Warm pickled onions: a sprinkling of between-the-songs chat is sometimes a good thing

In the past I've complained about members of bands who talk too much. Too much or just boringly. Both are bad. Back in the day, one of the worst over-talkers was Jeff Greene, singer-guitarist in the New Haven, Connecticut band the Butterflies Of Love. During their UK gigging heyday (late-90s/early 2000s), I saw this band a lot and, all told, must have heard about an hour's worth of Greene's rambling on-the-mic digressions. Truly painful, though interestingly I remember that on occasion these discursive digressions would cause distinct intra-band tension, with other band members trying to cut off Mr Loquacious to get their stop-start show back on the road. It's even possible that - perversely - some of this was helpful, with the tension firing up this rather somnambulant band's performance a little. Anyway, though I probably wasn't paying all that much attention to what musicians were saying inbetween their songs during 2025 (it's mostly just dead time), here are a handful of things that I liked this year: 

Drummer in Ex-Vöid (Delicious Clam, Sheffield, 17 April): though I can't recall a single thing he actually said, this Scottish (Glaswegian?) joker was pretty notable for keeping up a near-constant stream of between-songs banter with the audience. Funny/not-funny in equal measure, it was a sort of drole, goading comedy. 

Toby Evans-Jesra, Lobby (Shacklewell Arms, 19 April): "It's more important than ever to stand with your trans siblings. Fuck the courts. Fuck terfs. Fuck JK Rowling." 

Jack Harkins, Autocamper (Shacklewell Arms, London, 21 July): "I wrote this next song in 1987." 

Also from Harkins (Just Dropped In Records, Coventry, 22 July): "Everyone's sitting down in here. Like at our show in Brighton the other day. They were a bunch of hippies."

Singer in The Wameki (JT Soar, Nottingham, 11 September ): "We are The Wameki, from Toky-oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

Roo Stafford from Roo Stafford & The Innits (also from JT Soar, Nottingham, 11 September): "No-one talks about it but Jack Kerouac's On The Road is shit. It sucks. It fucking sucks."

And that's about it. Not, I must admit, quite "Kick out the jams, motherfucker" or "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"-level stuff. Nothing that's going to be remembered for years. But still, I reckon a few well-judged on-stage remarks - exhortations, comedic or surreal interjections, pointed political comments - can definitely enliven a show, giving it a little bit extra. It's a fine line though. As soon as they start straying into Jeff Greene territory it's likely to be a disaster. One of my favourites is still a comment delivered by Leeds band the Rent Boys at the Stag's Head in London in 2010. Riffing on the fact that the gig was adjacent to super-gentrified Shoreditch, the singer said (in his best Kenneth Williams lascivious-camp voice), "Tell ya what. Come back round here in a few years and they'll be serving warm pickled onions ... straight from the oven." He wasn't wrong.   

Autocamper's Jack Harkins at the Shacklewell Arms, looking back fondly to 1987