The 5-Close Shift. Monday, 10th March. - "So why are you working here?"

Bar Chords

Introduction

Hello. I am Austin Williams, born the year 1992 in Worcester, famous for it’s sauce, and complete lack of sauce. I moved to Birmingham when i was 15 when my Mother yearned for a fresh start and more opportunity for her and us. So she upped sticks, converted to Islam, and found a welcoming community where she felt a belonging to. I too found a belonging, but under the Religion of raves, new wave hedonism and indie music in Digbeth, where I found and formed my best friends and band, Swim Deep. Back in Worcestershire, my Father had moved to the Malvern Hills, famous for it’s, well, Hills. He on the other hand converted to Bohemianism, practiced reiki, and hypnotherapy, and would take us to watch a man called ‘Toad’ play folk music in a frog themed cafe. He brought me my first instrument, and gave my playing praise, even in the early months when I was making sounds that made the cats want to relocate to our neighbours. I was raised by two opposites, both giving me all the freedom, blind confidence, and contradiction I needed to become a world class struggling musician.

In these Substack’s i’ll be writing about my life behind the Compton Arms bar. Whilst following my ongoing lucid dream of being a songwriter/musician in an ever changing, ever folding, never paying, music industry. Recently, at the end of each close, I’ve been required to write a short report of how the shift went. This is an extended, uncensored, and definitely maybe sometimes fabricated version of that report. Which on reflection whilst writing at the end of each shift, often makes me realise this job can be a lot more interesting and revealing than I previously gave it credit for…

Being an old locals pub, meets 5 star ‘Time Out’ foodie spot’, you meet a deck full of characters, from our diamond in the rough, decades loyal locals, John, Terry, and Mick. To the yuppies splitting the g but never splitting the bill. To our resident groaner ‘French’, who is great if your kind of thing is playing ping pong with a wind machine, or doing a two legged race with a oak tree.

This substack was started as a way for me to try and squeeze out some sort of creativity and expression from my fairly ordinary job. Where other than trying to write ‘fuck’ in guiness foam for the worst customers, you don’t get much time to itch that artistic scratch.

I hope you find something in the conversations, overheard pub poetry, and seven pints deep nonsense I hear whilst doing my time behind the bar.

Chapter 1 - “So why do you work here?!”

10th March 2025, Monday Evening, Five till close shift.

Walking into the pearly gates of the Compton pub to start my shift, I’m greeted by ‘Essex’, with a glowing tanned face, freshly back from finding himself in Vietnam. He’s our assistant manager, but we call him the Captain. He’s 6 foot handsome, with long black hair, blue eyes, and looks very legitimately like he’s from my rose tinted imagintation of Seattle in the 90’s. You’d follow this guy to war, but mainly just to ask him to send you his shoe-gaze playlists. A fellow struggling hopeful musician, who on my first day working, informed me that we had met before, at a house party in Brighton circa 2015. Some would call those the glory days. I’d like to be able to remember them before giving such a bold claim out. He recalled he approached me, told me I looked like a Jedi (I think i was wearing this long flowing cotton cardigan that touched my holey converse which my granny gave me). I wasn’t going for Jedi but considering half my outfits back then, i’ll take that as a draw to myself.

Essex tells me he’s off to rehearse for a gig at the 100 club. So he hands over the ship to me for the rest of the night, and swaggers out with his guitar on his back, pedalboard in hand, and slowdive in the ears, with his day job safely in the rear view mirror he’s off to work on the big dream.

I serve a few dates, Guinness for him, very confident about that one, probably doesn’t even like it, he just has to make a decision fast in fear of looking like a dawdling child to his hotter than him date. Half a Guiness for her, she actually likes it and doesn’t have the 27 years of masculinity to peer pressure her into ordering a whole pint. He get’s scared she’s not going to be tipsy enough to find his jokes funny, she’s scared if she drinks too much she’ll accidentally find his jokes funny.

A lot of the people you serve on a weekday are dates meeting for the first time. You get to watch as they’re eyes decide whether the online photos do the IRL face justice. You get to watch someones great, great, great grandparents say hello to each other for the first time. One day they’ll be old and cherish this moment, and i’ll be there in the snapshot, just left of centre, trying to pour a ‘fuck’ in the Guiness foam.

‘Fez’ excitedly hurries through the pub door to start her night. Fez is about 15 years old but I’m sure she’s told me otherwise. Incredible posture, and has cartoon like curly ginger hair. She started here at the Compton soon after me, and was a fresh wave of joy and cat like curiosity. Fez loves working, and when she’s not working she loves mapping out pillars, doors, walls, and buildings for Architecture - her big dream. Once on our way home I saw her creep into a house left open by construction workers just to see how it was laid out. Cat like curiosity.

A woman in her mid thirties sits on the end of the bar, usually reserved our locals. She’s facing us, so we’re the entertainment for the night. She’s off to a film festival. We’re quizzed on what the difference between IPA and pale ale is, I bravely, yet regrettfully say IPA is ‘Indian’, for her to google it and tell me our IPA is brewed in Canterbury. I’ve never had to be an expert in music, and I refuse to look too close into pub hospitality, incase I fall in and can’t get out.

Her name is Summer, and we start talking about her homeland, China. I tell her I had visited Chengdu, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shang Hai, and Hong Kong, whilst on tour with band in 2019…

Although it was probably the most we had been paid for a tour, we travelled light and didn’t take crew, so we had a tour manager/translator there. He loved Jack White and had that exact hair, parted, black, and fried. He would only ever really compliment us via a smashing pumpkins reference. He once nervously asked me if I was going to talk about Tibet on stage, like Bjork did once, subsequently getting banned for life. We travelled into deep China and for the first time in my life, and our reflections in dressing room mirrors were the only white people we’d seen for days. It was November 2019, only a couple of months before the first whispers of Covid were heard. I was telling Summer that everything got real weird during our crossing over the border from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. Our 00’s rock loving tour manager and translator had parted ways with us after our last show, and gave us a number to text for our driver who would take us the two hour drive to the airport. He couldn’t speak a word of english, and were already saying we couldn’t all fit in one car with our gear. Our flight was beckoning and it was the end of a long Asian tour, and we had suddenly started to feel very homesick and lost without our trusty crow black haired translator. We were split into two cars to start the two hour drive, and had no way of contacting each other during the split.

It was a long anxiety laced trip along the unknown Chinese freeway, with no phone signal, and no music or radio, soundtracked only by our driver having the worlds worst domestic, or catch up with his wife down the phone. Just as I was starting to take sides In our drivers loud speaker war, I saw the signs for Hong Kong, half masked in a foreboding twin peaks-esque fog… Our van was hurriedly signaled, and pulled to the side of the road, our door is hurled open by a man in a mask and high vis jacket, the fog swirls like dry ice as the warmth from our van scurrys away. And with no warning, a white gun shaped device was pointed at our bassists Cavan’s head. As the seconds turned to minutes, the man with the sadistically gun shaped device pulled the trigger. ‘Bing’. ‘98.6f’ It took his temperature and the ‘gun’ was lowered. Now a new worry took over my head, I might not be getting shot whilst sat awkwardly between two pedal boards In the back of a taxi, but what if I’m too hot? Am i going to be whisked away by Hazmat suits like in Monsters Inc to a hospital, and never see my Girlfriend or a roast dinner again? ‘Bing’, he shoots me in the head, It turns green, and the door is slammed back closed.

Our drivers started giving us orders, orders to which in response we must’ve looked like slapped asses in the snow. We were pointed out of the car and told to walk across the border bridge, leaving our worldy possessions and gear in the car with a man who I’m sure by this point has just been divorced down the phone. A huge anti climatic relief ensued as someone stamped our things and shoo’d our timid butts through the border, where we were all reunited, with stories of our mysterious horror ride. Our drivers came through, but this time playing music in the cars. I’m assuming it was the various VPN’s and blocks meaning they couldn’t play spotify off their phones the other side. But at the time i thought it was some dystopian anxiety inducing prank for having annoying guitars and an complete lack of the Chinese language.

Whilst talking about the tour, our new friend Summer silently googled our band, looked up at me, then back at the phone, and with a childlike shuffle on the bar stool, started laughing and calling me ‘Cavan McCarthy’. I didn’t correct her at first because she was giggling so loudly at the name, and because it wasn’t mine, that brought me time with my own namesake dignity intact. She then sharply switched from laughter to a sobering confusion. “So why are you working here?!”. I quickly burst the bubble created by the glam and glitter of bands gone by, private jets and just the blue m&m’s on the rider. I explain that there’s no money in music anymore, or more that there is, it’s not paid to the ones who make it. And to make a minimun wage you’d have to be doing thousand plus venue tours year in year out, or get a BMW advert. It reminded me of the disparity between listener and musician/worker. If a plumber provides a service, we pay them fairly. I imagine a plumber turning around whilst fixing my sink, and telling me they have a full time job to fund this pursuit to plumb. I know this is a very loose, and probaly daft metaphor for the case, but we all know how essential music as a commodity in this world is, and i feel like it is as much as a integral daily service as any other job. I don’t get paid £0.003 for every pint i pour. I get paid a wage to be at the pub providing my service….

By this point, I was so high up on soap box she could barely see me, she nodded her head, drank the end of her Canterbury pale ale, and waved as she left “Goodbye Cavan Mccarthy, goodbye Fez”

Austin W.