Tea, Tape and the Thirty Minutes Nobody Films

Doors at half seven. Which means, in practice, that everything that decides how the night goes has already happened by ten past.

I've never once watched footage of the half-hour before a show, because nobody films it. There's nothing to film. It's a woman in a cardigan asking a stranger where the kettle is.

7:02pm, and the Room Isn't Mine Yet

Walking in is the strangest part. The room is already full of something — chairs, other people's leaflets, a faint smell of carpet — and it is not yet yours. It becomes yours at some point in the next thirty minutes, and you can't rush it, and you can't fake it.

So I walk the perimeter. Slowly, usually with a mug I've been given by someone who has been running this venue for eleven years and knows more about the evening than I do. I look at where the third row sits. I look at whether the door behind me opens inwards or outwards. I look for the bit of floor that will squeak.

The Actual Checklist

It's shorter than people expect, and most of it isn't musical.

Where is the tea. Where are the toilets, and does that door bang. Where do I stand, and is there anything within one metre I could knock over. What's the sightline like from the back, and from the side, and from the seat directly in front of the speaker. Is the lead long enough to reach the far corner, and if not, will I want to go there at any point. Who's on the door, and what's their name, and would they mind very much if I asked them to shut it during the quiet one.

Then about four bars of the trickiest song. Not the whole thing. Just the join, the one that comes apart if I haven't touched it since Wednesday. Play it once, badly, and leave it alone.

What I Don't Do In the Last Twenty Minutes

No new songs. I've learned this the hard way — the half-hour before doors is not the time to discover that a chorus I haven't played since the demo needs a different chord. It never works and it puts the nerves somewhere unhelpful.

No looking at how many tickets were sold. The number is the number and it stopped being actionable at about three o'clock.

No apologising in advance. Not out loud, not in my head. A room of forty people in a bookshop doesn't need me to tell them it's a small crowd.

And no checking anything with a stranger's opinion embedded in it. The phone goes face down. Whatever's on it can wait until the interval.

Kettle Politics

There is always a kettle. It's just never where you'd sensibly put it.

In a village hall it's an urn, which is a different drink entirely — tea that tastes faintly of the urn's previous life, served in a cup that's slightly too hot to hold with one hand. In a bookshop it's a tiny kettle behind the counter, and a bookseller who makes you a proper cup because they've decided, correctly, that this is part of the job. In a city venue it's a green room that turns out to be a corridor with a mirror in it, and a catering tray of teabags, and a sign saying no hot drinks past this point.

The tea isn't really about tea. It's about having something to do with your hands in a room where you currently have no function, and about letting somebody look after you for four minutes. Some of the best conversations I've had on this circuit have been with a stranger holding a kettle, both of us waiting for it to boil.

Gaffer Tape Is a Love Language

I tape down everything. The cable, obviously, because I've seen a man go over mid-song and I'd rather not. But also the setlist, if the setlist's on the floor. The poster that's come away from the wall behind me. The corner of the mat by the door that keeps folding over.

There's something in it that settles me — small, boring, useful actions in the wrong order. Your hands are busy, so your head can't get too far ahead of itself. Ten minutes of taping things down will do more for a set of nerves than any amount of breathing exercises, in my experience.

The Ten Minutes I Sit Still

Somewhere around twenty past seven — if the venue will let me, and most will if I ask nicely — I sit in the room on my own. Chairs laid out, lights up, nobody in them.

It's not meditation, I'm not that organised. It's just letting the room get used to me and me get used to it. I listen to what it sounds like empty, because that's the sound I'll be fighting or working with later. If there's a hum from a fridge, better to know now. If the heating clicks every eight minutes, I'd like that written into the set rather than arriving as a surprise.

Nerves never go anywhere, by the way. I've stopped trying to remove them. They're just the body getting ready to be accurate — hands a bit cold, everything slightly too loud. The trick is giving them a job. Taping a cable is a job.

Three Rooms, Three Half-Hours

The bookshop. Everything happens close to the floor. Chairs scrape, someone's always arriving late and squeezing past three rows, and the room has a hush in it that you can hear before you've played a note. I keep the pre-show quiet here. No running the set. Just tea, tape, and a look at the front row to see who's come early on purpose.

The village hall. The most honest room on the circuit, and the least forgiving. Hard walls, a stage a foot high, a kitchen hatch that clatters. Here the half-hour is practical: I want the heating off before people arrive, I want to know which dance-floor board squeaks, and I want to have made friends with whoever's on the tea, because that person controls the second half of the evening.

The city venue. More bodies, more noise, more everything. This is where I'm most likely to over-prepare and least likely to need to. The trick here is to actively do less — fewer checks, less walking about, one cup of tea instead of three. A busy room will carry you if you don't fight it.

7:30pm, Somebody Opens a Door

Then the sound of the first few people coming in, shuffling out of coats, deciding where to sit, deciding whether to sit at all. The particular hush that isn't silence. Someone in the back flipping a sign from closed to open.

I put the mug down wherever's safe, take the capo out of my pocket and put it straight back, and stand just off to the side where I can hear the room filling up without being in the middle of it.

Thirty minutes, and nothing much happens. It's my favourite part of the day.