by Serguey Shinder
Six songs, two months of Tuesday rehearsals, and every one of them was solid. We could start any of them cold, and a couple of the arrangements had got genuinely good. Then we played them on a Friday in a room above a shop with about sixty people in it, the night did not work, and for a week afterwards I could not tell you why.
It was the gaps. Between the second and third song there was a stretch of something like forty seconds in which the guitarist retuned, the singer turned round and asked me off microphone what was next, and then filled the silence with a story about the drive over that she had already told during the previous gap. By the fourth song the room had gone back to its own conversations and it never entirely came back, and the songs themselves were exactly as good as they had been on Tuesday.
We had rehearsed six units and never once rehearsed the thing that joins them, and the reason is very nearly funny. A rehearsal has a natural shape to it. You play a song, you stop, somebody says something about the middle eight, you have a drink, you start the next one. The format has a gap built into it that nobody experiences as part of a performance, so the single element an audience sees between every pair of songs was the one element we had never run.
What we did about it was not musical. The running order is written down and taped to the floor in two places. We agreed in advance who speaks between each pair and roughly what about. The guitarist brought a second instrument for the one song that needed it, and where that is not possible he retunes underneath the last chord of the song before rather than in the silence afterwards. We now play the whole set through, start to finish, with nothing permitted in the gaps except what we decided, and that run is the last thing we do before a gig.
The next one was the same six songs and a completely different evening.
I go looking for the same shape at work now, and it is everywhere. Everybody tests their own component, because a component has a name and an owner and an obvious place to put a test. Almost nobody rehearses the handover, where one team's output becomes another team's input, and the handover is where things come apart, on the day, in front of people. The joins stay invisible during practice because practice is organised around the parts, and whatever shape your practice takes is quietly choosing the thing you will never get good at.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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