From The Garage to The Stage Part 5: Camaraderie and Control

This article originally appeared on the blog at Songeist.com.

If you're just starting out as an artist, there are many hard lessons to be learned onstage that don't necessarily appear in the 'how to play' manuals or educational music books. To help you along, we've enlisted our very own Barney to impart his hard-earned gigging wisdom in this ongoing series of weekly blogs. If you're recently started playing live or even if you haven't yet done a gig yet, we at Songeist believe that these blogs will be a great asset to help you to consider all the aspects of your live show. We'll be posting a new entry every Wednesday around midday for the coming weeks so don't forget to visit!

READ PART 1: MAKING A SPLASH HERE.
READ PART 2: STRUCTURING YOUR SET HERE.
READ PART 3: SEGUES AND SPEECHES HERE.
READ PART 4: CONFIDENCE AND CONNECTION HERE.
READ PART 6: SET TIMES AND THE SOUND MAN HERE.

Remember to comment and let us know any live tips and tricks you have...

FROM THE GARAGE TO THE STAGE PART 5: CAMARADERIE AND CONTROL

So far, we’ve covered how to write a setlist, how to structure your set, how to segue your songs and how to connect with a crowd. But what about the other connection that is happening onstage, the connection that many musicians don’t immediately consider but is the connection that is, above all, the most important part of being in a band? What about the connection with each other? You may have spent more hours in a garage and more miles on the road with these human beings than anyone else on earth but put you on stage together and you either pretend they don't exist or throw dirty looks at them every time they even look like they might mess up. Dealing with on-stage stress is a part of being in a band, especially for an emerging band, and the most natural thing in the world to do is to lean on your friends; your band-mates. One thing that you’ll have to accept as a band starting out and using in-house sound engineers is that sometimes, even often, onstage sound will be awful. That causes stress. The very task of performing in front of strangers causes stress. And these band-mates you call friends are going to make some musical mistakes that will cause you stress. Being onstage magnifies all these feelings of stress but, just as with last week’s blog, you need to focus those emotions to compose yourself and not sell an iota of that stress, let alone take it out on each other. We know we have to emote confidence, but we also need to emote a sense of camaraderie and control.

The Horrors, emerging from their spaceship, full of camaraderie yesterday.
CONTROL YOURSELF
Following on from last week’s talk of confidence and connection-building, nothing relaxes a crowd more than a band that appears at ease and in control of their environment. If you look like you know what you’re doing, they will believe you do. Nothing belies a band’s nervousness and sense of being at ill-at-ease more than negative body language towards each other. A band that appears united as a team and comfortable on stage with each other evokes that same energy to the crowd. That sense of camaraderie is key to a band and should be part of your overall philosophy and approach beyond the stage. Some of the best bands, think The Ramones, The Specials, The Horrors, actually look like they've emerged from a spaceship together to take over our world. A band that look uncomfortable with each other or even worse, visibly hostile, tutting and scowling at mistakes, are facing a huge uphill battle in winning over fans. Just as I relayed last week, the crowd WANTS to like you, just don’t give them reason not to. You might be the kind of player (I know I am) that can’t tune out the other band member’s performances and picks up on every fluffed note, every scuffed fill and every flat harmony. The vital thing to remember is that 99% of mistakes, no matter how bad they seem to you, the audience will either not pick up on, or not care about. A rock gig isn’t a piano recital. No rock gig has ever been ruined, or even badly affected, by a few rogue mistakes in a set. But you can ruin a gig by creating a tense, awkward atmosphere onstage between band members. A dirty look early in the set can have its negative energy increase exponentially across the performance, as the band member's become more reactive and angry at one another. No matter how well they think they're hiding it, this will sink the connection at a show even if the crowd can’t quite put their finger on what the problem is. You can feel a bad atmosphere, and feeling is more important at a gig than simply hearing.

Don’t get me wrong. Mistakes count. The fact that Steve went into the wrong part for the tenth gig on the row does matter, especially after you brought it up in rehearsal twenty times. It matters to you and so, ultimately, it matters to the performance and the band. But you’re kidding yourself if you think that if you turn around and shake your head at him onstage, anyone in the crowd is going to sympathise with your exasperation. You just look like a mean so-and-so and you’ve created a negative onstage vibe, all over a bass mistake in a room where the sound is so boomy not one single person noticed. To physically register it onstage does nothing but bring attention to it, increasing the tension and making the gig worse for everyone. Again, it’s a case of implosion, not explosion, and even thought that messed-up fill daftpot on the drum's has done for the whole tour feels like nails down your back, it’s your mistake if you let it throw your own performance off track.


