A Weekend with Neck ca. 2004

The band is scheduled to play O’Donoghue’s in Shepherd’s Bush – a regular Saturday night haunt for Neck and guaranteed a good crowd. When we played there for the quarter finals of the 2002 football World Cup (Ireland against Spain) I had never before experienced anything like that atmosphere. The band had just released a version of Irish rebel classic “The Fields of Athenry” as a single, and Leeson had penned a stunningly beautiful, powerful ballad as a B-side, based on the Irish Blessing “May the Road Rise with You”. We played and played these two epic songs, with the pub packed to double the legal capacity with partying Irish, and the band’s electricity coming from an adjacent building to avoid the cut-off from the decibel meter when we played far too loud (i.e. all day!). Ireland lost against Spain, so the crowd partied harder and harder into the night.

On the day before our first scheduled gig at O’Donoghue’s in a while (the last one was cancelled right after we set up on stage because Queen’s Park Rangers just beat Cardiff in a football match at home so the Police closed and surrounded the most of the borough), we get a phone call from Austria, asking us to headline a festival in Graz, European City of Culture instead. So the pub gig is cancelled (with the promoter too pissed off ever to hire us again) and the band heads to Heathrow the following morning. In very typical Neck style, we arrive at check-in with four guitars, half a drum kit, bagpipes, violins and a half-cut trad section all ready to board the flight at the back of a long queue, five minutes before check-in closes. Leeson (in inimitable fashion) blags us and all our gear on to the plane.

Arriving at our hotel in Graz (this feels like the Big Time – they’re giving us a HOTEL! Only in mainland Europe are musicians treated with such humanity), Leeson reminds me of the “whoever pulls first gets the room” rule, and emphasises how I once epically transgressed on tour in Waterford by trying to sleep in our shared room while he was entertaining a lady guest. I take the floor instead of half of the double bed – this will save me both from having to top-and-tail with Leeson and from any sense of disappointment should I end up on the floor somewhere anyway due to Our Leader merrily getting his end away ‘for the good of the band’.

The gig is on a big outdoor stage, with a backdrop of a photographed cow so big that when seated at the drums I hide only part of its nose. The gig is pretty great despite the dominating bovine presence. The crowd goes wild, and then so does Shuggy the bassist. In the midst of a stage invasion that results in the shattering of Marion’s fiddle (fortunately it is way cheaper than I imagined, and she carries a spare, in case, presumably of over-excited Tyrolean revelers), I leave the stage to change my shirt and to seek in vain for any remaining beer from our rider. Meanwhile Shuggy disperses my drumsticks to the crowd. A generous and drunken gesture, this leaves me with no sticks. To his credit, a lagered and confused Shuggy then staggers helpfully into the crowd and recovers four of the sticks that he has tossed to baying fans. My continuing lack of fame means that a) no one really gives a shit about my sticks anyway, and b) since I can see no way of buying replacements ahead of our gig the following afternoon in Crawley, we’ll still be able to meet our contractual obligation to perform.

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Neck head back from Graz as quickly as we can. We are somewhat hampered by the alcoholism of our pipes player, Stephen, who insisted on sitting on a park bench near the concert venue for most of the night drinking cans of lager and aggressively serenading anyone in the vicinity with his repertoire of 1000s of Irish and Scottish folk tunes. Following traditional Neck form, we make it on to our morning flight by the skin of our teeth. From London Heathrow we drive around the M25 and south to Crawley, where we are playing another festival that afternoon. Arriving in surprisingly good time, we are able to (in Stephen’s case) drink ourselves into cantankerous near-oblivion and (in my case) wander the market stalls, buy a sterling silver ring to replace one I’d lost on tour, grab a half-decent burger, and enjoy a couple of other bands before we play. The festival has a nice, relaxed vibe to it – families enjoying a day out – and solid acoustic, folk and roots music. The event is stage-managed well, too, which makes the band’s day smoother than some. Before long this gig will exemplify precisely how playing with Neck is so irresistible and infuriating – why, like an abusive lover, I need to leave the band immediately yet thrill every time at the feeling of playing in it.

Our set begins well, with the classic opener “Loud and Proud and Bold” – it’s a short, sweet punch-in-the-face, giving me a chance to showcase the full range of my dynamic playing in under three minutes. We’re well-polished this summer, so I’m used to the effortless fun of punk-trad Irish music that we romp through night after party night. However, on this gig everything falls peculiarly well into place, and I experience a moment of exceptional alignment during our fastest song, “Always Upsetting Somebody”. The song requires that I play the ‘train rhythm’, made famous by rockabilly drummers, for two-and-a-half minutes at the maximum possible speed. Often in this song I grow tired, feeling the lactic acid build up too soon in my forearms and shoulders, but today I play it faster and smoother and with less effort than ever before. I soar. It’s an incredible feeling! I see myself playing from about three feet above the drums. The song finishes and I cannot account for my singularly sublime performance. Apparently everyone else is happy too. Then all of a sudden there’s a problem with an amp, and we have to stall the set. Leeson’s reaction might on another day have been discombobulated, but today he responds by singing a capella while the band waits off-stage. The song is breathtaking, and in the wings none of us moves, spellbound by a moment of stillness and total beauty. When I tell Leeson afterwards that I thought his song was incredible, he tells me he wrote for his two sons, and that he sings it to them over their graves every year. I choke back tears.

As dusk draws in, the van is eventually loaded and the band ready to head home. As we’re walking to the van for the last time, annoyed that Leeson didn’t help us pack it (again) and wondering where the hell he is, he appears from a path somewhere, girl in tow, scuttles in to the van with her, locks it from inside and pulls the curtains. Stunned, the rest of the band waits for a moment, sitting at a discrete distance while the van begins to tock gently from side to side, accompanied by small cries of pleasure from Leeson’s shag. I cannot believe this is happening. The festival lights and stalls close around us and the evening grows dark. We get colder, soberer, and more and more pissed off. Ninety minutes pass, and they’re still in there. I am livid, tired, hungry, and in need of my jacket. The five of us voyeurs feel royally shat on. After two hours the girl leaves the van and Leeson cheerily says we can all get in. I am too slow to call shotgun, and the back seats are warm from the fornications. Fucking great. Leeson gets to drive us home, laid and smug. Fuck this. Two fucking hours!! How the fuck does he get away with it?! I say nothing.

43 Orchard Gate

43 Walnut Walk was the house that saw Steve and I form a life-long bond, and was the subject of our only falling out. It bore witness to the most tumultuous and tormenting of romantic relationships and served as a pre-Heathrow-airport pit-stop for musos of various hues; it witnessed the end of my fling with Marie and the beginning of my life with Liz; it provided nature with the opportunity to develop in our back garden what I recall from high school geography lessons being termed a Climax Culture that took us many days in the blistering heat of our third July there to conquer. While he was with Tania, Steve’s bedroom was the backdrop for a climax culture of an altogether different sort, prompting on more than one occasion me and third housemate Jon to applaud at the conclusion of what had clearly been for both parties an exhausting and near-Olympian display of physical intimacy. It was in this house that Mike squatted, that Jon entertained more women than Robbie Williams at Wembley, and that my brother and I discovered the difficulties inherent in moving an upright grand piano from Brighton to London with only a Post Office van (fitted with aeroplane seats), a double mattress and a girl called Claire. It was at this house that I left my gear in the driveway en route to a gig, that Steve chain-sawed his way through a mains cable while one day attacking our hedge, and that I would from time to time wander at leisure in the road and a dressing gown, sipping the LapSang SouChong tea that was Mike’s sole material contribution to the running of the place while he squatted.

