Boss Radio

Actually they call it the 'Electric jam' now because so many people (Me included) were taking enormous liberties with the term 'blues'. Anyway, we got ourselves all ready - Eventually - and wandered our slow but merry way down to the venue, me clutching a little case with a couple of pedals I needed because I'd decided I was going to play a little Frank Zappa tonight, and 'The Les Paul with no name', which is the best guitar for playing Zappa on, and mum clinging on to my arm because she's a little wobbly on her pins at the moment.

I sensed that something was awry as we walked alongside the pub. There was no sound from inside. We were almost half an hour late and even without me there there should have been some kind of music going on. Hey, I may be good but I'm not Mr. Anello.

Sure enough, when we got to the doors they were locked. One of the bars had a single solitary light on, the other (The music bar) was in total darkness. The only other illumination came from an upstairs window. Mum wanted to bang on the door but I decided the locked doors made it obvious enough that nothing was happening tonight, and we set off home again. Of all the nights for us to be late...

Once safely home I clambered onto the internet and looked up the venue's website. It simply stated that 'The PRS has won' and that the venue was closed for the foreseeable future.

This seemed a little odd. The PRS like to get their money, but they're not in the business of closing down music venues - that's a little counter productive when you're very existence depends upon music venues - so I had a look through the pages of the local music magazine. The forums there were alive with opinions, but all they did was to confirm to me that human beings are their own worst enemies.

Years ago when I had a living to earn out of music I well remember pointless discussions and wasted hours of my life at the Musician's Union as various members complained about being asked to fill in the PRS forms by the management and how the Union should do something about it because "It's not our job". I still remember the eerie silence that followed when I finally opened my mouth on the subject and pointed out that as a musician a large part of my livelihood depended upon songwriters writing songs for me to perform and that I didn't see it as a chore having to fill out a form that would mean that those songwriters got paid for doing it. Indeed, after being told by a couple of promoters that they always filled in the form with a list of their favourite songs irrespective of what had actually been played I was even more determined to fill the things in myself. I obtained some forms, filled in every song that we knew, then Xeroxed them. After that all I had to do after each gig was to cross off the songs which we hadn't played...

A few years ago the rules got changed as a result of so many people not wanting to be bothered writing out those danged forms. In future the PRS would guess what you were playing and divvy up the proceeds accordingly, so all most venues (That would be the discos...) would have to do would be to hand over the dosh once a year. Had I still been an active member of the Union I would have objected to this since it seems to me that this simply means that the money would now be distributed unfairly with a 'big star' bias. Of course in live venues some, make that 'most', of the artists would be performing their own material, so, unbeknownst to me, the PRS still required the affected venues to keep a list of the cover versions played.

It seems that while the owner of the venue was good at the public house game and excellent at the music game, she was pretty crap at the businesswoman game, and she hadn't been keeping the list, so the PRS did what they'd always done and guessed. The bill was quite a bit higher than expected. The promoter asked for a rethink on the grounds that blues nights and indie bands used very little music of interest to the PRS, they, of course, were unable to oblige. If they had everyone would have been trying it on. Meanwhile the promoter had spent most of her money making the venue a better place for music, and also in providing an area for the now outlawed smokers to go and smoke and still hear the music, so she couldn't pay the bill.

The months passed and the PRS just followed their usual course and issued court proceedings. For reasons known only to herself the promoter chose to ignore them until, two days before my electric night, she found herself, with the absolute minimum of notice, in court. By now she couldn't even afford a solicitor, and, apparently unaware that this could really be serious, tried to represent herself. The court, of course, had no choice but to find against her, and when she pointed out that she couldn't pay the courts declared her bankrupt. Nothing that the PRS could do about this even if they wanted to.

Now here's where it gets convoluted. Because she was now a bankrupt she was disqualified from running a business, so her only means of paying off the bill, her venue, had to close down.

It's a weird world. She was in the wrong, no doubt about that, but I can't help but think that if my fellow musicians weren't so bloody-minded about filling in those forms, we might still have somewhere to play...