I fully endorse the loving, positive, fully-in-control eye contact, if not the shorts, of this band.

CAMARADERIE
Being onstage is stressful and in stressful situations, friends are mean to each other, and that doesn’t always stop between songs. One faux pas I’ve seen many times – and have been guilty of - is taking the mickey out of other members of the band over the mic between songs. We’ve all seen this, if judged correctly, be a fun addition to a live set but, just like erupting into synchronised head-banging from the second you get on stage, more often than not it only serves to highlight how vulnerable the musician feels at that point. What you imagine in your head is charming repartee between two band members, lifting the curtain into the group's lovable real-life personalities, is actually just two incoherent human beings, tuning guitars and mumbling 'dick head' at each other, like a pair of three-year-old siblings lashing out at each other because they're tired after a day out at the zoo. Of course, the crowd may smile. They may even laugh. Just like the raising a fist on stage is often mirrored in a crowd, the audience will attempt to follow suit at the pantomime of witty conversation that they perceive to probably be happening before them. But that doesn't mean it's anything but slightly embarrassing for all involved.

Speaking of addressing the room, sometimes the crowd will speak back. As we outlined last week, standing and conversing with mates does nothing but create a cliquey atmosphere. But if you play enough gigs, someone in the crowd, at some point, is going to say something bad about you. Just like reacting to a fluffed note from a band member, you do not sell it because you are in control of the stage, not the crowd. Follow the same rules as you would someone posting comments on YouTube; do not feed the troll. Granted, if someone is heckling to the extent it’s affecting the rest of the crowd’s enjoyment of the show, then perhaps, being as assertive and emphatic as you can, you need to face that. The crowd will thank you for it and facing down an idiot spoiling other people's fun can really bond a band and crowd. But if there’s one guy shouting abuse and giving you the V-sign in a crowd of hundreds, do not give him the satisfaction of knowing you have even seen him, even worse he's got you rattled. Ignore him completely. Focus your energy to keep in control of your own performance and don’t let him gain any influence over you. Just think; if a human being is so odious and has a life so bereft of happiness that he or she must stand in front of a stage and make gestures to bands they don’t like, they really do not deserve any validation for their actions, let alone the attention they crave. Ignore these sadsacks. They will get bored and, quietly and sullenly, wait for the headliner they came to see. They don't get out much, to be fair.

You might not quite manage it, but this is the post-gig atmosphere to aim for.

WAIT UNTIL TOMORROW
The discipline of control and camaraderie should not stop the second you get off stage, you need to remain focused for at least a few hours afterwards. This is difficult because you've been affected emotionally and the music means a lot to you and once you come off stage, there's a temptation to let it all spill out. After internalising your chagrin towards the guitarist’s multiple musical indiscretions for half an hour, there's the desire to come off stage and immediately start rattling off a laundry list of his mistakes. But it's a bad idea. Emotions are so high that a post-gig conversation will be ferocious, overblown and erupt into something far more intense than is constructive when discussing specific drum fills or vocal harmonies. Not only will you be angry, the other band member will be defensive, especially after a disappointing performance, so a fight will inevitably erupt and, essentially, what you are saying and asking of them gets buried under a landslide of emo, feels and mardy-bum melodrama. Save it for the bedroom.

With great diplomacy and experience, it's possible to get your band's communication developed enough that you can manage to talk about the set quite sensibly within an hour or two after the show. It's not always mistakes that you want to discuss and important things do get forgotten if you set a cast-iron fatwa on talking in the dressing room about what went on on the stage for the last half an hour. But as a rule of thumb it’s generally better to simply wait until the next day. If the mistake or observation is important enough to comment on, it’s important enough for you to make it your responsibility to remember it for the following morning. You could even write it down or pop it in your phone notes, as I do. If you calmly and clearly express the problem the next day and the band member is still being a tart about it… well, that's their problem, not yours. But that’s the thing with band members, they’re human beings and part of being in a band is learning one-another’s limits, abilities and even short-comings and having the wisdom and will to work with them and around them.

Next week in From The Garage to The Stage we'll discuss the final details of being onstage, beyond the band and crowd. We'll explore speaking to sound engineers, the logistics of working with crews, getting on and offstage and all the subtle, unspoken stuff that's expected of you as a band at a gig that no one tells you beforehand.

Until next time...

Barney

Horrors photo courtesy Neil Klug's Flickr used under Creative Commons License.
Lucacookus photo courtesy Mark Scott Austin TX's Flickr used under Creative Commons License.
Backstage photo courtesy Chillhiro's Flickr used under Creative Commons License.