For me, however, and I hope for the others who came to know and love this house, my abiding memory of it will be the persistent howl of the (midnight) toilet.

Probably the best thing about this water closet’s idiosyncratic behaviour was its impeccable sense of comedy timing. Whenever initially one had flushed the toilet at 43 Walnut Walk the event would appear, to all intents and purposes, unremarkable. Until one had left the confines of the smallest room, re-zipped and refreshed; whereupon the contraption would contrive to let rip one of the most penetrating and humbling sounds perhaps ever to ensue from an instrument of domestic plumbing. Tenderly and cautiously at first, but within seconds rising to nothing short of confident exuberance, the crapper would belt out a trombone-ish concert Eb. This horn-of-an-ocean-liner would last for up to two minutes, claxon-ing its urgent warning throughout the house and, doubtless, reverberating assuredly around the rooms of our adjacent neighbours’ home, sharing as we did an adjoining wall.

Revisiting episodes of my life wearing the warmly rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, I find it now more astonishing than the exuberance of our loo that the four housemates who endured this frequent (and never once unintrusive) serenade not once in eighteen months saw fit to call a plumber about what was a cause of considerable mirth, frustration and despair. I wonder with hindsight if perhaps this loud yearning moan, this passionate orgasmic groan from an object of our collective experience, so objectified, enameled and white, if this anthropomorphizing feature of our bog brought us somehow closer together and, curiously, in closer communion with that toilet.

Of course, the best opportunities for mischief to be wrought by the trumpeting toilet were proffered by the quiet of night. Oft would an unsuspecting visitor tiptoe innocently to the bathroom discreetly to perform his or her midnight ablutions; only to have their return journey to the guest room rudely arrested by the terrifying (yet, I confess, strangely endearing) nocturnal protestations of that rambunctious appliance. Many a morning over coffee and toast, clearly worried that they might have inflicted upon our home some irreversible damage by their ham-fisted and insensitive flushing, a friend would say something like, “erm, your toilet made a lot of noise last night”. Ha-ha! And they were nailed! Hook, line and sinker! The loo had caught them with their pants down and they had confessed. A small admission, albeit phrased as one of concern, became a confession of sullying guilt by Mike/Leigh/Alex – whoever was the culprit – he had last night awakened everyone within a mile of the bathroom; he had not been able to wait ‘til morning; he had been the object of an insanely funny practical joke played not by us, the generous and deep-sleeping hosts, but by that mostly-silent partner, that sleeping dog, that coiled spring of a contraption that would leap to life to victimize a visitor just when it mattered the most.

We did eventually arrange circuitously for a plumber to call (via messages left with the estate agent, the landlady’s parents and finally the witch herself – more of her another time); and the stakes of the game, or rather its pitch, were raised. The plumber, after flushing and listening and prodding about, helpfully informed us that there wasn’t much he could do because there was air in the pipes. As musicians ignorant of the minutiae of plumbing, and being mostly an intelligent (if under-confident) bunch, we all silently wondered if perhaps a solution might, therefore, be found in the extraction of the accused air; but we collectively failed to articulate this suggestion and were left to revel in the consequences of our combined cowardice.

So, although he did not manage at all to alleviate the problem, the plumber did alter the sound. I will never forget the moment that Dave triumphantly confirmed our suspicions when, during a particularly prolonged pronouncement form the inanimate occupant of the smallest room, he bounded up the stairs, took one of his guitars from the wall, plucked a string and pronounced that the toilet was indeed now yodelling in F. (I couldn’t, for shame, bring myself to admit that I’d thought it was a G – I merely consoled myself with the assertion that I’m a drummer so getting pitches wrong in my head was okay.) That day, though, something was lost. We could feel the end encroaching, tangible and sad. After the plumber had come and gone, the shitter wailed refreshingly its whole-tone higher than before. But this was short-lived. The glory days were over. One day less than six months later, someone noticed that the toilet had fallen silent. Thus it was with a heightened, brooding sense of the supra-normally mundane that we each would now trudge up the fourteen stairs to the bathroom for what was certain to precipitate a dull and un-gratifying experience. The toilet tried from time to time to revive its heyday by emitting a pathetic whimper or a mild, disappointing croak; but nothing to warrant any attention or to properly perturb the passing of now meaningless time.

Gigging in Whitechapel

The Eruptörs have a gig in Whitechapel, curated and (rather quietly) promoted by Tom, the manager of our label, Maniac Squat (named after a band Tom was in in the ‘90s that rose to brief notoriety with one perfectly-titled ‘song of the week’ in Kerrang! Magazine called “Fuck Off”, for which Tom was both lyricist and singer. Genius? Maybe). Tom is unable actually to attend the gig, which is irritating and sort of sends the wrong message to anyone else wondering whether or not to come to a punk rock gig in the café of an art gallery slightly off the beaten track in the trendy East End. It is the Eruptörs’ first gig in while and we are eager to Rock Out. Geoff has bought leather trousers especially for the event, and I have yet to play in the flame-adorned Harley Davidson Stetson that I picked up on honeymoon in Nashville, the purchase of which threatened to cause a first fissure in my young marriage to Liz.

I pull up in the car outside Whitechapel Art Gallery, as ever in trepidation that I will fall foul of a parking attendant by misreading the signs or leaving half-a-millimetre of tyre hovering with intent over a double yellow line. The sign says I have twenty minutes for loading. All righty, then – I take a look elsewhere; no way I can get a drum kit inside the venue, navigate to the lift, load in, travel up, off-load, stack somewhere safely and be back in the car in that  time, so I decide to try my luck around the back entrance (so to speak). A convenient alleyway there leads right to the back door and the lift to where we are playing. But unfortunately a car is backing out of the alley so I have to drive around the block to try again – the guy in the white van at my back has already honked unsympathetically twice, apparently incensed that I should slow to look for a space on his time. Feeling harassed, I do another circuit, only to find the car still gingerly emerging from the alleyway and someone else anxiously on my tail. Around again. On the third pass the loading bay at the front of the gallery is again momentarily vacant. I resume my spot there, resigned to the athletic fate of having to transfer my kit in stages and record time to beat the parking attendants before locating a more permanent parking place and hopefully still making the sound-check. As I reach the door, however, one of the staff, a really nice chap called Matt offers to help – but first he’ll see if we can’t get the car blocking the back alley to move. He quickly discovers that the car belongs to a minicab driver who is more than happy to move for me into a space just being vacated outside the curry house next door. (Brick Lane is known principally for three things: stolen bicycles, cheap mobile phones – probably also stolen – and curries; parking spaces are about as common as hens’ teeth.)

