Pre-Show
I’m behind the mixing desk at the Pavilion for the Winter Battle of the Bands, as I have been for two competitions a year since lockdown lifted. Music isn’t sport, but here we treat it like it is.
Hard funk outfit Mr Pink, currently sound checking, would score highly on any objective measure of technical skill – their tricky, chromatic riffs chop deftly between groove and metal as vocals soar and scream without dropping pitch. They’re multi-time finalists, looking to be the bride rather bridesmaid this time round. And there’s the rub – they’re note-perfect, but there’s no accounting for taste.
More people listen to Bob Dylan than any operatic soprano, and everyone’s favourite song is someone else’s teeth-grindingly awkward teenage memory / soulless corporate schlock / atonal noise. So you can’t rank art (someone tell Rolling Stone), but given it’s hard to run gigs and harder to get people to come to them, a competition is a useful gimmick. The musicians get some ready made leverage to crowbar friends and families off sofas to come swell the crowd vote. For a lot of the acts, they rarely play to as packed a room as they might at the BotB.
Not that this necessarily translates into financial recompense. The format does introduce a winner(s)-takes-all model which some understandably find hard to stomach, but the realities of playing original material are not lost on Phil McCaroll (SO:NI) and Sean McCann (BGO) – performers themselves, competition organisers and champions of local music.
The Heats
Five heats with five bands each is something of an endurance challenge for a sound tech. Festivals are one of the few types of shows I work with more turnaround, and coincidentally a BotB is a pretty great format for acts looking to hone a tight 20 for a festival slot. There’s no hierarchy in the running order at the BotB either; everyone has the same compressed stage times, no-one gets the glory of a long headline set.
Despite the frugal window of opportunity, it’s easy to tell early on that some bands are going all the way. Mr Pink have done it before of course, and the Zac Mac Band immediately demonstrate a combo of tight songs and shreddy virtuosity. I don’t have to turn to where the judges are sitting to know their jaws are descending towards the table. It gives them a break from fretting about getting enough punters in, but really the surprising thing is that anyone comes down to support their mates on a cold, rainy Wednesday night in February.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s several bands clearly playing one of their first shows. They don’t make it through, but they are getting the essential lessons you learn one a gig at a time – an imperfect performance doesn’t kill you, volume is counterproductive, the show must go on.
By and large the best acts make the semis, but format casualties at the heat stage included a stylistically-strong gothic three-piece fronted by Alice Sloan and fiddle-and-guitar folk outfit Trist. Disappointing, but demonstrative of the density of talent in this small corner of the world.
Semi-Finals
Which brings us back to ranking art – I’d pegged the technically impressive neo-soul collective WhoIsKalla? as sure-fire finalists, but they stall out in the semis. They’re one of those good problems as far as my work goes – complicated to set up and mix, with samplers, keyboards and multiple bits of percussion on top of the standard drum/bass/guitars, but as rewarding as they are fiddly. I’m sweating by the time I make it back to the desk, having crammed their set-up into the truncated changeover times, but soon my head is nodding of its own accord. The audience love them too, getting particularly loud on the band’s obvious single Shine, and their sprawling ambient funk strikes people as a change of pace and colour throughout.
So why was I so wrong? Partly, it’s the crowd vote (a quarter of the score), partly it’s the individual taste and estimation of the panel – the two organisers plus a weekly guest judge (the likes of the Thin Air/Junk Drawer’s Brian Coney, Wynona Bleach’s Melyssa Shannon, Rew’s Shauna Tohill, world-record-holding drummer Allister Brown etc.). Their task is to rank the bands on more abstract measures of quality than simply whose music they like the best, but inevitably our prior assessments of what constitutes artistic value will still colour what we see as ‘good’ independent of our own taste.
Most bands you see at this level have guitars and drums and play what you could describe as some kind of rock, but there’s still a reasonable minority who don’t, and they rarely seem apply to play the BotB. It’s hard to untangle the chicken and the egg – do groups playing other genres see the competition as not for them? Does the format favour high-energy stylings and swagger? Do other musical subcultures have different takes on what’s worthy or cool? Probably!
Grand Final
Enough people find it sufficiently cool to turn up to the final though, and the venue is rammed. The crowds all the way through were in good and generous form even to their mates’ competitors, and tonight is no different. Big cheers, enthusiastic applause. Feeding off this and higher stakes, the musicians are amped up beyond their previous fever pitches. A swinging shirt, torn off in the heat, dislodges a sign from the rafters of the stage. Voices crack as they’re pushed to their limit. An extra tune is broken out into the precious five additional minutes of performance time allotted to the finals.
All of the bands at this stage have impressive aspects to their music, as you’d expect; youngsters Dionysus‘ stand-out vocalist, the classic riffage of popular hard rockers Inner City Sumo, the heavily intricate funk of Mr Pink…but in the end the four judges (Phil, Sean, Jonny Woods and The Crowd) decide that wunderkind Zac Mac and his band are the winners.
Which is hard to dispute – if you follow local music online at all you’ll have seen videos of him tearing up the fretboard as a young teenager, and he’s developed a great voice to go along with his incendiary playing. The band keep up with him on some really promising songs with memorable hooks and a meld of hard rock with more modern Muse/Radiohead-esque touches.
Post-Show
So the competition is over (at least until the summer, when it all starts again), but the central questions of how and what we value in art or music remain (head to the Queen’s Philosophy Department!). Perhaps it’s just some gigs, people having a lot of fun, and at the end of it one band gets the kudos and rewards of winning and several others get help in the form of cash and future shows.
The musicians themselves do generally seem to take the whole thing in their stride – I’ve witnessed many enthusiastic conversations between mutual admirers, and multiple ‘losing’ bands seeking out the judges afterwards to shake hands and thank them for the show, competition be damned.
Maybe (as they say) it’s not that deep. Or maybe it is. Possibly we should assemble a panel to vote on it.
