One very valid answer
to this is ‘who fucking cares’, particularly faced with a horrific death toll. You’d
be forgiven if you stopped reading here and decided we were assholes.
But this pandora’s-box-of-a-question
is one way to think about how we mark what the pandemic has done to our lives.
What we mean by this is that if the cancelled shows are removed from the
sequence, there’s no marker that they were ever going to take place to start with.
Because we book up shows months in advance, we hadn’t even announced a couple
of them. That matters because what the pandemic prevented was the potential to
make connections with new bands and new culture, to meet old friends and make
new ones and all the ripples that come from that. In basic terms, it destroyed
a whole bunch of potentially good things that improve our quality of life. Covid-19
stopped these potentials from becoming the actuals they would have been in a better
timeline.
Faced with the hard
reality of tens of thousands of deaths and a collapsing economy, these losses
seem like fuck all. Much worse has been lost and will yet be lost. But on the
other hand, punk is obviously important to many of us else we wouldn’t put so
much time and energy into it – particularly those of us who are explicit about a
non-profit, DIY approach. So ignoring these losses seems a small erasure of one
of ways the pandemic has impacted on our lives. Focusing on hospitals and death
tolls is obviously far more important and we’re both watching the body count
rise with horror, sadness and rage. But its a partial picture. If all these
tiny potentials are erased, when we look back at this nightmare, our view of what
we’ve lost won’t be as rich as it should be. And perhaps it is this view that
will effect what we rebuild.
So shows #19-22 won’t
take place - but they will stay in our chronology. When, as we did for shows #1-10,
we make a poster or whatever commemorating this sequence of shows, these shows
will be included as a reminder of the potentials that the pandemic stopped from
being actuals. And maybe that will also help us to remember what else we lost
that was more important.
*
Part of marking shows #19-22
was also the creation of a free download
compilation. We’d already done a lot of work towards making these shows
happen so this work was repurposed in to a ‘mixtape’ of bands that should have
played these shows. In this way, something that should have happened in one
form became something else. This something was something worthwhile in its own
right but part of what it did was highlight what could have been.
Curating it made us
think: what the fuck does DIY hardcore punk look like in a pandemic?
Sometimes these things
are easier to think about visually. In one corner of the triangle, there’s
Covid-19. That’s not only the lockdown and the conditions it imposes, but also
the obligation to remember the tragedies of the pandemic, large and small. In
another corner is community. One of our goals in organising shows is to help
contribute to a scene, to help people make positive connections and to give our
friends spaces play shows. The third corner is us – we’re trying to have a good
time, which is a big part of why we book shows of course. For all the
altruistic goals we set ourselves, we’re mostly trying to make something happen
in a city that often feels like its deliberately talking to someone else.
We’re aiming then for X
– the centre point between all these considerations. To organise something that
acknowledges the losses and restrictions of the pandemic, that makes
connections between people and also helps us stay positive whilst muddling on
through. We hope the compilation does that – and we think that this is as good
a map forward as any.
Today, we
were very close to announcing a show we’ve had in the works for a long time.
After some discussion with each other and some of the bands, we decided to
wait. There’s a rush to escape lockdown. It’d be disingenuous
to pretend that we didn’t feel that too. But at the same time, we don’t want a rushed
return that leads to even more deaths or ignores the concerns and wellbeing of
the vulnerable. We’re only a tiny voice but on reflection, we’re wary of joining
any chorus that leads to that.
A lot of tiny voices
start to sound pretty loud.
It’d be equally disingenuous
to pretend that that conclusion wasn’t one that took some working through but
that’s part of the point. We’re just muddling through. When July comes and we
need to make a decision on APDA #23, we’ll muddle through some more - and it
might be that X doesn’t look like what we’ve been planning for months after all.