Thanks to the rare joy of civilized human interaction when parking in London, I unload the gear with a spring in my step and get it into the lift without hitch and with much unwarranted assistance from the attentive facilities staff of Whitechapel Art Gallery. I return to the car to complete my third circuit of the block and begin the fourth to return to Brick Lane where I intend to park for whatever the fee until the meters stop working at 7.00 PM. It is about 4.30. I get a decent spot and buy a ticket from a nearby machine, taking care to check I’ve left the car parked in a parking bay and not in a loading bay – a trap all too easy to fall into; I place the blue-Rizla-thin parking ticket on the dashboard and read it three times to be certain I'm certain I can leave the car there ‘til after the gig. Feeling cautiously confident, I head back to the venue for the sound check.

During set-up I manage to shear the thread of three screws on my Iron Cobra double bass drum pedal (it must have three-dozen adjustment points, about four of which are actually helpful), but I merely fit the spares I have brought, with a certain smugness. The Eruptörs are about to return to the London stage in triumphant style, and nothing will now stand in our way. Our sound-check goes smoothly, and in fact we have the best on-stage sound we’d ever had. My drums kick their usual amount of proverbial butt, and my co-Eruptörs sound awesome too. So all is well. Until a woman enters the room, screaming.

She is screaming at us, the Eruptörs (doesn’t she know who we are?!?!), telling us that this is not a venue for rock and roll, that we are too loud, and that she is trying to work but can not do so because of the unmentionably loud music we were just playing in her art gallery. When asked, she advises us that she was the Director of this institution and that no, she has not heard anything from Tom, her General Manager (the guy who booked us, who happens conveniently to be in France for three days), about there being a gig tonight, and that no, we absolutely may not finish our sound-check at least until she, the Director, has left the building, and she cannot possibly say when that might be. She ignores Alex’s offer of a hand to shake in an attempt to diffuse the situation, and storms out. Bugger. But never mind – there’s always something, and this time she was it. The Veez, who are supporting us, will just have to have their sound-check later. We're all using most of the same gear anyway.

A group of our friends arrives, and we decide to go for something to eat (with them). Brick Lane is famous for providing just this type of diversion, but curiously none of us fancies the customary Indian cuisine; so instead of stopping at any one of the bargain curry houses with their tenacious marketeers outside attempting vigorously to reel us in, we continue up the street until we find a place offering corn-on-the-cob and soft drinks. As we sit to eat, I mention (frankly, pretty casually) that on the way up Brick Lane I didn't notice my car parked where I'm pretty sure I left it. A few of the party half-hear me, and softly, if disinterestedly, consent that I probably just missed it – how could it not be there? So many cars look the same nowadays! Except that mine has distinctive AA Driving School decals all over it, unlike any other vehicle on the street, and it should stand out like a sore thumb. I finish my worse-than-mediocre corn and contrive with Geoff and Alex to look more carefully for my car on our way back to the venue. The car is again noticeably absent. Shag.

I opt to loiter awhile in bemusement and discontent while the band and entourage head back to the venue to concentrate on getting hyped up for our immanent epic concert. I am wondering whether to call the police when a patrol car serendipitously drives past. I chase it up the road, gesticulating wildly. Happily, the patrol car stops, and a round-ish police officer in his late forties (glad, no doubt, that it was I who was doing the chasing), winds down his window. It is then that I realise that to him I might appear both highly suspect and pretty damned funny, dressed as I am in full classic rock regalia including cowboy boots, Guns n’ Roses t-shirt (no sleeves, of course), Eruptörs patched denim jacket, studded leather bracelets and the obligatory new Stetson with flames under the brim. In costume and out of breath, I advise the officer that my car has been stolen. His lady driver, in a lot more make-up than I imagined police officers of either sex to wear, suggests that it has been towed away. After acknowledging her suggestion with all the modesty I can muster it dawns on me how absurd my story sounds. I am an unlikely driving instructor, and it does seem a stretch that anyone would steal a driving school car replete with AA logos and dual pedals. And did I really remember to lock the car? Was it definitely in the parking (not loading) bay? Crap. The police officers hand me their call sign on a post-it-note and I hear the driver radio some other patrols to keep an eye out for my car.

As the Police drive away, Kath, the Veez drummer, comes running up to me, sympathizing and saying how shit this all is. I am touched by her comradeship, and we walk to where I parked the car (now full of someone else’s vehicle). Some guy tries to get us into his restaurant for dinner, and while I want to shout at him for even suggesting such a thing at a time like this when I still have burnt corn stuck between my teeth and no goddam car, Kath in her sanguine brilliance instead asks him if he has seen my car being taken away. He has not, but his friend informs us that Tower Hamlets Borough Council came about half an hour ago and towed the car away on a truck. I feel a peculiar mixture of emotions, and wonder things like: How the hell will I get the drums home now? More to the point, WHY IN GOD’S NAME DID THEY TOW MY GODDAM CAR?!

When I get back to the art gallery in a massive adolescent sulk Matt says I can leave the drums in the venue after the gig for the night if I want; or, his colleague Richard has just offered to go home on public transport, get his van, and then drive me and my gear to my place after the gig. Incredible. Whence do such kindly souls come? I wax equal parts grateful and pissed off, trying to stifle the overwhelming and desperately unhelpful urge to hurt myself or somebody else. I settle upon the lavatory as the best place to vent my bladder and my rage. En route and scowling, I encounter in the stairwell three young women I taught to drive, who have long threatened to come to an Eruptörs gig. I summon a weak smile and one of them asks how I am. I spare no detail in explaining, whereupon they burst out laughing. These girls could be anywhere tonight but have made a special trip to see me play; so weirdly their mockery and mirth at my childish tantrum proves the ideal tonic. I feel ten times better and thank them for coming before making excuses to go and relieve myself.

Half an hour later, I can’t wait to go on stage with the Eruptörs. My wife is there, some friends have shown up, we’ve rehearsed, we are sounding better than ever, my double pedal is working (As is not always the case), the gallery’s director has apparently gone home, and the Veez are now half way through their rocking set, and we’ve received no noise complaints. Things could not be much better; bugger the car – that is a problem for tomorrow. The Eruptörs give the audience the best gig of our career. We open with AC/DC’s “Let There Be Rock” – just in case anyone is unsure as to why we’re here. We tear into each successive song with energy and abandon. I feel fantastic, and play my arse off. Our final song is “Skate Fast Die Hard”, which concludes with a massive, self-indulgent drum solo – o yes!!!

As we begin packing up after a sweaty, noisy, and arse-kicking half-hour of ear-shattering punk metal, I notice a lady in Metropolitan Police uniform waving up to us from the alley two storeys below. I pay her no heed, assuming she is looking for some crackheads or drug dealers is merely confused. Moments later, however, friendly Matt strides into the centre of the room accompanied by three police officers, turns off the Mötely Crüe coming form the PA and calls everyone’s attention. He proceeds to advise us all that the venue must immediately be vacated by all apart from those working here, as the police have received ten complaints from neighbours about the volume of noise ensuing from the art gallery. It's not even 11 o’clock yet – what were these people on?! “Loud?!” Yes, we’d put some effort in, but the drums weren’t even miked! Although I know that I and probably just about anyone could not have hit them any harder – hehehehehe…

We pack up, amused, bemused and confused. Saintly Richard drives me home with the drums, and I sit down to a hard-earned medicinal glass of red wine.

