Never let it be said that Guardian Music doesn’t honour the very biggest anniversaries, the ones that have changed the face of popular culture as we know it. This time last year, Tim Jonze celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Dave Matthews Band unloading 360kg of excrement on to a boatful of tourists. It’s hard to top a landmark like that, but we may have found one anniversary that does.
On 17 August 1965, the Byrds cancelled their show at Portsmouth Guildhall because only 250 out of 4,000 tickets had been sold. One of the greatest bands ever, off the back of a UK No 1 (Mr Tambourine Man) and a No 4 (All I Really Want to Do) could only sell 250 tickets. Criminal, really. Though not as cringe-inducing as Sky Saxon, of 60s garage legends the Seeds, booking a show at the Town and Country Club (now the Forum) in London in the late 80s in his guise as Sky Sunlight Saxon Dragonslayers and having it cancelled when the punters failed to snap up all the available tickets. A friend told me that when he went to collect his refund from the box office, he was informed he had bought four of the seven tickets sold (that may very well not be true, but it’s too good a story not to recount).
It set me to thinking about sparsely attended shows, and their curious atmosphere. Rare is the depopulated gig that’s just perfectly reasonable – in my experience they tend to divide into the horror show à la Spinal Tap or the unexpected triumph as band and audience unite to make the best of the experience.
Which have been your most memorable sparsely attended shows? And were they memorable for good or bad reasons? Here are three of mine:
1. The House of Love, Leeds Irish Centre, May 1988
The House of Love pitched up at the Irish Centre, touring their debut album, to find maybe 50 people there. In a room that holds 800. Yet this turned out to be one of the most jaw-droppingly brilliant gigs I’ve ever seen: Terry Bickers treating his guitar like a six-string studio, Guy Chadwick fierce and intense. Instead of feeling like the guests at a party that’s gone ahead after a cancelled wedding, we felt like were were being treated to a private audience with a group convinced they were the greatest in the world. I wasn’t the only person to think so. John Peel, reviewing the gig for the Observer, said: “The House of Love showed within seconds that they have that inner tension that makes for a great rather than a merely good band. This was one of those rare performances that I wished I could have taken away with me.” Almost a decade later, it was still fresh in Peel’s mind: “One of the great gigs, actually,” he said on BFBS in 1997.
2. Television, the Forum, London, June 1993
The New York legends had re-formed in 1992, and set about taking their spindly but majestic art rock around the world. They played in London in November, then returned to the same venue the following June, by which time the appetite to hear epic guitar solos delivered by ascetic-looking middle-aged men appeared to have diminished. The Forum’s balcony was closed. The dancefloor offered ample space to wander around in search of a vantage point – Joe Jackson was strolling back and forth across it – and Tom Verlaine appeared distinctly unimpressed. He began the show by requesting some blue light, and for the rest of the night all we got were a couple of blue spots shining on him and the group. Nothing else. It was a hot evening, but the atmosphere was cold, not helped by a run of songs from the group’s reunion album, which no one had come to hear. And then, magic. The set closed with a one-two of Little Johnny Jewel and Marquee Moon and the group seemed to retreat into themselves and regroup. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd seemed to be soloing from a trance state, and suddenly the four men on stage weren’t just blokes playing songs to an uncaring crowd. They were Television.
3. Kelela, the Great Escape, Brighton, May 2015
I’d read all the buzz, listened to the album, and had assumed Kelela – the queen of twisted R&B – would be packing out the small beachfront club she was playing at as part of the annual festival. I dragged Alexis Petridis down, and we stood there, wondering when everyone else was going to turn up. At the show’s absolute busiest, there were maybe 40 people in the audience. You could, at any point, walk to the stagefront barrier. When Kelela asked for the house lights to be turned up, I felt grateful the lighting engineer ignored her so she couldn’t see the pitiful turnout. If nothing else, it was a salutary reminder of the maxim that “if press coverage sold records, Captain Beefheart would have been a star”. It doesn’t matter how many writers bang on about something being the most exciting music heard since the dawn of time: if the people who have to pay for their tickets don’t hear something they like, they’re not going to buy a ticket to the show. This was a grim, grim evening, not helped by the fact that Kelela – who has charisma by the bucketload – was performing with just a bloke with a laptop as the backing. Rather than the future of R&B, it was more like some particularly precocious art student stepping in on music night at your local, after the All Hits All Eighties disco has been cancelled because the DJ’s picked up a tummy bug from a ropey kebab.
