If you call a venue Rock City, it leads people to expect you like and promote rock music. Or geology.
If your promo material claims you are the Midlands’ best music venue and the UK’s premier independent club and live music venue, that tends to support the idea you might be keen on (and good at) rock music. Also suggests no actual rocks, just in case an enthusiastic hobbyist wanted to expand his collection.
Apparently the above is all hype and no substance.
Followers of this blog will know that on a wave of enthusiasm following my first rock gig I booked a second session, at a more convenient distance from home. Still two hours away, but on the same continent this time!
I had my grumbles about the previous venue, but failed to appreciate how much my expectations had been raised by that experience.
We had to queue to get in, which is to be expected. It was cold and damp, which is also to be expected given the location and would be wholly unfair of me to criticise Nottingham for not being like Florida – which isn’t to say there weren’t muttered comments about the weather. The queue trailed back from the entrance right into the multi-storey car park and looped around the ground floor. Now the venue wasn’t directly responsible for the direction new arrivals chose for queuing and being located on a narrow city centre street they probably don’t have many options, but having to stand on a 4″ kerb in order to let cars get out of the car park without crushing any of us isn’t my idea of fun. It did give me pause for thought though, watching people join or elect not to join the back of the queue. They would look at the line doubling back on itself and sigh or roll their eyes, despairing at how long they would have to wait. In some cases they turned around and wandered off, perhaps to a cosy bar around a corner, known only to locals. Yet, in reality, joining the end of a long line (for an event with a definite start time), generally means you have less time to wait than those ahead of you, who have been waiting long enough for everyone else to create the queue behind. You might have a bit further to walk, but a moving queue is less frustrating than a static one.
When the doors eventually opened and we trickled in to the venue, the entrance hall was choked with a variety of secondary queues, for those who hadn’t scratched that itch enough while outside. One queue for the cloakroom (it was cold and I was bored with queuing, my coat stayed on). Another queue to buy tour t-shirts merged with the line for the ladies – already out the door! My bladder protested but I wasn’t queuing for that either, and I had a suspicion that a venue for 2500 people might have a few toilets elsewhere.
My instinct was correct. Strangely, there seemed to be no outer door to the room, but there was an empty block of toilets. Twelve of them, complemented by an almost excessive eight handbasins, and finished off by a generous provision of hand dryers – not one, but two! Even better, they puffed a reassuring warm draft onto my hands, so no fear of getting burnt or even dry! The whole place was most stylishly finished, with contrasting effect within the stalls of smooth glazed tiles on either side and rugged industrial metal flooring on the back wall. Once the door was forced to shut, it revealed signatures, perhaps of the original builders, inscribed roughly into the varnish. The lock formed the handle, and was sized so that a small child might get a good grip on it, but would have lacked the strength to pull the door open against the swollen wood or uneven flooring that caused it to jam.
The stage was low, and despite being only 20′ from the front I could only catch glimpses of the performers. Occasionally my view was blocked completely by arms in the air waving, but that was part of the experience so I could live with that. Also, given that the band chooses to play at small, fairly intimate venues when I am sure they could sell-out bigger places, it was kind of those in front of me to recreate the O2 or Wembley Arena effect I was missing out on, by allowing me to view the band (only) via phone and video screens so that the appeared 3″ high and half a mile away. I had noticed a few phones out at the gig in Orlando, and one boy texting a running commentary of the session to a friend who couldn’t get a ticket, but the Nottingham crowd seemed like they couldn’t experience anything with their eyes and ears without filtering it through a tiny screen. What I was left wondering is whether any of those people will ever sit and watch the recordings back, or will I remain the only person ever to see them? There are plenty of other recordings, professional and amateur, up on YouTube for anyone to watch without the effort of making their own version. Mind you, I did discover afterwards that the place has a reputation for phone thefts – one year 10% of all such thefts in Nottingham were at that venue! So perhaps people were hanging on to their phones for security and keeping them up out of the way of pickpockets.
The warm-up act was a new band, made up of some members of an earlier band that had toured with The Pretty Reckless previously. They only had one song out on the internet, but the previous band sounded OK, so my hopes were raised – and then dashed. Every song sounded the same. Worse, every part within each song sounded the same. I could see the guitarist moving his hands, but couldn’t distinguish any different notes. I could feel the drums, but that sensation shifted after a few tracks from a satisfying beat in my chest to a vicious reverberation in my throat. I couldn’t make out a word that was being sung. I stood, still in my coat, arms folded, feeling and looking like a disapproving maiden aunt in the centre of a sweating, heaving throng.
I wore a coat anticipating the queue outside. I thought that inside it wouldn’t be as cold as House of Blues, as we don’t really do air-conditioning here. I thought it would be hot and clammy. Then I realised that Rock City doesn’t need over-powered air-con, it just has doors and lets January draughts do the rest. My coat stayed firmly on until some time after the main act had started on stage, contributing in no small part to the maiden aunt air.
The Pretty Reckless came on to much whistling and cheering. They put on a good show, despite or because of the jet lag, but something wasn’t quite right. It became more and more obvious even to my untrained ear that the sound system wasn’t doing them any favours at all. I revised my opinion of the support act. It appears that the PA had been somewhat abused, and we weren’t hearing the sound in a pure form – everything was muddy, and elements of the voice weren’t conveyed. The band dealt with it well, laughed and joked, encouraged the audience to join in even more to cover it up, showed their human side but it was sad to see at the same time as revealing them as real people. The lead guitarist has the level of skill and self-assurance where there is no showiness, just music dripping from his fingertips: he had to work hard this night to try to get anything out.
Then, one and a quarter hours in to their show, the lead singer announced that they were having to cut some songs as some people wanted to dance. Another song later and they told us they were cutting even the encore because the venue had another event on after and needed to clear us all out to turn it back into a night club. They were serious. Song finished, house lights up, traditional calls of “we want more”, but the house lights stayed firmly on and that was it. Stage cleared, curtains pulled across, everybody leave please. That was their first UK gig of the tour – what a welcome!
flatlanderkat 