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Making music: an itch you can’t quite scratch
I don’t usually hang around message boards - when you spend all day on the internet the last thing you want to do when you finish work is spend all night on the internet - but I’ve been intrigued by a conversation on jockrock.org about music. In a rare, non-sweary thread people are talking about what motivates them to create music and how your attitudes change as you become Too Old To Rock*.
I have a vested interest in the subject because from my teens to my early thirties I played in bands, and a few years back I gave it up altogether - other than the odd drunken noise-fest when David’s visiting, I haven’t played guitar for two or more years. That’s a big change for someone who was always making a racket, and who tended to see everything that wasn’t about music as either fuel for songs or finance for being in a band.
I knocked it on the head for a number of reasons. Many - most? - musicians thrive on performing live, but shyness/stage fright meant I never, ever enjoyed that side of it. I preferred what’s best described as “dicking about” - working on stuff via computer music programs, or in studios. The people I played in a band with moved away, some geographically and others mentally (despite repeated efforts, I haven’t seen our former drummer Calum for three or four years. That’s a shame personally - he’s a nice guy - and a shame musically, because I don’t think I’ve seen or heard a drummer since who comes close to his raw talent). And other things got in the way of my obsession with making music. I joke that meeting Miss Right is creative death, but I’m only half joking: being happy isn’t good for writing “woke up this morning, Christ I’m depressed, ooh ooh ooh loook at me I’m so tortured” bollocks; better to have a good life than a crap life that makes good songs, and all that. And if you’re routinely working silly hours, finding the time - let alone the enthusiasm - to batter away on a guitar, a keyboard, a computer program is difficult.
Another issue is that as you get older, you stop being naive - and much of the music business, particularly in the lower echelons, is based on exploiting naivety. You’ll routinely put up with idiots, with mistreatment, with false promises when you’re sixteen; when you’ve got a bit of experience and a bit of sense you finally develop a bullshit detector and enough savvy to realise that “take three days off work, hire a van, travel to london and play in front of three drunks and a murderer” is not an offer worth accepting.
More superficially, clambering onto a stage and realising that you’re old enough to be the other bands’ dad (and if you’d spent your teenage years talking to girls instead of writing songs about wishing you could talk to girls, you might well *be* their dad) makes you feel like a dick.
Above all else, though, the main reason I stopped making a racket was frustration. I could never quite turn what I heard in my head into something others could hear, and it was driving me daft. I’d hear stuff by other people and know I could do it better, but I couldn’t express *how* I would make it better. My head was an amazing musician, but when I tried to translate it into something in the real world I was hamstrung by my own limited abilities - both in terms of my ability to play instruments (rudimentary at best) and my ability to explain to other, more talented musicians what I was trying to get across. It’s very frustrating, like trying to play a piano while wearing boxing gloves.
Rationally, giving up music was a sensible move. But it’s an itch that you can never quite scratch, and no matter what’s going on in your life the itch is still there. My dad gave up smoking a few decades ago and says that to this day, he feels there’s something missing: a taste you can’t quite taste, an itch you can’t quite scratch, a gap you can’t quite fill. And music’s exactly like that: sooner or later its absence starts nagging at you.
There’s a cliche that music is a drug, but I think that while the idea is hackneyed it’s also true. Making music delivers some amazing highs - pulling a tune out of thin air, suggesting *this* note instead of *that* note and hearing something amazing, overcoming your stage fright and playing a blinder, losing yourself for hours in a single guitar riff… everyone’s different and as a result the highs they get from music will come from different aspects, but the one thing everyone has in common is that the high you get from music is powerful - and short. In many respects it’s the ultimate drug because while the buzz is short it’s unlike anything you get from anything else in your life (I’m excluding parenthood here because while I suspect it may well offer something similarly amazing, I haven’t experienced it and therefore don’t have a clue) - and once you’ve experienced it, even if you’ve only experienced it for a tiny period of time a long time ago, part of you wants to experience it all over again.
Which, I guess, is a long way of saying that despite my perfectly rational and logical reasons for staying the hell out of making music, I’m writing stuff in my head again. Mrs Bigmouth has very kindly bought me a bass guitar, I’m getting the telecaster out of storage, I’m going to try and locate the effects pedals I loaned out for one night only and never saw again, I’m going to upgrade the Mac so it’s up to the job of recording music, and I’m really into the idea of making a noise again. Not because I want to be a pop star - I’m too old, too ugly and too ornery for that - but because making a god-awful noise is pretty much the most fun you can have without getting arrested.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
* In the jockrock discussion I’ve mentioned, Tony K made an excellent point about the Too Old To Rock thing: our generation is still defining the terms, because for the first time the cool list is growing old and continuing to make music which, in many cases, kicks the arse of the stuff made by younger acts.
I know you’ve got sole
More reasons why I’m not a pop star…
This is a post about being a teenage rock wannabe, and follows on from “We Need To Talk About Kevin”.
