Pat Kane: What it was like getting back playing live shows with Hue and Cry

I love this – how the pieces of a gig come together, every time. Let me share how it works for us, dwelling on Hue and Cry’s recent Glasgow Theatre Royal gig. Eight sensitive, expressive men (one calling off at the last minute because of a domestic Covid scare), joining up to play a repertoire that’s been forged over 30-odd years between by my brother, me and our audience. As you might intuit from the photo above, it came out well.

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But not without the venue and the backline, the infrastructure of each gig, which functions to a high level, and sometimes beyond. Experience makes things more comfortable, because you set some rules, and don’t deviate.

One rule is that our mighty citizen of Ullapool, Robert Higgins, is available to mix every gig. So whatever bounces back off the walls and the audience is familiar to us.

The second, for me, is made possible by what are called “in-ears” – tiny speakers moulded precisely to my lugs. So after decades of wild variation, the instructions to the monitor engineer is clear: 80% my voice, 20% band for the in-ears, overall band mix coming out of the flood speaker. I take one earplug out to catch the ambience of the event and the band … and off we go.

This has been a liberation for me. Whether it’s a big-stage festival gig, a gilt-edged theatre, or a hotbox venue, I live in largely the same bubble of sound. For singers, that’s a precious anchor in the storm of a gig.

And in recent years, the storm has intensified. Live music has become the reliable money-maker for musicians, as digitality ripped the price mechanism for recorded music to pieces.

And until early 2020, that was our life, like many other outfits. We work acoustically in a piano-vocal format, as well as full band. So in tandem with clever and creative promoters, you can end up in small, often beautiful and well-fashioned venues, in every corner of these islands. Many are what one would call arts and wellbeing centres. These are discernibly enchanted places, where communities – often a bit beleaguered – come together to lose themselves in dance, drama, laughter, movies, melody.

It’s actually a lovely, heartening alternative map of this archipelago. A network of the saving arts – one that we’ve filled out in our heads and hearts over decades of touring. In recent years ,we’d come out to the merch stall after the show. Partly for commercial reasons, yes, but partly to hear all the life stories. Of which, by this survivor stage, there are many.

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And then … lockdown, shutdown, choose your gravestone heading. Those simulated water-droplet videos weren’t lying. The could be no more virulent spreader of Covid than an on-stage performer, singing her heart out and thus drenching an intimate gig in potential infection. No more cosy chats and selfie hugs at the T-shirt stall. In fact, nothing at all.

In the tougher months of 2020 and 2021, as Hunter S Thompson might have put it, “when the going got weird, the weird turned pro”. Like many other artists – Nick Cave was the most artistically successful – we tried to use streaming platforms to sell tickets to live performances. The weirdness was baked in. You’d wring out your soul on a particular anthem – and then silent tumbleweed, maybe crickets chirping, at the triumphant end. Where are you all?! (Actually, you were out there on forums, tapping away. No sweaty coupons but our own before us, in the studio glass).

IT could be creatively successful. We worked through an “Irish Songbook” for a St Patrick’s Day online show, and came out of it moved and stunned by a nation’s musical richness, from Hozier (below) to The Mountains of Mourne. And if we are all driven indoors again, by some implacable mutation or other, many musicians now have the tools and skills to stay virtually close to their audience.

But as an operator in the “nighttime” or “weekend economy”, as the jargon has it, we are – like many others – regarding the fitful “opening-up” with great care and attention. Whatever the new normal was supposed to be, musicians, venues, promoters and audiences are slowly and robustly piecing their version together.

For example, I know that for our Theatre Royal gig, no-one could get past the door without a) a lateral flow test and a government QR code confirming it, b) proof of being double-vaxxed, or c) proof they’d been infected by Covid over the last 90 days (thus brimming with antibodies).

No, it’s not rock ’n’ roll. Yes, it is like the entry requirements to some infected UN quarantine zone of yore. But yes, it undoubtedly makes rock ’n’ roll, especially those lusty, “it’s your turn to sing the chorus” bits – thinkable and possible.

A report in the last few weeks from MusicWatch said that two-thirds of UK music fans approved of a “vaccine or mask mandate” at gigs. Another from the Music Venue trust found that “76.3% of people attending live music events are double vaccinated, substantially higher than the double vaccination rate for the general population (61.3%)”.

Those are good stats when compared against general public behaviour. I’m not surprised. There’s an implicit mutualism about a great gig: if everyone makes everyone else feel secure, it’s the best basis for having a great night. When the teething troubles are over, we’ll see the Scottish vaccine passports surely embraced by most gig-goers.

To grump a little: live musical performance has felt like the last sector in the cultural industries queue, when it comes to government support around the upheavals of Covid. Finally, the UK Chancellor has provided events organisers (music and otherwise) with insurance support, in case of pandemic cancellation. (Other creative sectors – such as film and TV – have had this since September 2020).

The numbers of the cost of all this are brutal. The Nighttime Industries Association recently calculated that 86,000 jobs had been lost in the UK nighttime cultural economy sector since 2019. We know that a good chunk of our own gig cancellations have come just from sheer bankruptcy and insolvency, whether promoter or venue.

I am happy to see that the Glasgow Hydro, now under new sponsors the energy company OVO, wants to relaunch itself as a “green super-venue”. Before Covid it was the second-busiest venue in the world (after Madison Square Garden in New York). Now, with locally-sourced produce and paperless ticketing, the OVO Hydro will showcase its sustainable credentials as it hosts the likes of Shawn Mendes, Billie Eilish, The Weeknd and Dua Lipa.

Until it doesn’t (Gaia depending). The idealism, passion and imagination at the heart of the music business should be a force that compels best eco-practice throughout its operations. (Though in terms of carbon offsets, those hydrogen and electric planes couldn’t come soon enough for those globe-touring enormabands).

But we can’t deny it. In terms of the current mode of transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the gig is the bloom that wilts first. All those expectant expectorators, on either side of the stage, singing their bug-laden lungs out … Put it this way: there’s nobody with more motivation to calm a disrupted biosphere, than the kings and queens of rock ’n’ roll.

Hue And Cry’s full band play Aberdeen Tivoli Theatre on November 11 and Edinburgh Liquid Rooms on November 13. hueandcry.co.uk