Where is my band going?

Since 2005, I have been playing second guitar and keyboards and singing with a local amateur covers band.

What do we have? Well let me tackle that question a different way but listing the things we don’t have:
- a stable line up
- a name
- a shared vision of what we want to do
- a regular gig (or any gig, in fact)
- a demo CD
- a web site

…and the list goes on.

In other words, my fellow musicians seem quite content to lark around for a couple of hours in a rehearsal studio every week, but are totally resistant to those annoying, non music-making activities that we would need to do to make the thing work. Yes, I’m talking planning, organisation, promotion, marketing, networking, advertising, selling ourselves.

We held a poorly attended crisis meeting last week at which not much was decided and discussion was pretty well limited to what songs to include (or exclude) in our repertoire.

Furthermore despite intense lobbying on my part, the band has steadfastly refused to have a go at any of my songs, although pretty well all of them are well suited to our line up.

You could say that as we don’t ever play anywhere, this doesn’t matter. Which is true, but I would still like to hear what these songs sound like played by a real band, rather than a PC sound card.

On the plus side, we are all competent musicians united by a love of good rock and pop. We really should be doing better.

So as you can see, moving into 2009, the band is not the potential source of pleasure that it should be.

Still it is –as they say- the only ball game in town as regards to playing music with other people, so for the moment I’m sticking with it.