Diary Of A Busker Day 2575 Saturday July 5th 2025 Southampton.
I don’t think I’ve ever played in Southampton on a Saturday but I’ll do anything to avoid the dreaded Hat Fair back home. The first thing I notice is it’s twice as noisy…because there are twice as many people about. The second thing is it’s a hell of a long time before the first donation. In fact after 40 minutes with fuck all in the kitty I was seriously thinking of heading back home. And then it was another 20 minutes before I’d made the £4.35 train fare back.
To combat the noise issue, I did something I haven’t done for ages; turn the gain up on the amp, just so much – not more than “3” on the dial, any more than that and it would start to distort. One of the first donations came from a couple who know me from Winchester. They were in their thirties and after a brief chat about why I was there (to avoid the dreaded Hat Fair, of course), they left, the bloke saying ‘well, good to see you again and best of luck to you, Marvin’ and wondering if he knew my name from Winchester of if he’d clocked it from the “merch” on display. No matter, it caused a warm feeling to flow inside me.
Song Of The Day; the end bit of Layla, as it earned a fiver, paid via the QR code. The donor was a man with his teenage son. That fiver accounted for slightly more than a third of the takings after the train fare was taken out. So £14.31 profit for the hassle of getting there and back and playing two hours straight through. Hardly worth it but to just reiterate the point I started with, better than being at the dreaded Hat Fair.