I hate going to see my friends’ bands

There’s little worse than being emotionally blackmailed into going to see your friends play a gig. It’s bad enough watching a dreadful, sleep-inducing band. But when your friends are the members of this soporific group, unlike at any other gig, you can’t leave early for fear of offending anyone. So, for the entire night you will then have to stand with a constant forced gleeful grin on your face to give the impression you are having fun. If everyone else is dancing you may even have to sway from side to side so as not to look too conspicuous. I pride myself on my honesty but is there anything you can do when the band come at the end to ask you what you thought apart from smile falsely, nod a lot and tell them it was “really good”?

It wouldn’t be too bad if the gig was free, but of course that would be far too painless for you. Instead, the band members usually come to some arrangement with the promoter that they will bring fifty paying people in return for being allowed to inflict their turgid drones and dull, forlorn lyrics on a room full of people. So you are forced to sacrifice a fiver in order to prolong the band’s deluded dream that there are sane people in the world who would go out of their way to listen to their pointless noise.

Surely after their eighth gig in a grotty pub with an audience consisting of the same handful of (now noticeably unenthusiastic to the point that most are talking among themselves as the band play) people that were at all of their previous shows, you would think the band would realise it’s time to call it a day. But no. They carry on until something catastrophic finally splits them apart, like the drummer contracting premature arthritis or the bass player getting a girlfriend who wants to teach him the ins and outs of tantric sex so he doesn’t have time to go to practice anymore.