Open Mic

From the first bum note – a plinkety-plonk-like strum of a woefully out-of-tune acoustic guitar – and the strangled cat vocal that followed, Kathy’s face contorted, like a stroke-sufferer, mid-seismic-seizure.

“My God,” she whispered to Niall, “he’s literally making my ears hurt this week.”

“It really is awful,” he whispered back. “Somebody should tell him. Put him out of his misery.”

Their eyes met; wicked smirks broke out across their faces; schadenfreude at its most playfully malicious.

Every Thursday, they called into the Black Swan for open-mic night. Why this had become a regular thing, neither would’ve readily admitted, certainly not to each other. One mid-summer evening, a few months back, they were walking home after a disastrous (and hugely overpriced) curry, conducting one of those petty, pointless, yet hugely spiteful arguments moderately unhappy couples of long-standing often conduct. Caustic jibes had quicky turned to blanket silence. Neither could bear the frictional formalities that awaited them if they returned home right away.

“Hey, look.” Niall pointed across the street. “There’s live music on in the pub. Do you fancy a nightcap? Who knows? It might be interesting.”

As they walked through to the still sun-drenched beer garden, an old man in his late sixties – balding, paunchy, red-faced, more retired plumber than former rock god – was halfway through a rousing rendition of Bob Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat.

“You were right,” said Kathy. “That old guy is brilliant. It’s like having a full-blown live gig right on your doorstep.”

“Who needs Glastonbury, eh? Why don’t you grab those seats over there? I’ll get us some drinks.”

There was a short break after the old man had finished his sterling Dylan cover, which gave Niall plenty of time to get the drinks before the next act started.

“I wonder who that guy is?” He placed two pints of golden, frothy-topped IPA onto the table. “The one over there with the camera.”

Discreetly, he nodded to a young man dressed like a sixties’ beatnik – long straggly hair poking out from the sides of a fedora-style hat, goatee beard, John Lennon glasses, leather jacket, frilly purple shirt, bell-bottom cords, and a pair of Cuban-heeled boots that must’ve elevated his height by a good seven to eight inches. With a vintage video Sony camera in his hand he was ducking in between tables, intently filming the next musicians as they set up, moving in a hugely stylised, almost choreographed, affected manner, as if he was the one being filmed, not the one doing the filming.

“Maybe there’s someone quite well known playing tonight?” Kathy speculated.

“Yeah, maybe there is.”

The next act – a young hippie-type girl on vocals and a long-haired forty-something playing soft acoustic guitar – performed a mesmerising version of Fade into You by Mazzy Star. Then an American guy with a frothy cappuccino perm sang one of his own compositions, a husky, involving ballad about never being able to get over his first love

“He was the best yet,” Kathy enthused, still clapping long after the applause from everyone else had petered out. “Absolutely brilliant. Joe Cocker meets Harry Nilsson.”

“On par with the first act, the older guy, no doubt,” Niall grudgingly conceded, not liking the way his wife was still staring at the singer. “It’s incredible how much talent we’ve seen tonight. Most of these acts could be professional musicians, maybe they are. There’s such a fine line between making it big and playing to a half-empty pub on a Thursday night.”

“So true.” Kathy drained the last of her beer. “I mean, who decides these things?”

“Simon Cowell, I guess. Then again, why do something you don’t get paid for?”

“Such a shame.” She picked up their empty glasses. “Same again?”

By the time Kathy returned, the guy with the camera from earlier was tuning up a guitar on the makeshift stage at the bottom end of the garden.

Maybe if he hadn’t performed, they wouldn’t have given a second thought to ever returning again, regardless of how much they’d enjoyed the music, and how effectively it had distracted their minds from a disappointing meal and the same old arguments that had been dogging their increasingly fractious relationship of late.

“Oh, look,” said Kathy. “Stanley Kubrick in flares is about to sing a song.”

Sitting down on a stool, he strummed the acoustic guitar with a peace sign on the front and thanked everyone for coming, with all the casual assurance of a seasoned headline performer.

“Right, people, this is a little number I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Earlier in the summer, I was walking barefoot on the banks of the river at dawn, just as the sun was rising and a wispy mist hung over the water, and I had a kind of epiphany about life, love, and poetry. All the good stuff that nourishes the soul. This is called Melancholy Man, Man. Dig it.”

