Farewell to the Dharma Bums
Well, last night at the Cavendish Arms in Stockwell saw the last date in the Dharma Bums whirlwind London tour on which I had been drafted in to play bass. A couple of weeks ago front man Phil Void was in town for a weekend and we squeezed two gigs in, then he was back last Tuesday night, dashing straight from the airport to a rehearsal where he presented me with three new songs. The next night was the gig I had arranged at the Cross Kings, where the Furbelows also appeared on the bill. My sterling friend Jamie Fisher was sitting in on tub-thumping duties. We then played SOAS on Friday night to a large and appreciative (i.e. drunk) crowd, followed by Saturday night at the Gloucester Arms in Kentish Town and then last night.
The Dharma Bums have been going in one form or another for 34 years and are all about Buddhist thought and the pro-Tibet movement. I have to say that Phil had rather led me to believe that he had a small army of ex-pat Tibetan fans in London. In fact we never had more than half a dozen of them to each gig—which meant we lost money on the Cross Kings promotion.
The oddest gig was Saturday: the Gloucester Arms has a stage but no PA (fortunately I was able to bring a small one) so it's clearly not a regular music pub. Yet Phil had somehow inveigled the landlord into paying us £150. I had my doubts from the beginning as to whether he'd honour this agreement, and we were doubly worried when we found out that Jamie couldn't make that gig. (In fact at one point it looked as if it would just be me and Phil that night). Surely he wouldn't stump up for less than a full band? In the end I brought drums with the idea that Clayton Denwood (yes, two Claytons in one band), Phil's longtime collaborator, would switch from guitar to drums—an instrument he hasn't played in a decade.
We duly set up: but aside from the usual six Tibetans there was no one else in the pub. This turned out to be a good excuse to argue that we were choosing not to play the drums because it was clearly going to be a quiet evening. The landlord didn't seem to mind and paid up (how does his business work, exactly?). We even had a group of drunken Irish women who stumbled in two songs before the end, danced around a bit then harangued us for not playing more. ("I've left four children at home to come and see you!" There's no answer to that, really.) So we improvised a Bo Diddley medley which seemed to placate them.
Phil's plans seem to revolve around being able to stay with one Tibetan or another wherever he goes, like some mendicant holy man, which is a fragile strategy. He even cancelled three dates in Dublin because no one could put him up, and most of his time in London was taken up with wheezing from one crashpad to another with his suitcases and sending me exasperated texts to say that his bed for the night had fallen through. I put him up for a couple of nights and spent Saturday afternoon trying to find him hotel room in Kentish Town for that night. You can't help thinking that if he'd organised things a bit earlier he could have got a cheap B&B all week, but I guess that's not the Dharma Bums way—you drift as the winds of kharma blow you, finding what you need as you go, relying on the kindness of strangers. It's a sad observation that, 34 years on, this doesn't seem to work so well any more...
