Punk at a Moment’s Notice explains guerrilla gigging:
The lifeblood of a resurgent London music scene, guerrilla gigs came to prominence when one of the capital’s hottest new acts, The Others, last month commandeered two London Underground carriages to perform an impromptu set for 200 fans.While better-established bands might have needed several months and a costly marketing campaign to pull it off, The Others summoned the crowd in just a few hours, with a cryptic message to the band’s Web forum members to meet at a local pub.
Once assembled, fans used SMS messages to tip off friends across town before moving to a nearby tube station to pack an eastbound train for a furious 30-minute set — belted out using a megaphone while onlookers crowd-surfed in transit.
The Others are proud that they know their fans:
“We actually know our fans,” The Others vocalist Dominic Masters told BBC Radio 1 recently, after scrambling users of his message board to a riotous, unauthorized performance in the national broadcaster’s reception area.“On our website, we’ve built this affiliation where they’ve got my telephone number on every posting. I’ve got about 500 kids’ names who I talk to, and there are about 1,000 with their e-mail addresses on the website.”
I’m afraid though that The Others, like all rising punk bands, are about to find out that A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. As it grows, it changes:
Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t. And so we blew past that interesting scale of small groups. Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.
As Clay Shirky points out, a psychologist named Bion long ago recognized three patterns in group interactions — and you see all three of these patterns in any musical subculture:
- The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, “A group met for pairing off.” [...] You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say “Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label.” And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it’s about sex talk as well.
- The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
- The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that’s beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying “You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn’t need that much description about the forest, because it’s pretty much the same forest all the way.”
Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: “This is for discussing the works of Tolkein.” Go in and try and have that discussion.
I only like old Others.