Beer and music – we’re told, so often, they go together. The craft beer fellas have all aligned themselves with music, sponsoring gigs, even naming beers after bands. And anyone with a rock’n’roll story of a gig from 20 or 30 years ago often adds in some yarn about being boozed, sozzled, tipsy…or if they weren’t someone was, the band on stage perhaps, or everyone else in the bar. Perhaps it was so cheap that it just crept up on you. There was no salted-caramel beer flavours then…only if you were super-hammered might you end up with butter in your scotch…

We put up with late stage times on school nights because the only way the model works – if it even works – is for the bar to get in some time selling beer first (and then after).

We put up with hefty prices – or moan about them while still consuming.

We put up with impaired performances.

We put up with a lot – because of beer and its impact on music.

I’m far from a teetotaller. I love a good beer. I’ll often settle for a bad one too, since it’s getting harder to afford the good ones

I go to gigs. I sometimes drink. I often don’t.

There’s often a lot of chat at gigs – and I’ve seen far too many shows ruined because the audience is talking over it and around it. I’ve been caught up in that too – sometimes it’s hard not to get sucked into that particular vortex. My logic has always been that if you want to talk you go as far away from the stage as you can…down the back is where the people lurk who want to chat…and that’s (largely) fair enough.

But Tuatara-sponsored late night at Wellington’s City Gallery is a disgrace.

At least it was the time they hosted SJD.

He is one of the country’s finest songwriters and performers and was there the other year as the special guest. There had been a film screening, a guided tour of the gallery and a DJ playing earlier. It was a nice vibe for a while. You could buy beer and wine. There was food too. People mingled. People were there to see and be seen. It was that kind of scene. The art was hanging on the walls still. Where it usually is. The artifice hung heavy – that this was culture; worlds colliding.

Instead when Sean took the stage to play his songs people talked. People with their backs turned to the music, their faces plunging towards nibbles or still locked in the thrill of the swill were not there for any reason other than to say that they were there.

Wellington loves to think it’s the “Cultural Capital” but there was no culture going on last night; no appreciation of art or talent. Just people stoked to have something to wet their lips while they waited until the person they were standing with had finished talking so they could start.

I wonder why we fool ourselves that we’re engaged with music, with art, with anything…

I wonder why the City Gallery needs to bring beer in through its doors to get people in after work.

Beer combines with music to make for some wonderful moments sometimes.

Those wonderful moments are still there though…honest. They must be. When we became fans of music the record stores were only ever giving away free badges or stickers or bonus cassette tapes, never a six-pack, a funnel, a tube of Berocca…
Beer combines with music to make for some wonderful moments sometimes.

But it also makes people lose any sense of compassion for what’s going on around them, for the idea that anyone else would want to listen; that the performer on the stage deserves any sort of respect. And if you just clap at the end of a song – when you are vaguely aware that the music has stopped, that the person you’re hoping is listening to your riveting story is clapping at something – that’s not actually engaging with anything other than the myth that you’re interested in arts and culture.

We started off having a lovely night. We looked at the work on the walls. A summer night out and about. Our son danced around in the early part. We disappeared off for dinner elsewhere. Returned to hear one of our favourite musicians. He was in there somewhere. Muffled by stories of what everyone else had been doing, or would be doing. You know – changing the world by pushing numbers around on a pad with a pen, clicking and clacking at a computer to increase the infrastructure optimisation and deployment best practices used to implement and manage desktop infrastructure as part of the solution…

A better solution would have been to fuck up and listen to the music. But there was no song in their soul, just beer pushing forward self-importance…warming their heart, warning them that there was art…somewhere, maybe even nearby.