anything anyone else is doing. But, critically, he says, we are not so far ahead of our time as to be over the other side where no-one else can see it or understand it. That is so important, he says. I know what he’s talking about. There are legends who were ahead of their time, never appreciated in their time, and now so revered we can’t imagine a world in which they didn’t exist. But in their world, they almost might as well not have. I’m sure you can come up with your own person or act who could fit into that. No. He says we are out there on the edge. But, very importantly, on the right side of it. Where what we are doing can be seen and understood, and also still have a relation to where we’re coming from.
Going right back to the early days of Mark’s Diaries, I used to write about all my fantastic encounters and people who would promise this that or whatever the other thing might be. Then, nothing. So I stopped writing about those encounters, deciding I would return to mention them should the thing they spoke about happen, then I could go back in time and talk about the beginning of where it happened. I’m going to break that rule now and say that this guy, who’s been around music a long time himself, tells us he knows of a kind of traveling entertainment setup that we would just fit right into. It sounds something like a circus but without the circus. I can’t quite tell you what it is because I don’t fully understand it myself, but he says he can make a call or two and get us on that particular radar. Brilliant. Why not. And if nothing happens, that could have nothing to do with him. All he can do is make the call. A few days later, with our video of tonight having been sent to him, he says he has. Thankyou very much. Can’t ask for more than that. I’m writing this exactly a month later. September 7 to this day’s August 7. Still heard nothing, and if we don’t, no harm at all. But what a wonderful encounter with someone who has connected with us on such a level. And after all the door slamming we’ve experienced while being here, here is someone who believes The Diaries are important. The Diaries are needed. We, the world, society, needs The Diaries.
With that, the newly anointed most important new band in the whole world goes off to have a date with the fun funnel. We have other parts of the world to visit tomorrow. Tomorrow, the second part of this chapter begins.
For that video, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_aNeDdOETg
