Diary Of A Busker Day 335 Wednesday March 6th 2013 1. Winchester High Street, corner of Monsoon. Time: 1-2:30pm 2. Basingstoke 1. Opposite Boots, Festival Place. Time: 6:01-6:03pm 2. Festival Place entrance. Time: 6:15-6:45pm 3. Top of steps near The Anvil entrance. Time: 7:10-7:25pm
Today’s the day – or the day of the evening – of the Tommy Emmanuel/Martin Taylor show in the stoke of Basing, and my idea is to try and recoup the £20 ticket and £8 train fare by doing a session here in Winchester and, thinking opportunistically (yet pragmatically), around the environs of The Anvil Theatre where the concert is.
As I had a reasonably profitable session yesterday at the never-tried-before, corner of Monsoon spot, I thought I might try my luck there again. Unfortunately the coinage wasn’t even half of yesterday’s, in fact it was well below the hourly average. I met a man called Derek and told him about the show and he’d never heard of Tommy Emmanuel. I said if he liked Chet Atkins – I had just been playing his arrangement of La Vie En Rose, then I think he should check out Tommy but he’d never heard of Chet Atkins either! A nice enough bloke, though. I think he was off to get hammered – he had a carrier bag full of beer cans and what I would call a “drinker’s” face.
Two hours and forty-five minutes after I packed up, I’m in Basingstoke. I find where The Anvil is – right next to the Festival Place shopping precinct monstrosity, but there’s no one around as it’s a few hours before showtime. Of course, there are a lot of people around the shopping precinct but as it’s a place I haven’t busked at before, I walk around for ages, delaying the inevitable, namely, setting up in a new, possibly hostile place. I walk up to the Old Town thinking maybe I’ll set up there, but there’s no one about and it doesn’t look very friendly, somehow. Back to the shopping monstrosity area, I go inside and take the plunge and set up opposite Boots, which has just closed for the day. I start The Third Man and get through most of it before I’m stopped; by a guy in a uniform who says that although he likes what I play, it’s private property (naturally) and I have to move away. He says I can play outside the entrance, though – ‘There’s lots of people there, coming from the train station and buses…and people on the benches.’ Oh well, I was pretty sure it would happen. My shortest ever set – about 2 minutes! Anyway, I do what my helpful uniformed friend suggests and set up, to the left of the entrance. I think he probably meant a bit further out, as I’ve still got the roof above me and I bet anywhere under that is sodding private property, too, but what the hell. I start up with what I was doing before I was so rudely interrupted – TTM. I do a lot better here. In fact, unbelievably NO ONE comes to tell me off, not in the whole half hour.
I see some familiar faces from Winchester: Sammy (short for Samantha, I think) and her daughter Izzy (short for Isabel, I think) who’s still terrified of me, or shy. She hides and plays around one of the mini UFOs that are near the benches a few feet away. And an Indian woman who I gave a guitar lesson to, about a year ago. She said she was living here now, somewhere nearby, and asked if I’d like to go to her house nearby for a cup of tea, which was strange as there were lots of big shops about but I couldn’t see any houses. I politely declined, as my work here was not yet done, but gave her one of my cards in case she ever wanted another lesson. She’ll have to pay my train fare, though – another £8 on top of the lesson.
I stop at 6:45; an hour before the show’s supposed to start, as I want to get a cheap bite to eat, then do another spot near The Anvil entrance, although I’m well-prepared for someone to throw me off any other place around here. Just after I pack up, I chat to a young foreign guy, Artur, who was listening at the tail-end of my set and really likes the fingerstyle stuff. I explain why I’m here and about Chet Atkins, who HE’S never heard of, either. He types the name into his phone/diary/encyclopaedia. When I tell him about the concert, he seems quite interested and asks me the cost and when I say it’s £20 he says he hasn’t got much. He takes out his wallet, looks in it and says he’s waiting for his money to come through. What, right now? Through the bottom of his wallet?! I feel a bit sorry for him and I’m just a tiny bit away from saying I’ll treat him. Instead, I say he can have one of my CDs, for free. It’s not Tommy Emmanuel, but beggars can’t be bloody choosers. Then, seeing he’s got about £2.50 in his change compartment and after him saying a couple of times ‘No, I must pay something’ I say he can have it for a pound, and I hope he enjoys it. It turns out he’s another musician – he says something about getting together to play, but I can’t be doing with any of that. Sorry, my broke, foreign friend. We say goodbye and I get a cut-price, end-of-the-day tuna and sweetcorn sandwich from the Tesco shop and then I reckon it’s time to head towards the gig area, which doesn’t take long; under a minute.
There are some steps leading down to a paved bit and the entrance is about 50 feet on the other side. I’m sure if I set up on either side of the entrance, someone will tell me to shove off, so…after some minutes debating, deliberating…I decide to set up at the top of the stairs…and start playing at 7:05 – there are more and more people arriving now. In fact, noticeably more every minute. Most are my age and older – quite a few in their 70s, I reckon. I get a few comments, some very complimentary and/or very polite – ‘You should be playing in there’ one man says, pointing at the hall. One man has a ticket he’s trying to give away. I wish I’d known that a few minutes ago when I was with Artur, my broke, foreign friend. There are also a few people who’ve seen me in Winchester, including the guy who loves my While My Guitar Gently Weeps arrangement.
Of course, the inevitable happens and some bloke in a uniform turns up. He says they’ve seen me on the CCTV and he knew from his colleague that I’d been playing (for 2 minutes) somewhere else and that I’d been asked to move on, and now he was gong to do the same. He was nice enough about it. I mean, as long as they don’t shout at me, I don’t mind too much. It’s not their fault, they’re only doing their job, aren’t they? It might be the only one they can get and as the guy says – ‘There’s a camera on me now, so I have to be SEEN to be doing my job.’ But like the other guy, he told me where I could play – beyond some small bollards, 30 feet away. I reckon I was going to have to stop soon, anyway – the show starts in 20 minutes. Before he went, I got the uniformed bloke to take a photo of me with the hall behind me, and as he was going off, I slipped in a few bars of The Third Man. Cheeky.
IN THE HALL
Of course, once the show had started, with these two incredible players playing the most inspired stuff ever, it became immediately and painfully apparent why THEY were in the posh, warm hall, in front of 7,000 who’d paid £20 each, and I was out THERE in the cold and dark, playing for nothing, or rather £5.12, and being given a load of grief, to boot, by a good percentage of the security people around the area. Anyway, in the interval I got talking to the two middle-aged blokes sitting behind me; both were musicians who had seen Tommy Emmanuel a few times before. While we were talking, T.E. came back onstage with some technicians and they were inspecting some of T.E’s guitar stuff; D.I boxes which he had on top of what looked like a cardboard box right next to where he was playing, on his left. There must have been some problem as there were a few times during the first set when he took out and re-inserted his guitar lead from his guitar input, like there was a bad connection somewhere. Now, I might have said something like ‘I might see if I can get Tommy to sign my guitar’ when I was talking to these guys before the show started. Anyway, one of them says ‘You know, you could go NOW – ask Tommy to sign your guitar. He’s a nice bloke, I bet he’d do it.’ I said I didn’t know; he might not want people to bother him if he’s trying to sort something out. In fact he’ll be really annoyed – he’ll be annoyed anyway because of whatever it is – the problem. My man says ‘Oh, I bet he won’t mind – as I say, he’s a genuine nice guy. I know he’s done that sort of thing lots of times. Look, there’s a great opportunity…I think you should go for it. Have you got something for him to sign it with?’ (Of course I did) ‘A black marker’ I said. ‘Well I think you should go down there!’ says my man, who had by now convinced me it was the right thing to do.
I took my guitar out and walked down the aisle to join a handful of other star-struck idiots standing at the front. There was another guy there, a lot younger than me, who wanted Tommy to sign a small guitar, although I couldn’t see it anywhere – it must have been really small! But it was obvious that Tommy, who was not more than 10 feet away, was completely absorbed in this box and whatever problem it was and it was also pretty obvious he was really annoyed about it all and he was definitely not going to sign anyone’s guitar. He never even looked up at any of us, not even once. I started to feel like an idiot, standing there holding my guitar up, with a couple of thousand people facing me; lots of people had left to get a drink but there were still a lot still sitting down.
After a minute that felt like an hour, one of the technical crew – a Chinese girl who was standing next to Tommy, looking at this faulty box thing, walked over to us and said there was no point in us standing there. I said ‘I thought he might sign my guitar’ and she said no – he wasn’t going to come over as there was a problem. (‘Tell those Pommies to rak off!, I bet he said!) So that was it. We all sloped embarrassingly back to our seats. Especially me, who had to carry his unsigned guitar right through the auditorium…right up all the steps…to Row H, at the top. I kept my head down the whole time, during the walk of shame. I felt a right numpty. What a stupid thing for a 50 year old man to do! My two friends tried to console me – ‘Oh well, Tommy’s a perfectionist, he is. If something’s not right, he’ll just be thinking of sorting it out.’ ‘Yeah, well…I DID try’ I said, trying to console myself.
After that, T.E. and Martin did another hour and a half of greatness with a couple of encores and that was that. It did cross my mind to maybe play for a few minutes outside the hall but I couldn’t be bothered. I mean, before was OK, but after I heard those two…anyway, I got the 11 o’clock train back and drowned my sorrows with a few portions of Honey Jim Beam and reflected on the day. Ten feet away from a guitar god! I’ve got my guitar, I’ve even got the bloody marker pen! One day, Emmanuel.
Earnings: Winchester: £11.96 (including 1 CD) Basingstoke: £11.32 = £23.28 – £8 train fare, Total: £15.28