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The fun continues the following morning when I call the school where I usually teach clarinet and music theory on Fridays to advise them I will not be in. They are okay about it, as I pretty much never cancel and there is probably a note of anguish in my voice suggesting that any protestations will be unlikely to help either of us at this point. I “only” lose out on about £150 from that day’s teaching. Humph.

So, to the car pound. It turns out to be bloody miles away, in an abandoned corner of Canning Town London so far east it's practically in the North Sea. It takes nearly two hours to reach by public transport but seems a lot longer due to my distinctly irritable mood. When I arrive at the pound I a, first struck by the number of cars. There appear to be thousands – I was expecting a few dozen, and suspect that the parking-fining-towing system in Tower Hamlet is a little too efficient. There is a small prefab hut housing two female occupants apparently competing with one another for prizes in disgruntlement – over one window a sign reads “Hackney”; over the other “Tower Hamlets”. The queue for the Tower Hamlets window is about 15 times the length of the Hackney one. Why, I wonder, were Hackney residents apparently so much more savvy to their borough’s parking restrictions? I queue for a tense, silent half hour (broken only by rude, blunt, unhelpful or occasionally civil remarks from the women fronting the Councils’ barely-legitimate money-laundering scheme) before reaching the window.

I am obliged to pay two fees - £60 for the towing, and £140 for the car’s overnight stay in a car park. These seem nothing short of extortionate. Although the repeated drama played out ahead of me in the queue for the preceding thirty minutes ought perhaps to have cautioned me against this, I ask why my car was towed, since I bought a ticket and displayed it on the dashboard and the ticket was presumably still in the car. After some shouting with a man out-the-back it is established by my disgruntled lady that, while it is clear I indeed bought a ticket, unfortunately the ticket has fallen on to the floor of the car. While still visible, it is not (as per the requirements of Tower Hamlets Borough Council) ‘clearly on display’. Thus I simply need to pay up in full or continue to pay the hefty daily rate for my car to be kept in the pound on the edge of the known universe. I pay up, am allowed past the stainless steel gate into the pound proper. I realize as I get in the car and root around for my sunglasses the reason for the disparity in the length of the two queues. Next to my glasses case is an old Hackney parking ticket, which has an adhesive back, so that it sticks to one's car window. Tower Hamlets’ tickets, on the other hand, are cruelly designed to blow away – I see mine from yesterday, face-up on the floor of the car. The prize for money-grabbing, anti-parochial opportunists goes to… the London Borough of Tower Hamlets!

I quite enjoy the (start of the) drive home - a rare, unhurried jaunt through the streets of Far-East London. To avoid the Congestion Charge I opt for the North Circular and promptly land myself in 90 minutes in heavy, anti-clockwise traffic. 

Going to Graceland

Usually a Lyft means a furtive half-hour drive on heaving pot-holed suburban freeways with high-strung New Jerseyans racing to get me to Newark Liberty airport. Every now and again, though, I get to hang in the back seat of a car in an altogether more relaxed state. Today is one such day. I decided to take today off months ago, and drank just enough last night to make sure I didn’t get up early. I go for a run, dry off, change, and book a ride from my Air BnB to [Memphis, Tennessee, I’m going to] Graceland.

The sun is shining, my hangover’s in the rearview, and the Lyft app tells me to expect Lamontre in a white Dodge Charger. My grin broadens when three minutes later the iconic American muscle car growls around the corner of Marion St., rear windows cracked, blaring The Arrows’ “I love Rock and Roll”. I open the door and the car smells strongly of weed. Lamontre reaches back to clear a bunch of shirts and underwear from the back seat and coyly excuses the small pastel blue homemade bass guitar in the seat well. Turns out he made it himself, and his wife painted it. He passes back a six-string backpacker guitar, also blue – not handmade. He’s teaching himself slowly – E chord, A, chord, B chord, scales and theory – and wonders if I can play.

Lamontre is a Rasta-capped black welder from Memphis in his mid-fifties who’s spent about ten years of the last thirty in Milwaukee because that’s where the work was. Now he drives for Lyft twelve hours a day. He lost a daughter a few years ago, but his other child is 25 and bore him grandkids, which is partly why he keeps two booster seats in the car with his laundry. Lamontre is the author of three books, about various events in his life from the points of view of imaginary bystanders. His sister put them on Amazon. He’s a self-taught music producer too, but until recently never got around to applying himself to the craft he’s admired his whole life in rock, blues and jazz guitarists.

He had an old white guy in the car a few weeks ago who tuned the backpacker guitar and unimpressively just played E, A and B. They stopped at an ATM and when the dude got back in he began playing and singing the blues! Lamontre is so excited telling this tale – like a five-year-old on Christmas morning. His naive enthusiasm is intoxicating. It also distracts him a little from driving, but hey – apparently about half the people he picks up can play a little guitar. I tell him I’m a horrible guitarist and a much better drummer.

Lamontre recently put little red stickers on all the places on his guitar neck he can play ‘E’. He asks if I’m an investor or an inventor and if I’ve ever heard of anyone else doing that. I confess I know of hundreds of music teachers who do it routinely, and that I only wish I could call myself an investor (I’m no inventor either, just banging around on things other people make). Lamontre is thrilled to be on his new guitar-learning journey, since he has the rest of his life to keep learning. What an utterly joyful perspective.

He drops me off at a cavernous café near Elvis’s Graceland mansion. I can’t figure out where the entrance is for people who want to eat in, so I just stand and watch a parade of beautifully attired Southern black folks in their Sunday suits queueing to buy lunch, suddenly feeling terribly self-conscious about my disintegrated faith, slovenly attire, and the copy of Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists I’m (now coyly) carrying under my arm. I walk to Graceland and am turned away at the gates – apparently you can only arrive there by shuttle bus. I stroll the quarter-mile to the bus stop and museums, grab a burger and a beer at Gladys’ Diner, and look on Amazon for Lamontre Maxwell. I purchase What These Eyes Have Seen with alacrity. It’s 54 pages long and will arrive in the mail next week. Now, for reasons I cannot explain, some part of me wants to see Graceland.

The Fine Art of Losing My Shit

It’s not that I don’t care, or that I want to lose things. I find the experience perennially exhausting, in no small part because of its un-waning inevitability. But I have to accept that I leave my shit in places I do not intend. Spinal Tap tell us there is a fine line between clever and stupid. I prefer the analogy of a cliff-edge, where clever is atop the precipitous decline and stupid is repeatedly diving onto the rocks just to clamber up in shame looking for my wallet.

