Or at the very least it has been injured...
I’ve been wanting to post something other than poetry but to be honest, I haven’t really had anything to say that doesn’t involve repetitions of previous information about either my life or my band. But something happened recently that has been in the back of my mind, bubbling away in my subconscious. This occurred at the end of August, which goes to show how slow my mind works 
The band has been going great guns. The last Friday in August was our last night of a very successful month long residency at a local venue. As we completed our second encore and were stepping off the stage, a genuine, toe-to-toe bar room brawl broke out.
Now I’ve seen more than a few of these over the years and they’ve always cast a darkness over me. But this brawl was something even worse. According to reliable sources, blokes who had been mates for life were fighting each other. I saw one smash a bottle into another’s head. I saw a different one pick up a barstool and hit another in the face with it. When he went down (as you would do), his attacker stood over him and was about to hit him in the face again with the stool. Thankfully, a friend of mine saw what was happening and grabbed the stool out of his hands. I believe he would have killed the poor bloke if my friend hadn’t acted.
It was absolutely disgusting, ridiculous and appalling. The net result is the venue won’t be putting any more live music on for a while and the police, who can’t do much else because no one is pressing charges, are going after the venue instead. Oh yeah, and of course the police are blaming the music, which just goes to show how little the police really understand the community.
In my local area, most of the nightlife is provided by ‘super’ venues, huge facilities with multiple bars catering for just about every kind of person. Except the person who enjoys live music. These places are cash-vacuums, sucking in the young and loaded and spitting them out 12 hours later broke and looking and smelling a whole lot worse than they did when they entered. Large groups of bouncers (hmm, what is a good collective noun for bouncers? How about a ‘break’ of bouncers) patrol the streets outside, generally keeping the violence to a minimum but quite often only stirring up trouble amongst the drunken patrons. As a consequence, fights between drunken young men often break out and sometimes tragedy is very close behind, be it accidental or deliberate. Do the police blame these venues? No, they usually blame the mix of alcohol, drugs and testosterone.
Live music venues, by comparison, are usually much smaller and don’t require the services of a team of highly trained hard men to keep the punters in line. In fact, it is an extremely rare thing the punters even need to be kept in line. I could say it is because music keeps everyone calm, but that would be rather simplistic. People who come to see music and bands are for the most part genuinely interested in music and therefore more appreciative, attentive and in tune with what is going on. So for the police to blame live music is just ridiculous.
The unfortunate thing is on our last night, a small percentage of the punters were only there to get plastered and cause problems. The only reason they chose our venue is purely because of convenience i.e. it was close to home. So they got themselves well wasted on whatever drugs (probably crystal meth). Then they came to the venue to drink on top of it all. I suppose if ever there was a recipe for anarchistic violence, this was it.
The upshot is it has left a very bad taste in my mouth. I’m not sure why but performing has lost some of its magic and appeal to me. I can feel in my heart, seriously. The band has not been in the same room together since but we’re planning on our first rehearsal this weekend. Hopefully, I’m the only one who feels this way. I am hoping the break might have taken some of the edge off this incident for all of us. Here is hoping…