A Tale Of Two Open Mic Nights

They were the best of songs, they were the worst of songs. Mainly, they were the worst of songs, but they taught me a valuable lesson. You can learn a lot about a place from its Open Mic nights. It is like that story told to illustrate that you get what you expect - a stranger sees a town in the distance and, clasping his bongos firmly under one arm, he walks towards it, only stopping when he sees an old man sitting by the side of the road. “What are the people like in that town?” asks the stranger. The old man pauses, considers the wisdom and experience that he has accumulated in many years and then replies, “They are too fond of soft rock covers.”

When it was first suggested to me that the difference between an Open Mic night in Swansea and an Open Mic night in Cardiff would be interesting, I thought that it might refer to some styles, some ideas or a variation in topics for performance. I never expected quite the level of difference that I witnessed.

Let us start with Open Mic night in Swansea. The first thing to say is that it is a little island of culture in an ocean of drunkenness. No-one who has been on Wind Street on a Friday night will surely question my description of it as an ocean of drunkenness. Indeed, anyone who has been out in Wind Street on any other day of the week would probably agree. It is odd then that a pub in its midst is holding an Open Mic night and that as poets or other performers read out their works, you can see stag parties in fancy dress press their noses against the windows to try to work out what is going on. I once asked my audience to go out there while I was performing and say, “You know what, that Ed Sheeran looks different live!”

The bar itself is L-shaped with the microphone in the corner of the L. There is a single speaker and sometimes people perform without amplification because the venue is small enough that unless they are making coffee behind the bar, you can usually hear what is going on pretty well.

The range of performance is huge. Mostly it is poetry, as befits a night marketed mainly as a ‘spoken word night’. However, I also really like the stories too – I remember one performer giving an account of the identities of the statues on Charles Bridge in Prague but doing it in the most entertaining (and educational) way. This is where we do encounter a theme that will return in this blog. There are two distinct skills involved in performing music or poetry – one is a musical skill, the other is the skill of performance. A lot of people who have the first skill neglect to develop the second.

With spoken word, you hear a lot of accents. By that, I do not mean a bland statement of Welsh, English, Irish or whatever, but there is a tendency for people to sing in a bland transatlantic accent but speak in their speaking voice accent. Outside Wales, people are often unaware of just how many Welsh accents there are (though I remain nonplussed when people say how much they like my own Welsh accent ... it really is not) and in the Swansea area you will hear a very wide variation. All I will say is that when you listen to someone with a Swansea Valley accent declaim angry poetry about the fate of the world, it has an impact that a Gower accent simply would not do.

My own contribution was really accidental. It was at the start of the year and I was invited by a friend to go along and play the bongos. I suppose that I was looking for things to do and for nights out, so it seemed like the thing to do. I did one song and the crowd asked for more, so I did another. It was good fun and I returned. The friend who I went with originally stopped going but by then I had started to know the other performers, what they performed and a little bit about who they were. Often there was a theme to the night. During the Six Nations, a Scottish man sings a song each time about Scotland winning the Six Nations (a work of fiction, obviously). I remember that International Women’s Day produced a lot of poems about equality. I congratulated one of the performers on her use of language. Another performer said how they liked ‘Death By Plums’ (everyone likes ‘Death By Plums’). Indeed, it was at the Swansea Open Mic night that someone said that they ‘like that song you did about that woman’. I told him that he would have to be more specific. You may all be performers there, but it is a mutual celebration of what everyone can produce. It is a friendly atmosphere.

Cardiff’s Open Mic night had been suggested a few times to me and I had come close to going to it before. A friend had told me that there was a lot of seriously-talented musicians there and that it was also very competitive. A prize of £50 was on offer each week to the best act and so people went along to win. That is a different concept to going along to perform.

The venue for the night is slightly away from the city centre, so there are no men dressed as chickens staring in through the window. There is a small theatre in an adjoining room if that gives you some idea of how much more of a ‘place’ the venue is. Indeed, there is a proper stage, microphones, pianos and some feedback monitors so that the performers can properly hear what they are singing (I am not sure that I would want to).

It is most definitely a younger crowd, evidenced by the fact that the singing does not start until nine. When licensing laws were relaxed, I do not remember anyone suggesting that the average night out would now start at ten and end at three. I have no idea what has caused this change – does everyone just need several hours more to get ready?