I have a team around me, press-ganged by fate, hapless victims who keep an eye out for my stuff, dragged unwittingly into the vortex of my functioning social incompetence. Sometimes, they just sit by and laugh. My friend Dorothee in Zurich used to say that leaving things behind in her house was a clear sign I wanted to go back there. This was hard to contest, as I did want that and still do. But I am indiscriminate as to where I forget things. I left my wedding present watch from my wife in the seat-back pocket of an A-380 a few years ago, and by way of demonstrating to my spouse that this in no way reflected a diminishing of my affections for her, when she bought a beautiful replacement watch I left that on a 747 just a short while later. I now own a small collection of children’s watches that I never take off on a plane. Today, I misplaced my hat.

I finish teaching my fun undergrad class in Manhattan and notice I am not in possession of my inexpensive black felt Fedora. I ask the students still milling about in the room, “was I wearing a hat when I came in earlier?” Giggled consensus is that they don’t think I was. Optimistic, I check again under a chair and behind the computer podium and don’t see it. It is probably in the rest room, and not without good reason! Just last week I left my mobile phone in two different bathrooms on the same day – one in New Jersey, the other in New York. In New Jersey I left work, got into my car, then tried to fire up the GPS which was on my phone in the men’s room inside building I’d just departed. Later in the day I taught a graduate research class at NYU and afterwards hastily made my way to the subway. I reached into my pocket to check some emails but encountered no phone. I needlessly checked all my pockets and my bag. Recalling my New Jersey success, I felt confident the phone would be in the men’s room at NYU. I returned to the building through a blizzard to find it was. 43 minutes later, I was again New Jersey-bound, texting my friend to say I would arrive an hour later than planned.

After class today, then, I am pretty sure my hat will be in the water closet. I bound eagerly to the second-floor all-gender bathroom (where the soap dispenser is not broken – #winning). There is a queue and an inconvenient wait, so when it’s her turn I dive between the woman in front of me and the bathroom door, saying I think I left my hat in there earlier. She is aghast, so I scout the room in earnest. No Fedora. Confidence dented, I check with security downstairs, aware as I clumsily conflate janitorial and security roles, they will never tell me that they have my hat. They don’t have it

Undeterred, I return to the principal business of my afternoon: I probably left another cheap hat in a nearby restaurant last night. It isn’t in the bar I went to afterwards (my friend checked), so there is a fighting chance it’s in Cuba.[1] The server approaches me with a menu. The pained awkwardness of my countenance advertises that I am not here to dine so I tell him I left my hat there last night (there is a 70% chance this is true). I describe the hat, he reaches into a cupboard and extracts it. Amazed and grateful, I do not tip. I wonder briefly whether I should, but I have not the cultural competence to calculate the gratuity on a service that was possibly free. Half anticipating the waiter to give chase, I depart for the subway. I board the train, wearing my hat. Just not the one I brought with me.

[1] The name of eatery – I was not so drunk that I visited a Caribbean socialist republic on the way home.

Cultural Learnings about Football

My wife, daughter and I decide to spend a sunny autumnal afternoon watching the homecoming football game at Huntington High School. I am excited to learn there might also be hotdogs (Esme is a fan and I like to imbibe with fried onions and complain about the vinegariness of American “mustard”). We are going mostly for the halftime show.

The endless stop-start of the first tortuous quarter is interrupted when a player is credited with scoring a touchdown after simply running (albeit quickly) to one end of the field with a ball and standing there. Illusions shattered, I recall rugby football and the lengths to which players of that sport will go, both to ensure and prevent the ball touching the turf in the ‘end zone’. I shake my head at this poor adolescent perpendicular in a two-dimensional box. Painfully aware that the cultural and empathetic deficits lie with me, I am relieved moments later when our child’s perpetual motion reaches a point of necessary diversion. We head to some grass beside the stand to play frisbee and burn off energy before halftime. We glimpse the cheerleading squad rehearsing energetically, and with one minute left of the second the quarter, we head back to Mum and our seats.

Play proceeds with stuttering predictability until, with 13 seconds remaining, a kid is injured and the world’s slowest-moving ambulance winds its way into the grounds and onto the field. I think on the cost of hospital treatment in this place where socialized healthcare is held to be a greater evil than devastating global climate change or death of the nation’s democracy. About a week later the final seconds of the quarter play out, and the feverish wheeling-on of percussion commences. The band lines up, looking ready, some members eyeing one of three drum majors who will conduct the ensemble from atop stepladders.

A brooding start to the music foregrounds the vibraphones in the foreground. Poetic. The clarinets are blissfully inaudible and the brass mostly in tune while saxes, drums and flutes carry the ensemble. The piece is long and the recall impressive, the size of the sound compounded by a following wind as it reaches the expectant ears of the audience. Some kids throwing flags around join in for a bit, and the people behind us start whooping. The choreography is impressive and tight, but I feel cheated by the lack of actual marching.

The school’s elite cheerleading squad takes to the field. They are flexible and well-rehearsed, and their synchronization is honestly amazing given the whirlwind schizophrenic bleeped-out R ‘n’ B mashup to which they move. They stay largely in time with the fast-changing tempi, and the Huntington High-Steppers indeed step high, but lead a single cheer they do not.

It is the hour of coronation for the homecoming monarchs. I hoped that the queen might be a flaming, flamboyant cowboy in chaps or a daring, debonair drag artist decked out in leathers and feathers. Instead, there is a smiley, confident teen in a nice dress with flowers unironically adorning her head. The king is not in ‘70s Las Vegas Elvis attire (a trick tragically missed), but nonetheless a mortified, lanky young dude with a clear desire to be swallowed up (regally) by a hole in ground.

There’s no way we’re staying for the second half. (Spoiler alert: one team beats the other, and next year some different kids in the same uniforms will play each other again for the same stakes.)

I have learned much today:

• Touchdown is an infuriating misnomer;

• Marching bands shuffle and sway;

• Cheerleaders do not necessarily lead cheers;

• I can see why colleagues resort to fantasy football in lieu of enduring the real thing

Finally, I would note that, in the words of British leftfield jazz artist Django Bates, “you kick the ball with your foot – that’s why they call it football” (but he was of course singing about soccer).

Trouble with Cheese

“Simply Satisfying”. These are the words that adorn the rectangular box containing my brunch snack aboard American Airlines flight 163 from New York City to Los Angeles – a meaningless faux zen wisdom platitude for experience-deprived passengers presumably presumed unable to react to the veritable festival of epic mediocrity that awaits them. The two terrifically un-tantalizing menu options proffered to those of us blessed to travel in the Economy cabin, in a hastening downward spiral of underwhelming customer service, are a Turkey Wrap (which sounds like a warm-up exercise for an elementary school nativity play) or the Cheese and Fruit Plate. The flavorlessness of the sandwich is guaranteed, as it has shallowly flirted with my taste buds before – literally nothing in the cold cut coil exuded any discernible flavor – so I opt today for the chic and continental European sounding alternative. My total disappointment, however, follows not far behind, although it is stalled slightly by my anticipation of the known quantity of American ‘cheese’ (a gastronomic phenomenon to which I am sadly also well used and for which I was expertly prepared by Stephen Fry in this book of otherwise heartwarming tales about traveling throughout the United States).