From the first of many bum notes, Kathy and Niall didn’t know where to look, certainly not at each other, for fear of bursting out laughing. Everything about the performance sounded wrong, from the flat, off-key voice to the far from competent strumming. The other customers had already lost interest and were talking amongst themselves, side on at best, or having totally turned their back on the stage, which, contextually, was even more offensive than the burst of derisive laughter Niall and Kathy were trying so stoically to repress – indifference has always been more cutting than any form of open hostility.

Mid-song, the musician (a term applied loosely) stopped singing and playing his guitar.

“Sorry, sorry,” he gasped, hunched over his instrument as if truly suffering for his art. “But I’m going to have to stop. I know it’s disappointing. But it’s just not happening tonight. I’ve had a virus…a bust-up with my girl…I shouldn’t have attempted the new song…it’s not ready yet.”

As disclaimers go, he’d just reeled off every conceivable extenuating circumstance pertinent to a poor performance possible before abruptly disappearing out of sight.

“That was beyond painful,” Niall whispered. “He certainly looks the part, but when it came to delivering…”

“I know,” said Kathy. “But great entertainment, nonetheless.”

It was all they talked about during the short walk home in what was, now, the early hours of the morning; all they talked about as they went to and from the ensuite bathroom, brushed their teeth, and climbed into bed; all they talked about at breakfast the next morning.

“And the bit where he tried to go all falsetto,” Niall could barely get his words out for chuckling so hard. “I swear a couple of empty wine glasses on the table next to us shattered.”

“Don’t!” Kathy slapped an open palm against the breakfast bar. “I’ve got so much respect for anyone brave enough to stand up there and sing. But surely, he must know how bad he is, especially in comparison to someone like the old man?”

“I guess some people are just supremely deluded.”

The following Thursday (and every subsequent Thursday thereafter), the couple, without making any express plans to do so, got changed into causal pub clothes, whisked the house keys up off the kitchen counter, and made their way down to the pub at around eight o’clock. A similar roster of singers performed each week, including the tuneless troubadour who routinely murdered every song he attempted, reducing them to such fits of repressed laugher, Kathy, post-menopausal and prone to bouts of light, sporadic incontinence, literally pissed in her pants, and had to dispose of them in the disabled toilets. Never in their twenty-four-year marriage had they ever bonded so strongly over something. No longer were there fraught, uncomfortable meals conducted in silence, or horribly protracted arguments about mortgage repayments, their collective dissatisfaction with their respective careers (Kathy was a paralegal, Niall an accountant), the real reasons why they’d remained childless, or their pedestrian if completely non-existent sex life. Rather than mere entertainment, the open-mic night diverted their attention from aspects of their life that had become almost unbearable. If they had a bad day at work, they didn’t take it out on each other anymore; they simply recalled a woeful vocal or off-key guitar solo, and all was well with the world again.

“Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next week.”

Every time they walked home in the early hours of the morning, they conducted the same (or very similar) conversation.

“You don’t think anybody heard us, do you? I’d hate to be seen as a heckler, a troll, or a bully.”

“No, no, of course not. We were tucked away in our corner there. No one was paying us any attention whatsoever. Besides, the music is always quite loud.”

Both felt a delicious anticipatory thrill when they saw the young man who had died on stage so emphatically during their first open-mic visit, a young man they’d since dubbed the Wailing Wall of Pain.

“Look, he’s shaved his little goatee off,” Kathy observed on what must’ve been their twelfth consecutive visit. “He looks so different.”

But his performance was just the same, just as excruciating. Perhaps realising – and the back-turning disinterest displayed by customers who’d been so enthralled and appreciative of the other performers was far from discreet – that he’d lost his audience, he started to shout rather than attempt to sing the lyrics to the same song he’d failed to sing through to the end for the best part of three months.

“My God,” she whispered, “he’s literally making my ears hurt this week.”

“I can’t believe he’s got the nerve to inflict himself on innocent bystanders like this. Why can’t he just sing in the shower?”

Quite when the music (again: loosely applied) stopped, or when everyone in the pub turned and looked at Niall and Kathy, lost in their own little cocoon world of uncomplimentary comments, neither could’ve said with any certainty.

“Hey you!” Wailing Wall screeched into the microphone, making stark, discordant feedback reverberate off the four walls and ceiling, like a bouncing ball, the sonic equivalent of nails being dragged across a blackboard.

Niall and Kathy looked up with guilty, panicky looks upon their faces.

