I’m up in Issan at the moment for a few days with my wife. We are visiting her family in her home village of Nong Han outside Udon Thani. It’s nice and quiet, but a week is too long. There really isn’t much to do, not even if you drive 40km into Udon, except write daft songs on a phin. (See video here!)
I miss my cat and my friends and I miss Phuket, its bars and its beaches. But above all, I miss quality live music. We are so lucky here to have so many great musicians and bands playing. And we don’t know how lucky we are.
You see, I’m amazed sometimes at how empty a Phuket bar can be when you can hear a terrific band playing there. And it’s usually just over 200 baht for a beer and a decent glass of wine for Mrs Tong Dee (who’s even happy about the state of the toilets these days!). It’s got to be more about inertia than expense.
So come on everyone! Count your blessings, support our musicians, check out the Cool Venues page on here, join Phuket Gigs Tonight group, and maybe I’ll meet up with you out somewhere soon.
It’s great fun covering live music for the Phuket News. Yes, I can blag myself into a show, get free food or beer maybe, stumble though a song or two with some great musicians and play some ragged harmonica. But the big reward for me in all this? I can be nosy and no one seems to mind.
Maybe it’s genetic as my mum was nosy. She always wanted to know what was going on in the small fishing village I come from. However, if she was interested in the community where we lived, I’m drawn to understanding the musical community here, which I see as a lot more interesting than, say, Newlyn, UK, population: 1,832.
You see, I’ve always been fascinated in what makes people tick. It’s why I studied Psychology at university and trained to be a counselor. I want to know what motivates them, how they make use of their talents and personality, and what makes them different. And now I can tell others their story if they want.
Take my friends Joseph and Lisa who perform with Hard Rock’s house band, February Cherry. Yes, Lisa is a terrific singer and Joseph is a very talented guitarist, but there seem plenty of them around. Why are they playing in Hard Rock every night and others are not? What got them the job? What made them stand out?
When I last saw them at Hard Rock’s reopening ceremony, Lisa engaged marvelously well with the audience between songs and Joseph was up playing on the bar within about 10 minutes. In such ways they show that there’s much more to being a successful act than just singing and playing well.
Take Freddy Mercury for example, regularly voted the best Rock vocalist ever. Yes, he had a five octave voice; yes, he was pitch perfect; yes, he had perfect vibrato. But I’m sure there were other singers around who could sing as well as he did. It was something else that that made him the best, something extra that gave him the X -Factor if you like. Yes, Freddy knew how to strut about the stage, Lisa and Joseph too, but it’s not all necessarily just about being flamboyant.
Take Johnny Cash – he couldn’t sing or play guitar well; Bob Dylan had a voice like sand and glue (as goes the song); Ozzy Osbourne had all the poses and stage moves of an iguana (actually, that’s not fair on iguanas); Bjork was just…well…plain weird. Yet they all became successful because they came across as somehow authentic and different. It’s therefore got something to do with our personality and how it’s expressed, and that is precisely where journalists can help.
So if you know someone who wants to be a star, tell them to not just blindly follow the crowd by crudely aping some aging rock star. Instead of covers, maybe try out their own stuff. Tell them: “Be yourself, be different, and have confidence and sincerity in what you do.”
“Stand out in some way from the crowd. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll show people something uniquely special about you and they’ll want to know more.”
And you’ll give someone nosy like me a story to write about!
Well, I can’t put it off any longer… I’ve left it as long as I can, but with tourists likely to start arriving in numbers soon, I need a Social Media Strategy for Phuket Music Scene. ARRGH!
Can you remember the Dirty Harry film where the villain drives away, his car blows up, and Clint Eastwood says with a deadpan face and tired voice, “A man’s gotta know his limitations…” Well, mine is computers.
When I was about eight, the nearest computer was 30 miles away in Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall which had huge dishes trained on satellites. It was the size of a bus and stored information by cutting out holes on rolls of paper. The next nearest one was probably 120 miles away in Exeter University. Now there’s one in your coffee machine and…guess what? You can’t figure out how to work the ruddy thing. So I still use a push down cafeteria as nothing that way can possibly go wrong and I won’t get stressed and destroy anything.
But now I’m told I need to sit down in front of the home PC and increase Phuket Music Scene’s online digital footprint, whatever that means. I don’t want to. I’d rather be out in some bar listening to a new act or jamming with my friends.
However, it’s important we get music here buzzing again and all the information online is now well out of date with many venues permanently closed. My intention was to do something about this through Phuket Music Scene, to provide a one-stop information site for live music here for visitors. So I better not moan and just get on with it!
The heartening things is know I have friends who will help and who see the need for all of this. You too can help – join the PMS group, visit my Facebook page and be my friend, share stuff, etc.
Together let’s keep music live, and let’s get musicians making some money!
Finally, after several months, Phuket’s bars are now selling alcohol again with live music allowed until 10 pm. Phuket’s bar owners, staff and musicians have suffered terribly, and for what purpose?
“To prevent the spread of Covid” would be the answer from those who made this decision. Yet restaurants stayed open and were well attended. Surely they too should have been closed with only deliveries by Grab etc permitted? Does drinking alcohol and hearing live music make us more prone to catching Covid?
As usual, there was absolutely no logic at all to all of this. The anti-alcohol and anti-fun lobby run things here now, hence the failiure of the Sandbox scheme and another High Season devoid of tourists. Tourism will take years to get over this and it may never return to its glory days ten years ago. More and more silly complex laws and the constant flip-flopping in decision-making we have seen doesn’t help.
However, Phuket Music Scene IS here to help! We will try to keep you informed of any new developments as live music resumes.
I was so sad to hear about Charlie. He was my favorite drummer and my favorite Stone. A quiet unassuming old school gentleman who went to bed with a good book on tour rather than groupies. In this way, he was an example to others of faithfulness to his wife and good manners ….except when he punched Jagger nearly out of a window in Amsterdam, but he deserved that of course.
It seems extraordinary that he ended up in the most famous Rock and Roll band in the world. He didn’t like playing rock as much as jazz where he started out drumming. But the Stones pursued him mercilessly when looking for a drummer. Charlie was their first choice.
It might seem strange to us now, but their early ambition was just to be the best blues band in London and play three or four nights a week in clubs. Charlie would be ideal for that, with his love of the jazzy swing beat. However, things didn’t quite turn out as they expected!
The popular music scene is full of the vain and pompous, the thrusting and the self-obsessed. We needed Charlie tapping reliably and emotionlessly away at the back of the stage on his battered, ancient, tiny kit. It was if he was destined by the gods to be there to remind us that the Jaggers of this world are an aberration fit only for the stage.
It’s not, in reality, how we would want people to be….