First to piss of me off, though, is the ‘plate’. I am all for irony, and have become known and disliked in many quarters for my compulsion to default to sarcasm at all times, especially when least appropriate. But this isn’t a plate, it’s a trough. A crumple-able plastic portable for the porcine. Albeit with a see-through lid. Beneath the transparent canopy are seated four of the world’s squarest, blandest crackers (wrapped in pairs), eight grapes and an oversized strawberry. Nestled among these alluring treats are triangles of four types of cheese. I am already beginning to hate and berate myself for not choosing the hip-hop poultry alternative, since at least that might have contained lettuce (no flavor, no calories and no point, but the promise of a crunch if you’re lucky!). I life the lid and smell nothing. What the actual fuck. That a trough of multiple types of cheese could assail my olfactory nerve not at all, makes me crave going back to reading the patronizing “bestseller” business book I am grinding through for work, whose advice could (and I really think should) have been condensed into a single pithy motivational tweet.

I suspect that the thick orange wedges on the far left of the trough are attempting to pass as ‘cheddar’; I glance quickly past them, knowing all too well the rubbery void that there lies. Adjacent is a large, off-white equilateral, with some pockmarks lending it an air of intrigue. Beside this lies a smoked-looking smaller piece, its amber rind hinting at hickory or oak. Bookending the right of the dairy display is a small chunk of probably brie. I decide to work my way port to starboard. The cheddar continues to smell not at all as I bring the slice close to my face. My resignation is complete once I chew the curds, exhale and find that zero flavor is to be forthcoming – not even the gym locker foot default cheesy pong that characterizes that godawful Kraft ‘cheese’ stuff that you can spray and spread and smear and goes gloopy. Jesus. On then to the next in line, which honestly I find the most alluring. It boasts texture, at least, and is minutely springier to the touch. But of course it tastes exactly the same. Which is to say that it tastes not at all. I give up any hope that the one that looks smoked has ever seen smoke or a cow; this at least sets us up for success, and it inevitably tastes as smoky and cheesy as the scent of the aircraft’s sterile bathroom. I finally fall to the brie, which, while surely never anyone’s first choice of cheese, can on occasion provide satisfaction in its benign magnolia beige-ness. But it’s rubbery as fuck doesn’t spread, and, of course, tastes of nothing. The strawberry, improbably, tastes of even less, while the grapes taste only of sugar. I return for a finale slice of ‘cheddar’, and regret it one hundred percent.

I am left with nothing now but to wash this all down, and hope vainly to cleanse my palate and my consciousness of the non-experience, with a cup of American Airlines black coffee. This inevitably proceeds to pleasure my senses with all the pizazz of a strip mall. The warm wetness disappoints just as wholly as Dunkin Donuts own ‘joe’ also never fails to do. The brown beverage is just the tepid side of desirable to drink, and is reminiscent in its insipidity of actual coffee, to the extent that, as I am now prone to do with carton after beaker after Styrofoam bucket of saddening dishwater Dunkin dregs, I drink the whole darn cup, hoping all the way down that at some point the drink might remind part of my brain sufficiently of coffee that it triggers some part of me to ‘like’ it. But this of course does not happen, and I don’t. It tastes like crap, and I finish it nonetheless, feeling righteous at least that I went for coffee in lieu of an alcoholic beverage. So I can work all the way to LA. But I don’t work. I write this for an hour instead. Cheese plate, my arse. I have a suggestion for a replacement slogan for American Airlines cuisine: Simply Bullshit. Or, maybe better: Just Bollocks.

Night in a Napcab

I’ve had a terrible cold all week that might even be flu. Although I’m in Portugal in January, giving an invited a paper at a conference and paying for none of my travel, accommodation or food, I’ve spent three of my four days in Lisbon in bed, sleeping and sweating and feverishly hallucinating and filling myself full of European grippe remedies that it took me more than 24 hours in the country to summon the energy to walk the 400 yards to a pharmacy to buy. I managed the conference dinner last night – it seemed like the most visible bit of networking I could do, and appealed far more than sitting through several hours of social work papers presented in academic Portuguese. Also, there was free alcohol. At American conferences, they refer to a conference dinner as a banquet, which is always misleadingly grandiose and so never lives up to my expectations – although few fail quite so spectacularly to meet them as the one at the sociology symposium in New Orleans, where a mediocre lukewarm buffet and a handful of bottles of red wine proved wholly inadequate to cater for all the guests (a close colleague and I had brought 20-ounce take-out drive-thru daiquiris to that meal as hors-d’oeuvres, which helped). I spent yesterday’s conference dinner being told confidently about a great many things by an English former military pilot and his wife, a Polish sociologist, and was interrogated for my views on the British monarchy, Brexit and Americans' perceptions of British-English speakers, by a local nutritionist whose eldest son is in Krakow studying for a master’s degree in computer science; she does not like to discuss food while out eating. I ended up closing down the hotel bar with a punk scholar colleague from Norwich, and we spent the last 15 minutes of the evening together talking in total darkness as the bar tender after serving us our drinks, promptly turned off the lights.

I wake up with a steaming hangover / influenza fever cocktail that only deepens when I force down some mass-produced, protein-heavy breakfast. I go immediately back to bed, imploring time to slow down as checkout approaches, and find myself freestyle rapping about the character flaws of leading protagonists in an imagined biopic of my life set in Midtown Manhattan in the 1980s. I take a medicinal shower, make checkout at 12.01 and sit in the lobby researching sleeping on the floor in German airports, till the stuffy mid-price hotel air becomes all but too much to handle. I stroll as briskly as my funky stupour will allow in search of a castle that Google Maps says is about a 45-minute walk away. I find it, am suitably underwhelmed, quite like the scenery on the way there, and somehow end up walking back mostly along major highways and abandoned lots, feeling there is a strong chance I’ll get mugged. Avoiding assault, I take a cab to the airport, check in without event, buy a cold cappuccino and a bottle of room-temperature water, and make plans to work on the flight. I buy duty-free gin for a senior colleague, who I’ve managed to piss off tremendously by putting the wrong week in my calendar for a long-planned five-day visit to his college on the east coast, when I’ll instead be on the west coast the whole week doing something entirely different. On the plane I write a 100-word abstract for a summer conference presentation and have the epiphany that this can double as the topic for a book chapter I’m six months late finishing (starting). This will also get me off the hook for the planned proceedings journal special issue, since my chapter by then will be halfway to the printers.

