![]() ![]() When Mewse was 22, she decided to do something new: she accepted a month-long residency as a singer on a booze cruise between Newcastle and Amsterdam. By her early 20s, she was still living at home with her parents, playing gigs for little return. But as the years rolled on, Mewse experienced all the disappointments the music industry so often has to offer – relationships with producers that turned sour, albums that almost happened, then flatly did not. ![]() She dreamed of being Lily Allen or Adele: she wrote songs about cheating boyfriends and gave them titles like Numpty any minute, it seemed, she might get her big break. All through her childhood she studied singing, dance, musical theatre, and in her teens she began writing and recording her own material. “I could have bought a house,” she says, and rolls her eyes. Once upon a time, that kind of success might have offered some professional and financial security. ![]() In 2015, she appeared on the Swedish electronic producer Tobtok’s 2015 cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car its Spotify streams are currently pushing 38m. Today the Stuttgart-born rock guitarist’s repertoire extends to 300 songs, and he has been playing to the hazy bar crowds of this Florida beach town for 30 years.Ĭompared to Rube, south London-born Gemma Mewse is a relative newcomer, but her story is just as winding. It took a few more years for Rube to get his own shows. “I guess I was too lazy to really sit down and translate each and every one.” “Some of the words I was just like, guessing what they were saying,” he laughs. In those days, Rube concedes his approach might be to take, say, a Bruce Springsteen song and deliver an approximation of its lyrics. We got to work on the stuff you’re saying, because whatever you’re singing, I don’t even understand it.” One evening in Key West, another musician turned to him and said: “Your English sucks, but you’re pretty good. When precisely he moved over seems fuzzy, but he remembers the feeling always of landing back in Germany in the midst of winter, “going through the clouds, and underneath everything was grey, grey, grey”. Over the months and years that followed, Rube found himself spending increasing amounts of time in Florida, sleeping on friends’ sofas and blow-up mattresses. I guess I was too lazy to really sit down and translate each and every one Gerd Rube “You know, everything is so bright, everything’s so colourful, everything’s green and blue.” Some of the words I was just, like, guessing. As soon as Rube stepped off the plane, he felt a connection with the land. When he was 20, he played a show for a travel agent who offered to pay him with a free holiday to Florida. For a while he juggled band life with a toolmaking apprenticeship, but gradually music began to take precedence. Rube started out, somewhat improbably, as an accordion player in south-west Germany, but when he hit his teens he realised that playing the guitar might be more impressive to girls. But the trajectory of a music career can be surprising. Still, it is true that very few artists set out on their musical careers believing they will find their place covering Donna Summer songs in the beach hotels of Portugal, or providing soft reggae dinner sets on Caribbean cruises. A prosperous summer can allow a musician to devote the quieter out-of-season months to working on their own material, or to have some semblance of a normal family life. But in a music industry that is increasingly precarious, particularly in an era of economic uncertainty, Brexit and streaming, an established residency in a holiday resort can offer artists a degree of financial and emotional stability. One might assume that there is something dispiriting about performing night after night to audiences for whom music is a mere backdrop to recreation, forgoing the chance to focus on your own songwriting in favour of covering singalong hits to a party crowd. The art of playing music to holiday crowds is distinctly different to any other: a careful calibration of pleasure and crowd control. But Gerd Rube played on, and the warm night air drifted in from the street, filled with plumeria and liquor and the paling scent of suntan lotion. Occasionally, the effect was stirred by drunken bickering or the whiplashed shrieks of tequila shots. The crowd sang along, applauded, whooped. Over the course of four hours he moved through a set that included Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer, Bryan Adams’s Summer of 69, a few of his own compositions, and a sprinkling of numbers from the Zac Brown and Jimmy Buffett songbook that seemed to speak directly to the voluptuous mood. ![]()
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