With the 2022 AFL Grand Final done and dusted, this time of year between the end of the AFL season and the beginning of the Cricket season is in my opinion, absolutely wonderful.

No more wasting precious oxygen on innocuous and irrelevant patches of small talk revolving around the footy. Who wins, who loses and the stats in-between are of no interest to me at all.

As a professional musician for many years who played in pubs with huge flatscreen televisions pumping out sport in all directions to a mindless audience, I was at war with sport for the attention of the masses.

(No doubt, I’ll be facing that very same fight again when I’m back out gigging but hopefully with a fresher perspective from being a little older and wiser)

I do remember the gigs I played post footy season. Those were the one where the punters actually listened… That was a refreshing change.

Personally, I don’t understand the concept of pubs with so many TV’s as it seems to defeat the whole purpose of going to a pub in the first place. Isn’t a pub a place to meet and have a conversation with others?

Maybe I’m just becoming a cranky old bugger.

I do see it time and time again though, a pub full of people but no-one talking to each other. All eyes are glued to the sport, or the TAB or whatever else is flashing up on the multitude of screens around the place.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really dislike sport per se, I just think there’s a time and a place for everything.

Looking back on my time as a professional musician, I noticed a disturbing trend of being hired solely as a de-facto jukebox politely playing in the background while the punters are simply watching TV or, rudely texting on their mobiles.

To me, it seemed that a lack of a multitude of ambient background noise/images was the enemy to the audience and I have no idea why.

Another thing I had noticed was that the amount of clapping (or at the very least, polite general recognition that there was live music in the room) had decreased dramatically and trying to communicate to people through live music was becoming harder and harder to achieve.

I really don’t want to sound like I’m having a whinge. I mean, live music is awesome and I’m still looking forward to playing music for a living again. I do realise that with every occupation there are good days and not so good days to experience.

I get that.

However, I just want to be part of a live music scene that makes a difference in peoples lives rather than just being a functional accompaniment to watching sport on the TV.

Is that too much to ask?

Oh well, AFL is over for another year, Summer is just around the corner and things are looking up and even though I’ve just gone on a bit of a rant about Sport vs Music, I do love my cricket

Peace,

Corey 🙂