Arriving at Munich airport, realization of my vague plan to sleep inconspicuously on a bench in the terminal is unexpectedly challenged by the absence of anyone else doing the same (I’d assumed the floor would be strewn with backpackers all too frugal and bohemian to pay for hotels). We landed in G gates, and my flight in nine hours leaves from H, so I figure I’ll head there in order to wake up in the right place, resting my head on the gin, laptop bag strap wrapped around an arm or two and the carry-on between my legs so no one nicks it. Turns out, though, you can’t get to H gates without going through passport control, which is closed. I return to G and at the bottom of some stairs see a sign advertising “napcab” sleeping cabins at gate G6, which sound more efficient at this point than taking a taxi, a hotel and another taxi just to get a few hundred feet across the terminal. G6 houses a cluster of four pristine white napcab cubicles. Each costs 10 Euros an hour, comes with fast, free wifi, air conditioning, charge points for laptop and phone, and a bed. I choose a PIN code for entry and realize I haven’t brushed my teeth. Forty minutes, another round of emails and two trips to the gents’ later, I dip my debit card and head in. The exotic blue light disappears when I enter and I instantly pull down the door blind for privacy. It all feels just a bit weird – spending the night in a little white box in the middle of a major airport – and there’s someone in the one adjacent cube too. I sort of want to test the sound insulation, but I’m less keen to wake up a fellow traveler by discovering at precisely what volume they can hear me doing inverted paradiddles on the adjoining cell wall. I have entertainment options: there is white light or yellow or off; I can set an alarm, check flight information or change the temperature in the room. I stick on some Vivaldi and get naked. I change to Mendelssohn, don’t like it, switch to a Wagner overture, put in my ear plugs (to avoid being woken too easily by shouty tourists milling around in the morning with children) and set four alarms for between 6am and 6.30. I scroll through social media for ages, turn off the lights and sleep occasionally for four or five hours, waking up sticky and stuffy with my phone blaring Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades”. It seems no one has broken in during the night or taken advantage of me while I slept. I gather my belongings and purchase some breakfast. The security people surprise me by allowing me to take my Portuguese duty-free through to H gates. I go for a quick wee and return to find my group is now boarding.

Playing Strummer Camp

Neck’s third appearance at StrummerCamp – my second there with the band – is an event that, predictably, will provoke in me a mixture of emotions and a range of physical sensations. I love playing with Neck. Our performances almost always send shivers down my spine and make me feel very glad indeed to be alive. But every single other part of being with Neck feels like a screenplay scripted by the writers of This is Spinal Tap. This gig is no different. We arrive at the festival site in good time for our set. Although twice I hear mention of “the radio set” and vaguely recall having discussed this in rehearsals or on the way up in the van, I choose not to think about what the implications of this might be, and focus instead on keeping dry.

The festival site looks exactly as it did when we played here four years previously at the inaugural StrummerCamp – it is just Manchester rugby club, with nothing visibly advertising the festival or any of the bands playing at it. A familiar feeling. We are directed quite meticulously by damp security staff holding half-drunk beers to an awkward and unlikely-looking parking spot by the backstage loading area of a large marquee. We squeeze the van in, and are asked to move it almost immediately, which we do. We wait a few minutes, some of us leave the van, and Leeson (designated driver for most journeys to gigs) parks up again in the same spot. He then disappears, looking, I think, for food or beer or a stage manager. James (fiddle) sits in the back hunched over a pasta meal he prepared earlier. Brendan (bass) goes looking for friends in other bands. Hugh (banjo) searches for pre-sell-by-date Cokes or beers in the band’s emergency in-van DIY rider, and Sara (tin whistle) takes care of some day-job emails on her phone.

Despite it being June, it’s cold and wet – my hands’ least favourite weather conditions for drumming! I know I’ll need to spend some time warming up, or else will struggle and possibly fail to play a 40-minute set of break-neck Irish psycho-ceilidh Neck songs without getting cramp. The only available facilities for warming up are also chilly – some space by a table back-stage in the marquee, with wind gusting through the permanently-open wall while bands are loading and unloading gear. I try to warm up for a few minutes with a practice pad and some rudiments, and can feel that although I’m getting looser this is pretty much going nowhere – my fingers are freezing and stiff. I pop to the enticing clubhouse across the field (drumsticks and practice pad suspiciously concealed beneath waterproof coat – I can’t believe most of the band forgot to bring one), only to find it crawling (almost literally) with heavily drunk middle-aged punks propping up the bar and one another, and trying to play pool. Not a chance of finding a quiet corner.

I get back to the van, and the radio thing, it turns out, is real – we have apparently agreed to play a live acoustic set for a local radio station. In the van. All six of us. Or five, since Brendan can’t be found, but anyway there’s little point to him playing unamplified electric bass inaudibly in a freezing van for half an hour on live radio when he can, instead, be sourcing narcotics. We climb in, with me nearest the door (awesome). The radio presenter/recorder/producer stands outside, pointing a video (!) recorder in our general direction. Since we are parked directly adjacent to the backstage area, we can hear with loud and crystal clarity the strains of the band playing the set before us. I feel my warm-up slipping away, but then my right hand, responds well to my attempts to flay the bodhràn and loosens up. We kick out some surprisingly emotional and soulful renditions of classic Neck material. I also sing, which surprises me; but once I’ve done falsetto harmonies on the first chorus of “May the Road Rise with You” there’s really no turning back. My left hand I can feel seizing up, but it has an easier job than my right hand for the main gig. Hm.

No sooner have we finished the acoustic session than we rush to get our gear set up on stage, do a line-check, and begin the main set in front of a nearly-full house. It goes okay. The crowd loves us! I drop a total of five sticks, despite making a point of keeping as hydrated as the two small bottles of water provided will allow. My cold-hands’ nemesis is uber-fast penultimate (pre-encore) song “Everybody’s Welcome to the Hooley”, which features an interminable and merciless (but great fun!) 6/8 rhythm on the floor tom (already suspiciously under-miked and probably acoustic to the audience – it is in no one’s monitors despite being central to our sound). I make the jump to light speed for the jig at the end, and we power through unscathed to crowd-pleaser “McAlpine’s Fusiliers” and an epic ROCK finish. Lesson afterwards says we played a great gig. I don’t see it, but hey, why argue? I often don’t connect with an audience like I want to on bigger stages. I also have the feeling that I played “Sally Gardens” the fastest I’ve played it in a few years – that feels nice (the idea is to play that reel as fast as humanly possible, and then speed up).

Possibly the worst thing about StrummerCamp – when taking into account the wet, the cold, the inevitable 4 AM arrival back in London, and the fact that I have to assume we won’t be getting paid because last time we played here the promoter had given us as remuneration precisely four marijuana joints (between six of us) – is the food. It is absolutely dreadful. I always lower my culinary sights a little when heading north of London; perhaps this is wrong of me, but then it is also learned. StrummerCamp is an exceptional case, though. On offer, not unreasonably for a music festival held on a budget at a rugby ground, are “burgers” and “cheeseburgers”. What these turn out to be, however, is utterly crap. The “burgers” consist of two slices of soggy, cheap, thin white bread caked in warm margarine (why?!!) and a mostly-fat, wafer-thin “meat” patty indelicately squashed between them. One can, should one wish to pour salt onto the wound, add either red or brown sauce – at no extra cost. I go hungry. Which, in part, leads to an encounter with a very nice young man in a petrol station in Cheadle Hulme (after our noble leader has first had me drive us to within feet of the exit, has disappeared for over an hour on what we are later to learn was an abortive mission to source and negotiate food tokens that we then discover to our mutual disbelief would, anyway, only have been valid at the Festival’s god-awful burger outlets, and that even these are now closed).

