‘In The City’ Showcase Disasters

‘In The City’ Showcase Disasters

Whilst the previous thread details all the success stories of the ‘In The City’ conference showcases, I am now wondering if anybody has ever gone to see any bands perform at one of the ‘I.T.C.’ promotional events and rather than be being beneficial to the acts performing, it has just turned out to be a disaster. In addition to this, did anyone else end up in a showcase that looked like it was going to be good, but actually turned out to be awful.

Whilst I have seen a lot of average and weird acts in my time at ‘In The City’; and managed to stay put through a lot of odd showcases, I think the worst showcase that I ever ended up at, was an event promoting ‘the great new sounds of the Irish music scene’, which happened about ten years ago at a bar in ‘Deansgate Locks’.

As ‘In The City’ was associated with an ‘indie legend’ in the shape of ‘Factory Records’ Tony Wilson and took place in a city that had been at the centre of the ‘Madchester’ scene, a great number of acts would be of an alternative nature. Even though this was where all the main focus in the press would be, a lot of other musical ‘happenings’ were going on as part of the conference, but these would be events that would be marginalised out towards the ‘fringes’ of ‘I.T.C.’.

When it came to the Irish music showcase, we should have realised sooner that this was not going to be the most amazing night out, when the venue turned out to be a near empty bar, rather than say ‘the Roadhouse’, midweek at ‘the Locks’. In addition, to this we should have noticed that there was no stage and no instruments for the ‘bands’ to play.

We asked if this was the right place for the Irish music showcase and we were told it would be starting there shortly but the acts needed to set up first. We were reassured by the bar staff that it would happen within the next hour and so bought another round of drinks.

I was expecting the gig to be like a ‘Mother Records’ showcase, where I would find the next ‘Hothouse Flowers’, the new ‘Toasted Heretic’ and the next ‘Frank & Walters’, though when the stools came out it was perfectly clear what type of acts where going to come on.

The first act was called ‘inFOCUS’ and when the five of them, rather than ‘the 4 of Us’, walked out it was obvious that they were ‘Boyzone’ clones and rather than being ‘the hottest new thing in Irish music’ like the advertisement said, they were very ‘wet’ indeed.

Even though they were singing live, they were using backing tracks pumped through the bar’s ‘in-house’ speakers, backing tracks that to us, seemed to be used not only for them but the other couple of ‘bands’ we saw that night.

We would have left earlier but we wanted to make sure that this had not been a ‘one-off’ and that someone like ‘The Pale’ were not going to come on with their mandolins afterwards. However the next ‘band’ were just like ‘InFOCUS’, apart from the fact that it was a group of girls this time, and so after all of our drinks had been drunk, we gave up on ‘I.T.C’ and went to play pool somewhere instead.