NYE WMC 2011/2.

So New Year’s Eve at our local Working Men’s Club. I feel fraudulent in that my membership is hours away from being two years out of date, I’m retired and before that I got paid for enjoying myself which doesn’t really constitute work. This is born out by the first round of Bingo. To everyone else is appears to be a pleasant, engaging pastime but to me it was, well work, and unprofitable work at that. So we installed at our table at 7.30 and by 8.30 when the band came on we were already talking about the need for pacing. The band, ‘Jack of Hearts’ is led by Jackmouse who is in turn led by Jackmouse’s ego in the form of a permanent wide brimmed black hat, which gives him the appearance of a guitarist suspended from the claws of a hovering crow. Now music-musician-audience is a delicate triangle especially in a WMC. One wouldn’t for example play a selection of the Third Reich’s Greatest Hits at a bar mitzvah. Likewise one shouldn’t hire a blues band to play a once a year NYE gig, especially one who’s trumpet player thought little of playing in a different key to everyone else and a mix engineer who couldn’t hear the low frequency feedback reminiscent of a passing tube train inches below our feet. I’m torn: I know the months of hard work, practice and the odd fight required to put a band and a set together but that counts for little with an audience that don’t. An audience only wants what they have fondly imagined to be fulfilled, and Dock of the Bay wasn’t it on NYE at the WMC. Thirty minutes of mild unrest and back to Bingo and its variants, Dingo, Pingo and Jingo. Margretmouse proudly whipped out her dibber and it was eyes down to watch your stake disappear. Fag breaks become more frequent as I avoid both the bingo and the band. Half way down the left wall is the Fat Controller/bingo caller behind a tinsel dais. As he proclaims the miracle of counting to the crowded hall a young girl on a spot lit stairway hitches up her knickers in a matter of fact way whilst kids of all ages entertain themselves as their parents drink with one hand and lose with the other. The Fat Controller, like many of the men, is 13 stone from the back and 16 stone from the front. He is chair of the committee, President of the proceedings. The doorman, tasked to keep non-members out is by this time pissed as Canute and letting anyone in for 50p. I talk to a chap at the fag station who has come back ‘up north’ because people are unfriendly ‘down south.’ After ten minutes I know why. I go back inside. The band is playing, the subway train is still passing and the trumpet player is still blasting out eastern semitones to a Jimi Hendrix cover. The evening is also ‘bring your own food’, which proves a god send for passing the time. Margaretmouse, as is her wont, has brought cheese, ham, pastrami and roast pork rolls, bottles of gherkins and funeral onions, at lest that’s what my parents called them, tortillas, bread sticks and, well we never did get to the bottom of her bag. By now it’s twenty to twelve, I’m sober but coughing like a drain. The Fat Controller has had enough of the band and orders Jackmouse to sling his hook. And he’d changed his shirt for the second half, shame. His evening has not gone as he had fondly imagined. The FC, in an effort to raise the mood to a midnight climax, then put on a sounds of the sixties medley featuring The Supremes. We joined hands, sang Old Langsyne and went home. An enjoyable evening, but not as we’d fondly imagined it.