Our bass player, Chris, was Robbie Williams ten years early. By far the best-looking member of our band, he had natural charisma, fashion sense and dancing ability. He wanted to be a rock star, but wasn’t too bothered about the “rock” bit: from time to time he toyed with the idea of joining a boy band, but unfortunately our bit of the world tends to produce lumpen, ruddy-faced blokes who look like potatoes so there wasn’t a Take That to accommodate Chris’s Robbie.
Chris knew the importance of image, and before long he and Kevin started to talk about on-stage clothes. David the drummer paid a bit of attention, but I didn’t really understand the point. I’ve always been a “I will wear this to cover my nakedness” kind of person, Ricky Tomlinson to Chris’s David Beckham.
We were booked to play in Irvine, in an upstairs venue called Bay 63 (there’s a European Union Directive that states all venues must have terrible names). Chris and Kevin were late, because they’d been up in Glasgow looking for stage clothes. Kevin had bought a really horrible ruffled white shirt (which, surprise surprise, looked very like one Bono wore), and Chris had bought shoes.
Let me tell you about Chris’s shoes.
These were no ordinary shoes.
These were suede shoes.
Blue suede shoes.
He was delighted, and with good reason: they were possibly the ugliest, bluest shoes that had ever been created, a blue so blue that the word “blue” isn’t enough. Imagine something bluer than the bluest thing ever created, then add a bit more blue. He asked me what I thought. “Hmmm,” I said. “They’re very blue.”
Fashion chat over, we lumped our gear up the stairs to the venue and set up where the soundman told us to. As ever, I was stage right; Kevin was in the middle; Chris was up by the smoke machine, stage left. We soundchecked, worried about whether the waxed floors would make it hard for the drumkit to stay in place, decided they wouldn’t, headed off for something to eat and wandered back to Bay 63 just before we were due to play.
The venue was transformed. When we’d been there earlier it was a big room with shiny floors and a patina of nicotine, but by the time we’d shoved some hamburgers down our necks it had become Rock Heaven. There was smoke - boy, was there smoke. There was a crowd, many of whom were pierced in various interesting ways. And there were lights. Boy, were there lights.
I think they’re called sweeper spots: very bright, very focused beams of almost laser-like light that sweeps around a room. The combination of the sweepers and the smoke gave an eerie, strobe-like quality, the belching white smoke pierced by searchlights as if Martian war machines were searching for the power of Rock. We were delighted.
Time to play. I stomped on my magic guitar pedals, David did the count-in, we kicked off with something rocky. The sound was great. The lights were better. When I looked up from my guitar (something I couldn’t do too often due to my - ahem - limited playing ability) I saw a sea of bouncing people, strobe-lit by the sweeping spotlights. This could be the best gig ever, I thought.
Something whooshed behind me, making a noise.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”
I couldn’t turn around because I was trying not to screw up a guitar riff. The something whooshed again, this time in the other direction.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”
I managed to turn slightly, and saw a visibly terrified Chris looming out of the smoke like a runaway train, trying his damnedest to stay upright, looking for all the world like a movie monster on a skateboard. Music moves people, and it was moving Chris from left to right and back again at breakneck speed.
You’ve heard of the Duck Walk, Chuck Berry’s legendary guitar-playing strut? It turns out that Chris had accidentally invented his own version: the FuuuuuuuuuckWalk. He’d decided to move from his usual static position in order to rock out, but unfortunately the combination of virgin leather soles, a freshly waxed floor and the water spilling from the smoke machine turned him into a human toboggan. Shooting from side to side, swearing as he went, Chris was - yes! - on the Sole Train.
Chris’s shoes never appeared on stage again.
We need to talk about Kevin
This may turn into a series. Then again, it may not.
I met Squander Two through music: we were both in bands that kicked around Glasgow, so when he stayed at my house the other week we shared war stories about the dubious joys of playing music in public. The topic shifted to bands we’d been in as teenagers, and in particular a band I’d been in called Western Dream. After yet another tale of pomposity, stupidity and utter incompetence, Squander Two said: “You really ought to blog about this.” So here goes.
Western Dream were rubbish - even worse than the name suggests - but of course we didn’t believe that at the time. We were mighty warriors of rock, snake-hipped sex monsters with zero self-awareness, precious little playing ability, lots of spots and a singer called Kevin (he’s not called that now, so I don’t feel bad naming him). Kevin was a lyrical genius whose take on Margaret Thatcher, if played on the radio, would have changed British society overnight:
She’s cold as ice
She’s as welcome as lice
We all liked U2, but Kevin really liked U2. In fact, he liked U2 so much that he tried to be Bono. He adopted Bono’s on-stage drawl and even dressed like him - cowboy boots, black jeans, ruffled shirt… think Live Aid Bono and you get the idea. It was a pretty good facsimile, but Kevin differed from Bono in one key respect: Bono could sing.
