.. is no immediate evidence for this assumption. For example, there have been occasions when we’ve been playing to an apparently indifferent crowd, and yet when we’ve finished playing, a selection of those very same people has made a point of letting us know just how thrilled they were with the music.
That has a fair bit to do with herd mentality, but there are also those odd individuals who look so positively pissed off and morose you feel obliged to make a real effort to focus on them - for absolutely zero response. A case in point was at the Anglesea pub a few years ago when I felt so personally affronted I decided to beard one such sad-sack. He’d been nursing a beer on his own all afternoon and looking thoroughly miserable, so at the end of the set I casually walked over and asked him how things were. He explained it was possibly the best afternoon’s music he’d heard for years and he could scarcely contain himself.
At that moment I decided it was futile to agonise about how the music was being received and to simply concentrate on my end of the business and the audience could take care of itself.
In the last few weeks I’ve been making a serious attempt to wrap up the second instalment of the Breathing Space series of EPs – Breathing Space Too. I had a visit from my old mate from the Chants’ days, Matt Croke, who is nowadays an avid guitar fiddler in both senses – i.e. he plays and modifies electric guitars – and I invited him to have a listen to two or three of the tracks. Now, as you may know, the intention was to release say three of four of these EPs in fairly quick succession, but as it’s now over a year since the first one was released, I’m painfully aware that the schedule is way behind, but that wasn’t what Matt had in mind when he sniffed, ‘Yes, very good. I like it. But you realise that it’s thirty years too late.’
He then went on to explain that these days people aren’t interested in music that requires them to actually listen – all of which brings me back to my original point. I’m prepared to concede that the music buying audience is more discriminating about what it actually purchases these days – the competition is absolutely overwhelming, not to mention so much of it is available for free - but as Elton John mentioned on Elvis Costello’s Spectacle programme last week, it’s a shame that the singer/songwriter phenomenon has seen the demise the professional Tin Pan alley writer, because there’s an awful lot of rubbish out there.
If my music is thirty years too late, I think I’m rather pleased. Ed Nimmervoll asked what I would think back in the sixties if I knew that I would still be an active and productive musician in the noughties. I think the youthful and insecure Mike Rudd would appreciate where the ancient and anxious Mike Rudd has ended up.

Non-sequiturs? Well, that was my first thought for this month’s P&W topic. Frankly, I don’t know how daily, or even weekly columnists for that matter, do it. Come up with things to write about I mean. I suppose that’s why so many of them drift off into inanity. Anyhow, I suspect that perpetrating non-sequiturs a dying art, but that’s maybe because I haven’t been in a classroom for some decades now. My teachers were responsible for such gems as ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ and ‘What’s that have to do with the price of fish, boy?’ which were trotted out ad nauseum, until their inherent absurdity became part of the general blather. Mind you, it got really scary when prefects and Senior Study boys started mimicking them when brow-beating (or just beating) the terrified junior fodder from the lower forms.