“Yeah, you.” Wailing Wall, almost tearful by this point, trembling with emotion, jabbed a finger in their direction. “I see you down here every week, huddled in your little corner, taking the piss out of us performers. Who do you think you are? I’m one of the greatest singer/songwriters of my generation. You should be privileged to come here and watch me develop new material.”

This was such an empty, baseless boast Niall and Kathy were certain that one of the other customers would speak out, not so much in their defence, but to merely state an irrefutable fact.

“He’s right,” said, incredibly, the old man who’d covered Bob Dylan on their first visit. “Everybody who stands up on that stage and performs deserves respect.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” said Niall. “We were just –”

“Mocking someone expressing themselves,” the old man interrupted. “There’s nothing worse than that.”

“Yeah,” a dozen or more customers echoed his sentiments and glowered at Niall and Kathy. Only then did they realise just how different they were from these ordinary, much younger working-class people in their denim jeans and tracksuit tops.

“But you – you can actually sing and play guitar,” Niall said to the old man. “You know that he can’t do either, that’s he’s a dreadful performer, that he’s got absolutely zero star quality.”

“Practising an artform, no matter to what level, is a beautiful thing,” said the old man. “You should try it, get up on that stage, and sing a song. Now. I mean it. Truly. Let us scrutinise you like monkeys in a zoo, let us poke fingers, make snide comments, and laugh right in your faces.”

Niall and Kathy giggled nervously, in the way people do when finding themselves in an awkward situation, a confrontation with no readily identifiable resolution. Perhaps they thought he was joking, but it soon became apparent that he was in deadly earnest.

“What?” said Niall. “But we’re not musical people. We just like listening.”

“But you’re not listening, are you?” said the old man. “You’re judging. So let us judge you.”

“No, really…”

In the most unceremonious way imaginable, a gang of customers hustled them up out of their seats and frogmarched them over to the improvised stage at the bottom end of the bar.

“So,” said the old man, perched on a nearby stool, tuning his guitar. “What are you going to sing for us?”

Niall and Kathy shared another quick, panicky glance.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Ticket to Ride by The Beatles. We both like that one.”

“Good choice,” said the old man, standing up. “Me and Bartholomew” – he gestured to the Wailing Wall – “will accompany you on guitars.

“On your count,” he said, strapping his own guitar over his shoulder.

“A one-a-two-a-one-two-three-four.”

The musicians strummed out a pleasant, melodious intro; Niall and Kathy took a collective intake of breath and quickly exhaled before launching into the opening line of the song.

“I think I’m gonna be sad, I think it’s today, yeah…”

After a shaky start, they relaxed, smiled at each other, and started to sing their hearts out, to, perversely, enjoy standing up in front of these hostile strangers and expressing themselves in the same way the old man had mentioned a few minutes ago.

“I don’t know why she’s riding so high, she ought to think twice, she ought to do right by me-e-ee…”

Just as they were about to launch into the second chorus, they became aware of some disgruntled murmurings:

“So shit.”

“Embarrassing.”

“Got the nerve to poke fun at others, when they can barely hold a note themselves.”

Soon, no one in the crowd was watching them anymore; they either had their backs turned, were talking amongst themselves, or were queuing at the bar for drinks.

“Keep going,” hissed the old man. “Finish what you’ve started.”

***

“Those miserable bastards,” Niall moaned during their short walk home. “I, for one, thought we were bloody brilliant once we got into stride.”

“I know. Sour grapes, if you ask me. At least we can actually sing, unlike Bartholemew or whatever-his-bloody-name-is. We were so much better than most of the people we’ve seen perform there over the last few months.”

“You know something? We should check the local paper. I bet there are loads of pubs that do open-mic nights around here. Maybe we could put an ad in the paper, find a few local musicians to support us.”

“Great idea. It could become a little sideline. Neither of us has been happy at work for a long time, have we? Maybe we could bring in some extra cash on the side, enough to support ourselves, even.”

BIO: Neil Randall is a novelist and short story writer. His latest books, The Professional Mourner (Dark Winter Press) and The Belgrade School Shootings (Alien Buddha Press) were released in May of last year. His shorter fiction and poetry have been published in the U.K., U.S., India, Australia, and Canada. Further news and samples of his work can be viewed at: https://narandall.blogspot.com/, including links to his new online review show Randall Reads…where the author reviews a book each week that made a big impression on him, and help shaped him as a writer.