The power of performance

I found myself on Bournemouth pier last week, playing at the party thrown by Morning Star for the Unison Conference. It was great fun doing an acoustic set early in the evening, then later on, after the headline act, being house DJ for the night.

Performing solo acoustic at this sort of party is usually a fairly tough gig, because your audience spent all day politicking, debating and networking. By now, they're quite reasonably just up for a bit of booze, relaxation and flirting.

Part of me knows that the ideal live music for this is just a daft disco or a classic covers band - in other words, a simple fun background for the party.

But we must never be tempted to lock out original or 'real' music for the sake of an instant hit, especially in the very spaces where people might appreciate what is being sung and get something of long-term benefit.

It works like this: you may have a tough gig, but people are always listening far more intently than you realise.

With the seats all around the sides, I inevitably echoed across a large empty dancefloor in the middle, more of a background thing than the sole focus of attention.

I came offstage a bit disappointed, only later realising the extent to which it had actually been a very successful gig, once a stream of lovely people had come over, bought CDs and been very friendly.

The other mistake I often make at socialist or issues-based gigs is to pitch my set slightly wrong, rolling out the more ranty political material to the very people who least need to hear that kind of sentiment, since they're already on board.

It's as if I'm too keen for the crowd to know I'm 'like them', which is dumb.

That's what the song Preaching To The Converted is about - singing activist material to activists being a fruitless exercise, beyond a kind of reassurance or emotional adrenalin shot.

Yet still, after more than a decade performing, I regularly make that mistake. I should've played love songs or funny tunes.

At the Uncivilisation festival last month up in north Wales, I pitched it better because the concert was in a traditional theatre setting, conducive to quieter material.

But on Bournemouth Pier I needed to just belt it out.

Playing to an audience like this is a marked contrast to my normal indie or folk scene crowds and reminds me vividly of the universality of making music.

I believe with all my heart that wherever in the world and whenever in human history I'd been born, I would be doing roughly the same job. Of course the peripheral stuff might be different, modes of transport, how one promotes gigs and other logistics.

But fundamentally, the process of travelling around performing to people has always been there and always will.

You can look at every single culture that has developed across the span of our civilisation, or any single community of organised human life, and you will find individuals wandering about the place, sharing their creative re-envisioning and interpretation of the world around them, from bards to griots, from mummers to folk singers.

Like fine art, the experience of live performance cannot be properly reproduced. It leaves its impressions deeply embedded in the memories of those who witnessed it.

For the vast majority of human history, that's been the sole way any kind of music or storytelling was handed down.

Prior to the development of the printing press for words, or even recorded sound, which is still an incredibly recent technology in the greater scheme of things, in order for this stuff to be shared, somebody had to travel.

This places a contradiction at the heart of my beliefs. I passionately believe in "the state," whether it be a tiny self-organised community or a global methodology to promote peace, justice and equality. I'm not a libertarian individualist.

Yet however I might support its collaborative and co-operative spirit, I cannot whole-heartedly attach myself to any such community.

My fundamental calling is an existence spaced between these communities. My role as a performing artist is to drop in and out, sucking up and spewing out their realities in a way that other people can make sense of. And I am comfortable with that role.

I'll still be gigging after the zombie apocalypse.