I did a gig recently for a corporate client – they had an award ceremony mid week and wanted our 12 piece party band to supply the evening entertainment. We started with our soul and contemporary set and got a good crowd dancing in front of the stage. This was going to be a nice gig and we went off for our break and to get changed into the second set clothes looking forward to a good night.
During the interval (about 20 minutes) someone broke out the headphones which were going to be used for a silent disco after the live music had ended. For those who don’t know, a silent disco is like an ordinary disco but with everyone listening to music on headphones rather than from a large sound system. I knew such things existed but it’s the first time I ever saw it happening. As we walked back to the stage it was slightly eerie to see almost everyone in the room dancing but without hearing any of the music. They were wearing large headphones and dancing at the other end of the room from the stage like a creepy puppet show.
We started our second set – for the second set we were playing a lot of disco classics from the 70’s, and were dressed up in the full on afro wig spangly sequinned shirts or comedy pimp outfits. Guaranteed to get the dance floor full, and we always enjoy playing these tunes – I particularly love the meaty basslines in these numbers, and with Vinnie on drums this was going to be a great set!
Trouble is, as we were at the other end of the room, and people were already dancing, the addition of a live band didn’t seem to have much of an affect on the audience. A few came back over to dance, but the atmosphere was lost. Even weirder, some people came over to dance while still wearing their headphones. In between our numbers it was sometimes possible to hear people singing along to the tunes they were dancing to.
This is something we’re not trained to deal with as musicians; there have been rare occasions where I’ve been booked to perform for an unsuitable audience (rock band for a jazz club, for example) and sometimes your job is specifically to be background music (jazz trio at a cocktail evening) and there are ways of dealing with those situations. But playing dance music to a group of people who are dancing to different music which you can’t even hear is an odd experience.
So I think the guests all enjoyed themselves, but from a band perspective it was a strange and disappointing end to a gig!