After nearly a year of putting on shows, we’ve
noticed that there’s been a few conversations with friends asking, politely,
what we think we’re doing – and we’re expecting a few more now we’re putting on
a Queer Vegan pop punk band with what is basically an Oi! influenced hardcore punk band.
So, the pre-emptive short answer is: putting on some bands every couple of
months so that there’s something for us to look forward to. Which isn’t to
say that there aren’t other things to look forward to or that other things
aren’t happening. But really, A Public Disservice Announcement collective is just two blokes
putting on music they like just in case no one else does.
*
Only, it’s sort of not. Because there is no one
way to book a show. This means that we have to make decisions that are shaped
by larger ideas, decisions that are often informed by a broader vision of what
DIY is. We have choices that we have to navigate whether we like it or not -
and how we do that creates meaning.
One of
these choices is how we build community. On its most basic level, we have to
think about this because - although we’re putting in the leg work to make
something happen which gives us a degree of ownership over the whole thing - we
need people to attend to make our shows viable. At a very minimum, building
community means we want people in the room so we can pay bands. We’re aware
that there are complicated reasons why people don’t attend shows, but it also
seems that part of the responsibility for that not happening is the promoters’.
We’ve got many jobs to do but a lot of them involve making sure people turn up.
We think that this is setting bar pretty low in
terms of community building, although we suck even at this. But still. We want
people to turn out but we also want them to come back. We are aware that we’re
following in the footsteps of a great many DIY hardcore punks in Southampton,
both those remembered and beatified and those forgotten and scattered. One of
the things that most of those scenes got right was that they brought likeminded
people together semi-regularly. From this, other projects grew, including a
slew of bands and zines, distros, labels and other collectives. We’d like to
help contribute to providing and sustaining an environment where this happens
and we try to make choices that support this goal.
Those shows were fairly musically diverse. Some of
this diversity was pragmatic and those pragmatic choices remain relevant to us.
We aren’t convinced that there’s enough of x scene in Southampton to sustain
shows of x type of band. We worry that this logic leads to micro scenes of poor
turn outs, frustration, financial loss and burn out. There is, then, a basic
reason to bring together diverse line ups: bringing all these people in to a
room together on the assumption that three different types of punk/hardcore
band means three times the crowd.
But less pragmatically, between us we like lots of
different sub-genres of hardcore and punk. If you draw a Venn diagram, there’s
plenty of overlap, but also plenty of overspill. This means that we’re likely
to put on a wide range of bands totally unapologetically (and for stuff we
won’t touch, we’re really happy for someone else to put on in our absence (we
might even show up)). We’ve also been around long enough that we’re sort of
bored of seeing six bands that sound the same. We would rather see three
different sounding bands and like only one - much more than we would being lulled
by the same sound over and over.
We are also wary of compartmentalising. We don’t
get punks that don’t like any hardcore and hardcore kids that don’t like punk.
There’s differences obviously, but there’s plenty in common, including the DIY
ethic and we’re trying to recreate that space where these commonalities can
coexist, talk to one another and build something viable.
Finally, although those scenes were politically
progressive, we’re now at a stage in punk and hardcore where for whatever
reason, it seems like there are far more people playing in bands that,
demographically, aren’t just straight white dudes like us. It seems to us that
you have to look a bit harder to find these bands, but why wouldn’t we do that regularly?
We’re looking backwards to learn from the ways things were done before but that
doesn’t mean we aren’t looking at what’s going on around us and trying to
create spaces where people can see their identities represented.
While we have always tried to make our line-ups
diverse in these ways, we've of course fallen short quite a few times.
Sometimes the practical aspects of putting on monthly shows, or not being able
to do a show when a band with non-male, non-straight and non-white members is
looking for one, leads to lineups that aren’t diverse in gender, sexuality or
race and ethnicity. But we’re trying and we’re going to keep trying to make
sure what we do more accurately represents the DIY community without resorting
to the tokenism of putting on shit bands we don’t like. This is another choice
(and one that leads to many further choices) and we’re stumbling through the
implications of this rather than presenting a pre-emptive set of excuses.
*
All organising is basically guess work. It’s
having a goal then a theory of how to achieve it. This theory may or may not be
correct and even if it is, it’ll always need tweaking - not least because there
are factors that are unaccounted for and beyond anyone’s control. Part of
writing a blog like this is working through problems and coming up with
theories that might be robust or might disappear into the ever growing pile of
shit ideas and financial losses.
We’d struggle to define success but still - A Public Disservice Announcement collective has been mostly successful so far, whatever that
means. But there’s also been bands that broke down on the M4 and never made it.
We put on an amazing show that 5 people paid into and had to do the walk of
shame to the cash point. This project might fizzle out next week. But it might
go on for years until one of us drops down dead. We’d like to say that we’ll
never let our egos define us or become territorial - but we’re both getting
older and we’ve both got access to Twitter.
Basically though. Were two blokes putting on bands
we like. We appreciate the support more than you know.
