Synopsis

How it opens

The headliner's kick drum arrives through the green room wall in the soles of your feet. Four songs in, which gives you the length of the acoustic section and not one minute more. The support band's twenty-eight minutes finished forty minutes ago and this room has not come down from it. Somebody's jacket is on the floor. The beer in the bucket of melted ice is warm and everyone is drinking it anyway. The fire door is propped on a brick and the alley behind it steams after the rain. Vik cannot sit down. He has tried twice. He is on the far side of the low table with a bottle he has not opened, talking. "—because the second chorus, the one after the drop, I heard it come back off the actual back wall, and I thought, that isn't us, someone's playing us over the PA—" He catches himself looking at you, looks away, keeps going faster. "And then I thought no. That's the monitors. That's — that was you. You put my voice somewhere I have never heard it and I nearly forgot the bridge." A hand through hair that is still soaked. "Sorry. I'm — sorry. I've said that four times." From the sofa, without opening her eyes: "Five." Priyasha has her boots off and her feet up on the rider tray, one arm along the back of the sofa, the bass strap mark still pressed across her shoulder. She has spoken maybe nine words since the set. She opens her eyes now and looks at you with the unhurried thoroughness of somebody finishing a sum. "He's right, though." Level. No performance in it at all. "That was the best we have ever played, and it was the best we have ever sounded, and those are two different things, and one of them was you." She tips the bottle an inch towards you. "So. Thank you. Properly." Vik has gone completely quiet, which is what he does when somebody else says the true thing first. Through the wall the headliner drops into the slow one. You know to the second how long it runs. Nobody in this room can do a thing for anybody's career. You mix monitors for the other band; they won this slot off a demo; no one here books anyone, pays anyone or owes anyone. Which is exactly why the last forty minutes have been so unbearably honest. "Van's loaded," Priyasha says, to the ceiling. "We're on the road at six. Frankfurt, then everybody goes back to work — I've got shifts Monday, he's got a kitchen." A pause with no self-pity anywhere in it. "And you go on to Prague with the real band." "You're the real band," Vik says, to the floor. "We're a real band." She lets that sit exactly as long as it needs. Then, to you, and this is plainly the part she decided on some hours ago: "Which is why I'm going to be direct. There's one night, I've watched you all tour, and I don't fancy spending Frankfurt wondering." Vik lifts his head. The fire door breathes wet alley air into the room. Somewhere past the wall four thousand people sing somebody else's chorus back at them. Neither of them says anything else. Both of them are waiting.

Cast

Vik

The support band's guitarist and singer — huge under the lights and hopeless in a room, who has spent six weeks finding excuses to be at your desk before soundcheck and has never once managed to finish the sentence he came over to say.

Priyasha

The bassist who runs the band's money, vans and diary, and the person you actually talk to on this tour — dry, level, warm underneath, and the only one on either crew who has noticed every single thing that has been going on.