Closing night at the Lantern Rooms
The queue went past the chip shop by half seven, which it had not done in the four years any of us had been coming here.
That is the part people kept saying to each other, in the tone people use when they mean something else.
It is raining, which feels like too much, and the queue on Ordell Street is longer than the room. People have come from other cities. Two of the four bands playing tonight have not existed for six years and reformed for this.
The first band are nineteen and have played here four times. They are nervous in a way that reads, from the back, as slightly too fast, and they get better across twenty minutes in the specific way bands do when a room is on their side from the first bar. The singer says "thanks for having us" at the end and then stands there a second too long, working out whether to say the other thing, and decides not to. Correct call.
The second band are the reunion. They are fine. Reunions are usually fine.
The third band are the best thing that happens all night and nobody will remember, which is worth writing down so that at least it is written down somewhere. They are four people who have been playing together for two years in front of forty people at Unit 9, they have exactly enough songs, and for half an hour in a room that came for something else they are absolutely undeniable. The room notices about four songs in. You can hear it notice.
Between the third and the headliner I go out to the corridor where the posters are, and the posters are already gone. Someone has taken them down — not stripped, taken, carefully, which is a different thing. What is left is nineteen years of paste and torn corners and the pale rectangles where things were, and it is the most articulate thing in the building tonight.
The sound engineer has worked here since 2011. He is packing the desk during the changeover, which he does not normally do, and when I ask him about it he says the desk is his and he is taking it home.
Nineteen years. I've mixed about four thousand bands in this room and I could not tell you the name of half of them. That's not sad. That's the job working.
The headliner is loud and long and knows exactly what it is being asked to do, which is to be the last thing. They play forty-five minutes and come back on for two, and the second of the two is a cover, and the room sings it in the way rooms do when the singing is the point rather than the song.
Then at four minutes past eleven the house lights come on.
They are fluorescent and green-white and unbelievably ugly, and everybody looks at everybody else, and nobody moves for about fifteen seconds. There are plastic glasses on the monitors. There is tape on the floor in the shape of where things stood. Somebody near the front starts clapping and it goes round the room once and then stops because it is not clear who it is for.
People stay for another twenty minutes. Staff let them.
The building has been bought and will reopen in the spring as flats, eleven of them, with the frontage kept because the frontage is listed. The room itself — the one with the pillar and the terrible load-in and the ceiling that made everything sound better than it was — is the part that goes.
Nadia Vresk
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