I wonder why promoters put on midweek local band nights at places like the Bully, especially when the acts are, shall we say, of the less mainstream variety. Tonight is a prime example. Totting up the numbers – band members, guests, staff, paying customers – at £5 a head I reckon they’d have been lucky to crack £50 for the night’s takings. In a space the size of the Bully back room, that basically equates to an empty room, and doesn’t pay the performers a penny. It’s demoralising for the bands and it makes for a crappy gig, regardless of the quality of the music. Sure, maybe the bigger local bands could pull a crowd midweek, but the middle bracket workers and also-rans simply don’t.

As such, virtually no-one watched True Rumour, me included, and I can see why. I caught a couple of songs at the end of their set and it wasn’t the kind of thing I would have paid to see. Campfire hippy-surfer-acoustic dross, which couldn’t be saved by some vaguely interesting jazz sax noodling. In fact, scratch that; jazz sax noodling isn’t interesting either, even if you have several different sax-related instruments to noodle on. The overriding air of seriousness about the performance didn’t help either.

I gave Dropout a somewhat mediocre review recently when they submitted their latest demos to MusicInOxford.co.uk. I was therefore keen to see them play live, as it’s not entirely fair to judge a band on their rehearsal recordings alone. It would also be unfair to expect them to have entirely changed tack in the space of a couple of months on the say-so of a hack internet reviewer. Despite that, I was largely underwhelmed by the set, which lacked much in the way of stagecraft and performance, or standout tracks.

Part of the issue appears, to me, to be that the music is too simplistic to stand on its own. I’m not suggesting every band should be complex like Zappa, Arsis or Masiro, or that simple music doesn’t have merit or impact. But sometimes simple music is just simple, and lacks the little variations, filigrees and hooks that make it interesting and arresting to listen to. Lots of bands do quiet/loud/quiet but it needs more than a verse riff/chorus riff/verse riff to pull it off well. In Dropout’s line of work, they need to put those gargoyles on the structural walls of their music, otherwise it becomes background.

One ray of light stood out: the penultimate song was a fast, punky beast that had some real balls and character about it, and a killer riff. The band seemed to genuinely enthused to be playing it, and they noticeably stepped up the energy in their performance. It had more variation in the vocals, which seemed to fit the mood and style of the song better than the rather generic vocals in a lot of the preceding songs. One final thing: a frontperson should never, ever (a) explain the meaning behind the song in anything more than one, very brief sentence or preferably a single word – eg hookers, drugs, lying politicians, fake moon landings, cats etc; (b) subsequently apologise for doing that; and (c) have to wait another minute in awkward silence before the band starts playing said song about feline prostitutes.

Black Tish II are an interesting proposition, albeit not very well executed on this showing. A one-man show melding Pretty Hate Machine-era Nine Inch Nails, a touch of Ministry, some industrial clanking and a healthy dose of feedback and atmospheric weirdness with a laptop and our guitar-wielding hero. Dodgy sound didn’t do much to help the hyper-fuzz guitars, which veered alarmingly above and below the laptop backings, but it did seem like more effort had gone into the backing than into writing the guitar parts themselves. This was no Steve Vai-style performance, with the guitars instead taking a simple, rhythmic role behind the programmed beats and abstract soundscapes. Still, it was actually quite an engaging performance, and if Mr Tish attends the same stagecraft class as Dropout there could be something fairly good here. (Needs a proper vocalist as well, someone with a bit of Rammstein about them…)

I can’t write too much about Headcount on the grounds that I know them well and it would be sycophantic. Plus, they’d start to get big-headed about finally getting some good press. That said, this was one of the better performances I’ve seen them deliver in recent times: relaxed and in great form on the banter front. In between berating Dropout’s gurning drummer and each other’s increasing or receding girth [delete as applicable], they played a solid set of favourites peppered with a handful of previously unheard tracks from their forthcoming album. The new tunes fit nicely into the classic Headcount mould whilst showing possibly a slightly lighter, more personal side to the songwriting. Of course it’s all still delivered at breakneck speed and with more tempo changes than you could shake a shish kebab at, so nothing has really changed. Good set.

Unfortunately, the room was essentially empty aside from the other bands (kudos to them all for staying until the end) and that’s never a good thing. As a performer, it’s often a hard choice between taking a gig to get experience, raise your profile or bed in some new songs, or turn it down and risk dropping off the radar or getting a bad rep amongst promoters, especially for new or upcoming bands. Bands needs to be a little more aware of the kind of shows they’re signing up for, and not be afraid of saying that it’s not worth their time and effort to drag themselves to an empty venue on a midweek night. You might play fewer gigs, and we can’t all play on killer bills every time, but I can think of precious few lineups, let alone individual bands, who would have even half-filled the Bully or any of the other main local venues tonight. If bands were a bit more picky about their shows, maybe the promoters would reciprocate and try to arrange better lineups to draw larger crowds. It works better for everyone that way.