Siiiiiiiiiiiiing!

I'm doing open mike tomorrow. This band I'm in, the one that 47 started... well, we are rehearsing, and then our blonde lesbian drummer suggested that we do this open mike. We've done it before and it's always gone relatively well - including one memorable session where we collaboratively wrote a song together and then two of us (not me) got up on stage and performed it without actually knowing what it was meant to sound like, going on scribbled lyrics by one of our number, approved by me, and chords by everyone else. I've still got a recording of that somewhere. I should find it.

While I much prefer to do full-length gigs (and I've done these one-and-a-half-hour things all by myself because I am an egomaniac), I'm not really above doing open mike - the problem with such a venture being that one only gets two songs when that happens... and it's difficult to develop much between two songs (I tend to use banter to pad it out, which seems to work well enough). The other problem, which mostly applies to me, is the fact that I can't resist mentioning sex.

It's not really part of my act. Very few of my songs are bawdy, and while there are some really explicit ones, they are masked well by lyrics which are open to interpretation (or deliberately don't make any sense). But there are a few which have no other way of going. At open mike I've performed a song I wrote for Scarlet on Valentine's this year, which is entirely about having sex with a multitude of girls, including the postwoman, taxi driver, French maid, receptionist, waitress, porn stars, and the sister of the girl to whom the song is addressed. I've also performed a song about spending the afternoon making love in various rooms of the house (notably the bathroom floor), one about staying up late playing hentai games until you fall for one of the characters, and one about trying to seduce a girl in French by alluding to croissants and coffee. Oh, and one about trying to convince a visiting American girl to have sex with the narrator via Craigslist.

I can be very deviant sometimes.

There isn't anything wrong with me singing dirty songs. Not really. And I rarely swear, hardly ever in my banter and very rarely indeed in my songs. And now that I'm not single any more, the songs don't really have the same sort of gravitas. Love songs that refer to a certain person have lost their significance in many ways, and those alluding to people who have lost their innocence, turned bitchy, submitted entirely to their partner's whims or been gay in the Scouts also don't hold their weight very much. Yes, I do have songs which are neither about sex nor have any taboo words or allusions to the same (and they're often my best), but when you're steadily doing those over and over again until you want something different to play...

...the sexual songs are going to be all you have left after a while.

Time for a dig through my archives.