"If that's your wife, tell her I'll be round in a bit"

Tell your wife I'm not finished here yet - what time do you lock up?

"We have someone who will play sudoku or whatever on their PDA all night. I need a suitable put down for that one."

We DO like to share here, mate! The nine in the top right corner! :-)


"I'm with the "make it noisy" crowd."

While it is good (from personal experience) to start out performing in front of a quiet appreciative audience, It's actually more fun to work a noisy room. If you can shut them up and get them involved, you don't need to ask anybody else how good you are... I actually find it MUCH harder to work a handful of people, than a large mass (The smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint - Come feel the noise!) - a few hundred is probably the largest crowd. Telling a story that gets the audience involved so hard that they say afterwards that they were actually frightened and saw the beastie... wow!

While playing an instrument and/or singing - that takes far more internal focus and concentration than 'just talking' - for me at least.

I once watched a master at work. He started on banjo (normal volume) - the crowd was noisy. He gradually got quieter and quieter - then Boom! loud. All eyes in the room turned to him and all conversation stopped! :-)

"On the other hand, I DO feel that somehow we sort of lose something when we insist on the rapt attention of the audience. After all much of this music sprang from noisy alehouses and the like.""It's full of precious performers who don't learn their songs and have to resort to crib sheets and bore the pants of the audience. Many folk floor singers no longer have the ability to capture the audience with their music because they are not used to playing to 'live' audiences. They expect silence and attention when their performances seldom warrant it."

The top British performers (musos and comedians) in the 60s/70s (till they died) learned their trade in The Music Halls - only the trapeze and knife throwing acts got silence! There is an expression - 'dieing' - which I can assure you - you should experience ONCE, so you never want to feel that again and work harder!

"not used to playing to 'live' audiences"

And that IS the whole point of 'entertaining'... otherwise these days, just put it on a self published CD and make your own webpage which you always put in your signature at the end of every post on the web in which you tell everybody else how brilliant your ideas are, and they don't know what they are talking about because you once attended an Adult Education course on beadworking and take long walks in the country where your muse inspires you to make music by smashing trash can lids together while gargling Listerine... that way you don't have to deal with real people and their illogical ideas.

I can, at times, walk the walk - but it IS hard work - and I can understand the idea of showing respect, and especially ENCOURAGING beginners.