Don’t get me wrong, Kevin could sing too - and when he was good, he was very good indeed. Unfortunately his relationship with the tune was rather rocky, and the slightest distraction would send his voice wildly off-key, never to return. As a result, rehearsals were essential: Kevin needed to rehearse songs until his body sang them on autopilot, because if he didn’t then he’d lose the key and howl like a recently bereaved walrus.
I can’t stress this enough: when he had the key, Kevin was a fantastic singer. When he lost the key, he created the worst noise imaginable, a sound that could smash glass, peel paint and make Shaun Ryder sound like Pavarotti. You know those old hand-cranked air raid sirens? Imagine one of them being forcibly inserted into a cat’s arse while Mariah Carey does a vocal warm-up inside a dustbin that’s being beaten with baseball bats.
We were booked to play Hot Gossip (yes, really) in Ardrossan, a pretty rough pub in a pretty rough bit of a pretty rough town. Two of the audience were in traction: one of them, I discovered later on, had escaped from a mental hospital. It was that kind of place. Still, we were going to get £130 for playing there. Sure, it was danger money but hey! We would win over the hostile crowd with our sheer rock power!
Just before the gig, Kevin spotted a rather attractive and relatively un-pierced girl at the bar. He caught her eye, got a smile, and swaggered over. The rock band frontman in full effect. After a brief chat, the conversation turned to music.
K: So what bands do you like?
Girl: All kinds of stuff. U2’s probably my favourite.
I can’t be sure, but I reckon that at this point Kevin’s voice magically transformed from deepest Ayrshire to begorrah-I’m-a-little-leprechaun as he did a little jig and waved a shillelagh.
K: Cool. We do a few U2 songs, you know. What’s your favourite?
Girl: Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I love that song.
K: Well baby, I’ll sing that song for you tonight.
I don’t think he actually said that last bit, but I’m sure he wanted to. Possibly with a Colgate tooth-flare and a sexy wink. It doesn’t really matter, though: Whatever the actual words were, Kevin promised to play Still Haven’t Found… and came over to tell us.
Me: I don’t think that’s a good idea.
K: Why not? You know how to play it.
Me: That’s not the point. We haven’t rehearsed it.
K: Come on, it’s easy!
Me: We’ll fuck it up.
K: No we won’t.
I wasn’t happy, but the rest of the band wanted to do it. Grudgingly I agreed, so we decided to do the song the way U2 was currently doing it live: one guitar and one vocal, then the rest of the band would kick in after the first chorus.
Mid-gig, Kevin announced that we were going to do a song “for a friend of mine”. I stomped on my delay pedal and started the riff. Kevin moved forward. He started to sing.
I have climbed highest mountains…
It was beautiful.
I have run through the fields…
It was like alchemy: take a bunch of ordinary, rather cloddish blokes, add a decent song and the result is something stunning. If you closed your eyes you wouldn’t hear a duff bunch of teenage wannabes; you’d hear one of the world’s biggest bands at the peak of their powers.
Only to be with you…
Kevin’s new friend was pretty impressed. So were we.
Into the chorus.
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
The audience is singing along. Even the fella in traction. The girl is melting. Kevin’s not going home alone tonight.
The chorus ends, David the drummer clicks the sticks for a count-in, Chris the bassist slides down to the first note. Click-click-click-der-der-der - yeah!
We are kicking. Swiss-watch timing, perfect playing, the crowd’s totally into it. Kevin’s got his foot up on the monitor, Live Aid Bono in full effect. Into the second verse.
Oh fuck.
Waaaaaaaaaagh belEEEEEEEEEEEEVE inna KEEENGDUM CU-U-UUUUM!
Kevin’s lost the key. He doesn’t know he’s lost the key. He’s wiggling his arse in front of the crowd, yelping. They’re pissing themselves laughing. We’re pissing ourselves laughing. Traction man’s going to end up in casualty if he laughs any harder.
aaanallda KULLAAAAAS BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED eeento WUNNNN!
David’s playing the drums with tears in his eyes. My gut hurts. Chris is hunched over, howling.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEENTO WUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
There’s around 70 people in the room, and every single one of them is absolutely killing themselves laughing.
Except one.
He’s spinning now, oblivious to the effect he’s having. Occasionally he’ll stare right into the U2 girl’s eyes, at which point she does a very impressive job of looking awe-struck. The second he looks away, of course, she’s banging on the bar with her fists. The same happens with the rest of the crowd: when Kevin looks at them, they quickly put on their serious faces. When his eyes move on, they’re laughing even harder than before. The only one who doesn’t notice is Kevin. He’s deafened by the speakers, blinded by ego, honking like a startled goose.
burra stEEEEEEEEEEEEL HAVVA FAAAAAAAAHND WARRAMLOOOOOKINFAAAAAAAAAA!
The song ends. The audience gives a huge ironic cheer. Kevin turns around, beaming, and sees us.
David’s face-down on the snare drum, weeping.
Chris is sat next to his bass amp, giggling like a loon.
My cheeks are streaked with tears.
Kevin beams. “What’s next?”"