Sunday Showcase - A night out in Clubland

Saturday afternoons were made for professional sport, a polished, slick, well attended spectacle. Saturday evenings, and indeed the whole weekend is for live music, watching or gigging depending which side of the microphone you are, and not always such a polished, slick, well attended spectacle.

Live music can be anything from a stadium tour to the back room of a pub, and without the latter we wouldn't have the former.

A phenomenon sadly rare in the south but still very much in existence north of Watford is the true social club. 50p gets you in, an additional £2 allows you on to the ballroom for the Sunday showcase. 

Here is what that £2.50 offered.

Opening act was a flat capped acoustic singer, adding a rather mid Atlantic accent to his rock covers, nice enough and not bad for the cover charge.  In honesty, there’s not much more to say about the opener.

Young Elvis then took to the stage in a wonderful gold lame’ jacket singing along to a backing track with a passable accent and fake strumming his guitar, regardless of the instrument on the track at the time.  A quick change to a jumpsuit took the compere a bit by surprise and the next tracks were accompanied by rather more pelvic action.

Act three. Sixties covers. The absolute backbone of the club scene. These covers bands tend to look the same, sound the same and sing the same songs where ever you go, but they always tend to be crowd pleasers, performing all the well-known standards

Being a social club there has to be a break for bingo, or in this case "open the box", before the final two "turns" take to the stage

So, number four on tonight’s bill.  Up and down the country, blonde girls are singing to backing tracks, with no musical instruments anywhere near the stage. The sound system is expensive, the purchased, recorded backing vocals are polished, the actual performance is perhaps not quite to the same level, certainly not as good as the singer might believe.

The club circuit is heavily populated by cover artistes, you give the audience what they know and what they like.  The club scene though is also where new artistes cut their teeth, it is an important rite of passage if you want to make it in the industry.

The fifth and final act of the night was a UK Country singer/songwriter.

To perform original music to a club crowd will never be easy, but easy doesn't make for a career and if you can win over the Sunday night crowd of regulars, you can win over anyone.  They may not dance. They won't sing along, but when the room goes as quiet as a club room ever will, then you know they are listening. They are also judging, but they are listening. Drop in a well known ballad and see if they sing along. 

They did.


The ballroom has a stage, an old mirror ball  and a pork pie buffet in the toilet/dressing room/green room, the raffle is more keenly followed than any singer will ever be, but these clubs have produced and polished generations of performers, and if the gods of live music are kind they will carry in doing so for a long time to come