The whole event in Cardiff is slick and professional. There is a sign-up sheet and you have to book a fifteen minute slot. In Swansea, someone with a clipboard asks if you fancy reading a poem. On this occasion, I was the last person to get a slot in Cardiff and that was after 11 p.m. Ah yes, after 11 p.m., for the young people that is now just at the start of the evening, but for me that is getting close to past my bedtime on a school night. More to the point, it is three hours of being nervous and playing Scrabble to take my mind off it.

Ah yes, you can play board games in the Friday venue. This rather sums things up. It sounds trendy and intellectual, but what it actually does is tie everyone to a table and give them a reason to ignore the man giving his all through a cover of ‘Ace of Spades’ six feet away from them. You come to Cardiff in a group and you stay in a group. I am yet to go to the Swansea Open Mic on my own, but I can imagine that if I ever did that there would be people to talk to there. No-one in Cardiff talks to people who they do not know.

At around eight o’clock, the Cardiff venue started to be flooded by people with guitars. This is the main difference. In Cardiff they might as well call it ‘guitar night’ for all the variety that there is. You can hear a man with a guitar sing a song about love, a man with a guitar sing a song about heartbreak, a woman with a guitar sing a song about hope or a woman with a guitar sing a song about relationships. The novelty act of the first couple of hours were two people on stage at the same time. Wow, radical! One of them made percussion noises and the other ... played a guitar.

The other problem is that only a few of these guitarists have worked out the difference between musical skill and performance skill. You remember I mentioned that earlier? Musical skill is making a competent noise. Performance skill is communicating it to your audience. If all you are going to do is be musically good, then you might as well play in your front room. Performance means connecting with your audience and when your audience are all playing Scrabble and ignoring you, this is a really important skill. The biggest crime of all is singing with your eyes shut. Oh yes, I get it, the beauty of the emotion of your performance and so on, but if you do not open your eyes, you cannot connect with your audience. You might as well be playing with yourself in your front room.

Before I started performing to audiences outside my front room, I studied performance. I knew that I had a certain skill at it already (see ‘Dewi Heald : The Stand Up Years 1996-7’) but I watched musical performances on YouTube. I would recommend that all musicians watch Chico Marx play the piano. Chico is not brilliant. Indeed, I am not sure that he is anything beyond competent, but he really knows how to make that a performance. His way of playing the piano is as funny as anything he actually plays. There is a moment in the film ‘Animal Crackers’ where Chico is playing the same section on the piano over and over again. There are no words, no jokes, just an endlessly frustrating repetition which is funny. That is the skill of performance. I also recommend watching Chuck Berry. I am yet to see a YouTube recording where he did not have the audience eating out of his hand.

I can some up the Cardiff performances with a description that came from my table – ‘X Factor auditions’. Yes absolutely, all these guitarists wanted to be on the X Factor. I will admit that I went for a quick laugh when I came on stage by asking, “Do you like guitar music?” and following it up with, “Then you’ll be really disappointed by me”. When I came off stage, the host did ask me to come back again. Perhaps she valued the variety.

It may sound as though I am being critical of the X Factor wannabees and I suppose that I am. However, I do also admire the slickness of the operation in Cardiff. It is professionally done and some of the performers were excellent musicians who even knew how to open their eyes when they sang. There is something rather good about stepping on a stage and being shown where your sound guy was and how to indicate to him to change the settings on the microphone. Perhaps I just enjoyed the professionalism of our host asking me, “Would you like to mike your bongos?”

Yet, there is something about the Swansea Open Mic night which was missing from Cardiff. There was a rawness to it which the slickness and the professionalism loses. I am not talking about ‘authenticity’ so much as inclusion. That someone can sing about rugby in Swansea is rather fabulous to me and I missed it in Cardiff when we were hearing more about love lost, love unrequited and ... at this rate the death of a beloved pet all in the same song. Was it the influence of the cash prize? (which I did not win by the way). Was it the bigger crowd? Somehow there is a will in Swansea for everyone to do well and I did not feel that at all in Cardiff. Even a poet declaiming a shameless political and angry rant which I would probably not have chosen to listen to does it with a passion that I admire. One again, the skill of the performance can be everything.

At the risk of pushing the metaphor further than you will accept, it is almost the tale of two cities and the characteristics that they show to the world. Cardiff is ambitious and competitive to be the best. These are good qualities that can make great things happen. Swansea is raw and passionate and making the best it can of difficult circumstances. Sometimes it is not aware of quite how much it has got going for it, but that is part of its charm. I think that both are sides of the same Welsh coin which would not exist with only one of them.

Both of them benefit from the presence of a bongo player. This looks like a job for me.