So, you’re a musician? How do we know? Because it’s the line you opened with when walking on over here. You’re the better-looking vegan, the activist who gets action, the less cardigan-y ‘pop atheist’ (unless you of course play the keyboards), but all the same, we heard WHAT you are before we even asked. You’re the musician.

Or more accurately, you’re the one who brought the acoustic guitar to the party last week and we whole-heartedly despise you.

Please, do take a seat anyway, the next round is on you. Two locally-sourced, beard and glasses, Labour backbench IPAs … ah, well, what else was I expecting? No, no, I’m sure the 20 pence a bottle donated to upselling, Bristolilan, so-called ‘vintage shops’ is well worth the eye-watering price and somewhat-less-than-mouth-watering taste and after all, it was so kind of them to endorse the wardrobe malfunction of an outfit you have rocked up in tonight.

Perhaps I am being a little judgemental. Maybe let’s start again.

Breathe.

So, what kind of music do you make?

Ok, wait stop. I refuse to humour the unimaginative whims of yet another flannel shirt-wearing, loop-pedaller. Would you DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT? Yes your single sounds like something that could be on the radio, but why stop there? Just because it sounds appropriate doesn’t mean that it sounds good.

You make a valid point. Good is indeed subjective, it is (in part) a matter of taste, but we can still be objective here! Should we not hold art to a standard? Be critical and reflective and determine what exactly it might add to the existing canon?

All joking and savagery on my part aside, I do believe you were made for great things. You can hear sounds in your head and turn that into something that other people can hear. Just think about that for a second.

Sounds that previously existed only in your head, with the right application of skills, allows others to hear those sounds. It's crazy. And you are crazy talented to be able to do that. It’s just a shame that one of the sounds in your head that is missing is... my voice... telling you to make something good.

I think my rantings have emptied the bar. Oh your friend is about to go on stage? I see. There were 300 odd ‘attending’ your Facebook event and yet the room is so still, I find myself instead rubbing shoulders with my increased social awareness and my desire for the door. But before they begin, I must ask; are all of your future albums going to be about your ex-partner, or do you finally feel seven rather lengthy songs, 23 and a half minutes of my life lost to the void down, that with your soppy, wetwipe, bedroom lyrics, enough to push George to take you to tend the rabbits, that you have finally covered this moment in your life to the full?

After all, you’re a singer and guitarist! If you were a bassist this would be another matter entirely- how often then would you realistically find love? And if you were a drummer, your tact with women - comparable only to the handling of Curley’s Wife - would surely put my previous Of Mice and Men reference to shame.

And what if you were a rapper? Well, then I’d tell you Of Mice and Men is a book, it doesn’t have pictures and not to bother.

How do I express myself, you ask? Am I not simply jealous, you ask? Am I just too uptight, you ask? Well, I’ll have you know…

*shhhh*

On-stage the amateur pub musician begins their descent into a set of questionable tuning, half-hearted covers and awkward stage banter that could have fascinated me for seconds.

Meanwhile, off-stage, time seems to bend like a liquid around me as I swim among the questions posed. My mind adrift, to the strumming of four-chord progressions, each Ed Sheeran wannabe ballad sounding less and less dissimilar, I sink further into my own self-doubt and reflection.

Do these stereotypes really matter if they are only having fun? Isn’t life too short to be so judgemental? Deep down, do I simply crave for the popularity and acceptance that they share?

At once, with animation that would have startled a coma patient, all three audience members besides my companion and myself, begin to clap. The enthusiasm of both the barman and the sound engineer is only matched by that of the third; some sort of living clothes-horse, that looks and smells as if he is so regularly glued to the barstool, that he has in fact biologically merged with it, in some kind of alcohol-induced symbiosis, to create an entirely new breed of human.

So overwhelmed is the gentleman, or indeed so shocked to have realised, as I was that the music had now stopped, he stumbles off of his stool as I stumble back into the end of a line of thought from my singer-songwriter companion...

You’re seriously telling me you don’t like Morrissey? Well now, there’s a surprise!

Check out the official music video for The Prosaics' single Frown below: