Musical Memories

Matters arising 1: there was much excitement in the vegetable patch a couple of days ago when some of my seeds actually sprouted. Yes, the radishes are pushing up through the earth and soon I will able to undertake the gardener’s ritual of “thinning out”, when you decide which are the weakest individuals and euthanise them. All those people exhibiting giant marrows at village fetes are probably closet eugenicists. 

This bodes well for the most recent vegetable crop, as radishes are usually first out of the blocks; but things look bad for the crop I planted at the beginning of April. Looks like I will never be able to enjoy the experience of eating wasabi rocket.

Matters arising 2: We’ve had to bite the bullet and get outside help for the most egregious legacies of the dirty dentists. The flagstone floor of the kitchen, and the oven of the non-Aga cooker, are archeological digs in dirt form, and require some kind of heavy machinery to shift. Meanwhile the decorators are in full flight, the electricians have nearly finished, and we have a date to replace the broken, leaky, rusted guttering. All of which is nothing to do with this week’s topic…

I had an invitation to join a band a few days ago. It came out of the blue and enabled me to tick “join a band” off the list of Things I Will Do In Somerset (the others are “Find a football team to watch” and “Be a volunteer guard on the West Somerset Railway” – don’t ask). The band in question was started by two old friends from London who moved to Somerset about ten years ago (but we thought of it first. Oh alright, they did). The band plays songs from the 60s and 70s which feature distinctive harmony parts, which means not only will I be able to play bass in a band (something which has eluded me thus far, for reasons I will come back to) but be able to sing close harmonies, which I am very much looking forward to.

"This one's called Uptown Funk..."

My Life In Rock began when I bought at the age of 15 an MDF Les Paul copy and a book of basic chords. Before I had learned more than two or three, a fellow pupil at school approached me to join his new band, the only reason as far as I could tell being that I owned a guitar. I was stricken with a crisis of confidence, and decide to confide. “I don’t really know any chords” I said apologetically, and he replied with one of my favourite rock quotes of all time: “Don’t worry about chords; just play riffs!”

So that’s what I did, and so discovered the Jazz concept of the Moveable Shape. Not that we were quite at that level. We played a variety of songs in a generally heavy rock style (“Eighteen, when your hair’s too long / Eighteen, all your songs are wrong” etc.). Our band leader’s belief was “All rock songs end on E” so whatever key we were in, we ended with a long E chord. It was quite an introduction to the world of music. No surprise I rebelled by joining a punk band. It was a trio with my friend Keith on guitar, me on an MDF bass whose bottom string didn’t work at all, and no one on drums as we couldn’t find a drummer. We wrote lots of songs (“Nobody seems to hear the words I utter / I’m just another voice from the gutter” etc) which the world never got to hear. Keith lost his nerve singing the line “My Dad wants me to be a swot / I don’t care what he says” in case his Dad ever heard it, so we had a fairly unique punk song running “My Dad wants me to be a swot / I do care what he says” – rather appropriate, in hindsight, for two grammar school boys. My final outing as a schoolboy musician was singing in an R&B band (the 70s “pub rock” type, not the warbly Beyoncé type). We actually gigged.

After that there was quite a hiatus – apart from a single gig playing drums for Lucy Lastic And The Bandaids (no, you won’t have heard of them) – until in my mid 30s, a work colleague of Helen’s mentioned to me he was putting together a 70s glam rock tribute band but didn’t have a drummer. “You don’t play the drums, do you?” That heady night with Lucy Lastic came flooding back to me. I said I did. I bought a kit. And so for the next 25 years I drummed with a succession of bands – glam rock, Beatles covers, skiffle and rockabilly – which on closer inspection were actually the same band with different branding.

When Keith and I were in our punk band we used to scan Beat Instrumental magazine, drooling over the gear. One week they featured a new bass, the Music Man Stingray, designed by Leo Fender (the name may ring a bell) and featuring little dampeners beneath the strings. That did it for me. I had no idea why you would need them but I wanted those dampeners. Sadly I couldn’t afford the bass, being a penniless schoolboy punk.

Look at the dampeners on that

I remembered this years later, when I could afford it, and decided I must fulfil my childhood dream. Except I found it had been upgraded and had – shock – no dampeners. My dreams and ambitions came crashing down around my ears. Until, a couple of years back, I came across the Stingray again and found they had released a throwback version with the desired items back on show. That was all I needed to know. So now I had a bass, I needed a band to play in. I had actually put one together and started rehearsing just as Covid struck. And now the pandemic is nearly over, of course,  I’m moving away.

So the invitation from my Somerset neighbours was perfectly timed. I had been browsing joinmyband.com, recoiling in horror from the videos bands had posted of them mangling well known songs or playing incomprehensible originals. Free of all that, I can look forward to many appearances at village fetes and pub gardens (with a couple of patio heaters and ponchos in winter no doubt). I’ll keep you posted.