Sunday 6th November - Staks Battle of the Bands 05 (1/3) By Michelle Dee

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3).

Photograph Gallery   Hollywood Gallery ,    the Vels Gallery 1,    Gallery 2.    Minus 272 Gallery.

On Sunday 6th of November the popular cafè bar cum restaurant on Beverley Road held the final of the Battle of the Bands competition. This event is not to be confused with Band Wars organised by the staff at the Polar Bear on Springbank. The bands that had successfully made it to the final were Hollywood, Minus 272 and the Vels.

Regular readers of this site will be immediately struck by the inclusion of bands that have hardly featured on these pages before. These competitions are fraught with problems and always give rise to argument and dissent. First of all, how do you judge whether one band is better than another and who should make this judgement? Do you give marks out of ten on a particular set of criteria agreed before hand? Do you pick a number of unbiased judges with suitable knowledge of music to make the final decision? What do you actually mean by a better band? Better looking, better sounding, better musicians; better stage presence maybe?

So how were the winners of this competition chosen each week? Well it was a very simple method that resulted in the rather strange list of finalists. Each Sunday during the last few months, three or sometimes four bands played live downstairs at Staks. They played to whoever had managed to drag themselves from their beds or the after club parties, and anyone else who had walked in off the street. Then after the bands had performed, papers, later to be voting slips, were handed out and people were asked to write down the name of the band most deserving of going through to the next round.

These names were then collected, counted up and Mr. P. Baggot, one half of the 50/50 promotions team (the other being co-organiser Baz Barraclough) announced the results. So far so good. But as the competition went on a number of things began to happen to skew the results. To start with, the days proceedings began to commence later and later; meaning that if you were the last band on then chances are half the audience would already have left before you even played. So the number of potential votes changed from week to week. People who came into Staks halfway through the day still voted even though they had not witnessed the earlier bands.

Friendships and alliances were allowed to come in the way of decisions on which way to vote. It has to be said that towards the latter end of the competition it was about how many friends you were able to bring with you and nothing to do with musical ability at all. During the heat stages bands with a couple of songs and less than five gigs to their names were having extraordinary results.

Continued..... Next Page (2/3)

Check the thisisUll.com Gallery Photographs courtesy and Copyright ©  Michelle Dee 2005

Photograph Gallery   Hollywood Gallery ,    the Vels Gallery 1,    Gallery 2.    Minus 272 Gallery.

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