Professional Dignity

I know I've blogged a lot over the last couple of days, but sometimes things need to be said fairly urgently. As an 'artist', whether that be an actor, a musician, a playwright - if you or your work is being performed in public, you always strive for as near perfection as you can get. That can often be killing, because good gigs - and that's those really good gigs where you connect with the audience, where you're playing well, are so rare, but we live for those moments. Often, there are misunderstandings. I write this blog in a rush - and my remarks are often off the cuff, straight after the event itself, and are blurted out, but they are always very honest. It seems some locals at the excellent venue we played at recently, The White Swan in Bluntisham, have taken offence to one or two things I wrote in my 'gig report' of our recent show there. That gig was problematic for us on a practical level, because we had a great deal of issues with our own PA system, and as a result we could barely hear what we were playing. This takes me back to our striving for perfection thing - we didn't enjoy the gig as much as we could have done because ultimately, when we're playing in front of such an enthusiastic audience - we want to do our very best for them, and due to reasons beyond our control we couldn't do that. That is absolutely nothing against the venue, or it's people. Let's be honest - if I had said it was 'the best gig ever' people would have surely felt short changed, because we know that, on a day when technology isn't against us, we can put on a better gig than than the one we did then, and we really, really cared about the White Swan gig because it was a big homecoming for Jon and we wanted to put on the best show we possibly could. If I had said it was 'the best gig ever' it was probably a sign that we didn't care about the venue, or the people watching, when we actually, honestly do.