The music industry is a pile of arse, and other observations

Right. This weekend I was intending on bringing you news of playing the Astoria. I had managed to land myself a gig with the hastily thrown together support act to Budka Suflera, who are playing the legendary venue on Sunday night and who are - apparently - a massive Polish rock group in the vein of the Scorpions. If you are not thinking "that sounds absolutely awful", you may wish to leave this page immediately and have your musical tastes surgically adjusted.

It was going to be easily the biggest gig I've done. The Astoria holds somewhere between 1500-2000 people. The largest gig I've done must be about 300-400. Unless you count "performing" in front of around 1000 French teenagers during my remarkably brief career as a hair product model for Revlon.

I met the band last weekend. It consisted of four Poles, and an English dude on guitars who looked as if he felt as utterly out of place as I did. (This turned out to be indeed the case. My sociological skills are still in good nick, which is one positive I can take from this. Anyway.)

We rehearsed last weekend in a studio stuck out in the arse end of Acton. The set was to consist of three songs, which were pretty simple to learn, and we had a good four hours to learn them. We had them pretty tight by the end of the session. I went away with instructions to work on a few parts of each song and get a couple of friends down on the guest list.

I spent most of the week thinking, woo, I'm going to play the Astoria. However, my years of experience as a musician and consequent level of extreme cynicism about the industry and its atrocious overall reliability record for Positive Things Happening meant that I elected against broadcasting this, mentioning it only to a couple of friends who asked what I was going to be up to at the weekend.

I've never enjoyed telling people how excited I am about brilliant things that are about to happen, and then falling flat on my face when they don't.

The singer woke me up with a phone call this morning, sounding very upset, and saying that the support gig had been cancelled.

This is why I depend on Something Which Has Bog All To Do With Music for my salary.

(On the plus side, I've made a new guitarist friend with similar interests in selling out all notions of artistic credibility for the opportunity to play in front of a thousand Poles.)