We need diesel, and I need to eat, so we stop at the first place that’s open. It is a Tesco filling station and, while open, is also closed, inasmuch as one has to shout at a window and shove things awkwardly under the pane of glass into a drawer to a frightened child cowering the other side of it in order to effect a transaction. I try my luck, and ask the adolescent if I can please come in and look at the sandwiches. Oddly, he smiles, agrees, walks to the door and lets me in. I am surprised, but try not to show it. The sandwich selection is certainly far from appealing, but one or two of them look palatable (I’ll be eating in the dark anyway), and some are even on wholemeal bread. Unable to see a machine, but tired and anticipating weary hours of unlit motorway, I asked if there’s any coffee, and the young man cheerily steps out from behind the counter, crosses the shop floor, proudly holds up a jar of Nescafé Gold Blend instant coffee granules, and asks if this is okay? He is too nice to be being sarcastic, so I assume he is mildly insane. I smile – what else can one do?! – and explain (in a voice that I feel is empathic, but which probably comes out as massively condescending) that actually I am actually sort of looking for some coffee to drink now, as my home in London is a good ol’ drive yet, and I could really use the caffeine. I can’t help wondering how it is that a guy working in a filling station at midnight on a main road can so completely have misunderstood my request for liquid refreshment. He then asks if I’d like him to make me a brew. The other band members are all either asleep, high, or (in Leeson’s case) refuelling the van, so I agree. He pops to an adjacent room, switches on the kettle, and comes back to the shop. I am becoming all the time more confused and delighted by the naïveté of this young man, and I ask if there are any tissues. Apparently not realising that I wish perhaps to purchase some, he pops next door and returns with a handful of tissues from the kitchenette, on which I promptly blow my noise by way of articulating my gratitude. The kettle boils and he makes me cup a coffee in a nice big mug.

It has apparently taken all this time, we soon learn, for Leeson to realise that the pump with which he has (not) been refuelling the van has been off. This works out very well, affording me just enough time to down the hot coffee, return the mug, and pay the chap for the ham sandwich and the small bag of Diamond Jubilee Special Edition M&Ms; the rest, apparently, is all part of the service. This surreal episode remains with me all the way down the M6 and the M1, as I try to guess what might have been happening in the teenager’s head. I end up deciding that he’s just a very nice guy indeed – I really hope he has a girlfriend and that she’s nice to him. Sarcastic, cynical, petrified, snobby and insecure workaholics like me are a dime a dozen. This guy is a national treasure. You should visit Cheadle Hulme.

Edinburgh Napier University

I was delighted in autumn of last year to receive an invitation to give a handful of guest lectures at Edinburgh Napier University. The request came from fellow drummer, lecturer, and music education researcher, Bryden Stillie, Senior Lecturer in the Schools of Arts and Creative Industries. I had met Bryden when introduced by mutual colleague and Napier employee, Zack Moir, and had the privilege of watching Bryden give a master class for students at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, on his cutting-edge work with drums and technology. Two days ago he met me in the cold rain outside Glasgow’s Buchanan Street station and welcomed me warmly with a meal at a local Vietnamese eatery, followed by quite a few beers.

I took a bracing run the following morning along (some of) the longest road in Scotland, followed by a short train ride with Bryden to Scotland’s capital city where I was shown around the music department at Edinburgh Napier University. The tour took longer than anticipated because my host kept stopping to talk cheerfully and animatedly with colleagues and students. The conversations revolved around individual students, the curriculum, and assessment design. Everyone we encountered seemed upbeat and excited to be working here; I sensed a strong mood of collegiality and mutual goodwill from among the team, who were eager to complement and support one another with resources and lighthearted banter.

The rooms and connectivity of the bespoke music facility had been designed in-house by music, engineering, and information technology guru, Dr. Paul Ferguson in close collaboration with legendary music producer, Calum Malcolm. I was shown into several practice rooms, all of which could connect to any of the recording studios. Each of the live and control rooms were separated by floor-to-ceiling windows to enhance performer /engineer connectivity and collaboration. The facility also featured next-generation fibre connections throughout, waiting for the software and hardware to catch up. My hosts were clearly excited about the spaces.

The first lecture I gave was to a mixed group of popular music students (and one attendee from the classical music programme), about being true to oneself in making life and career choices, while considering responsibilities to others. The second talk – mostly to drummers – focused on musical theatre work and how to manage life, sanity, and relationships on a show. In both sessions, the attentiveness of the students and their insightful questions demonstrated the young musicians’ developing worldliness and openness to diverse musical futures. The depth of engagement was marvellous. I was motivated by the engagement of the students with the topics, and from the insightful, focused questions they asked – the more extroverted individuals during the sessions, and the quieter students after the classes. These were both optional extra classes, and took place in front of packed rooms. I even ran out of handouts!

The day concluded with the School’s first ever Music Research Symposium for staff and students, replete with three-camera film and sound crews comprised of students from the Film and Television programmes and their lecturer Dr Kirsten MacLeod. My talk on “Embodiment and Drumming Eudaimonia” (in which I also got to play drums along with a killing track by my longtime alt-rock collaborator, Stephen Wheel, pumping through the PA system) was well received. This was followed by a marvellous paper from Zack Moir and Bryden Stillie, in which they are articulated and discussed some of the problems facing musicians seeking to enter higher music education in Scotland and England. Free wine and beer for all during the short break lubricated conversations all-round, before Renée Stefanie gave a brilliant and inspiring presentation about her work, teaching singers. She danced, sang, emoted, explained, and empowered. Her compassionate performance was breathtaking, and among the very best conference presentations I have seen. I took part in the final talk of the night with Zack Moir and Paul Ferguson, in which we discussed a current research project where we are working with LOLA and (shortly) LOLA 2internet systems, performing and recording live jazz-rock music and video across distances of hundreds of miles. After the research event, I was buzzing, and delighted to take in a local ale with colleagues.

This visit reaffirmed my conviction that one can be serious about music, teaching, and research, and that it’s possible to be relevant in all three. I saw how this can all be achieved with alacrity and with mutual respect for colleagues and students. What a joyous learning experience the day was. Thank you to the Ian Tomlin Academy of Music in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University.

Auditioning for V1

(This post was initially commissioned by Ishani Jasmin to appear in her magazine issue about music.)

My friend Alex friend mentions that a guy he knows through Facebook is putting a band together, and he suggests I audition to play drums. He thinks the opportunity might appeal because the bandleader is Dennis Willcock, original singer from Iron Maiden, and the guitarist is former Maiden axe-wielder Terry Wapram: the band is called V1. I am insanely busy already but Alex seems really excited for me, so I figure the worst that can happen is I’ll have one rehearsal, they’ll says ‘thanks, but no thanks’, and I can tell friends I briefly jammed with some guys who were once in a band that became massively famous a short while after they left.

I message Dennis through Facebook and he asks for examples of my playing, so I forward a dozen videos and audio tracks from the rocking-est projects I’ve been involved with. He gets back to me a few days later, saying he’s shown the guitarist and they’d be happy to audition me. We set a date, I fly to south-east Asia for a work trip, and upon my return I meet the guys on an industrial estate in Welwyn Garden City. One of the first things I learn upon arrival is that I’m auditioning primarily because I am local; the other applicants mostly live in the Netherlands and Brazil – hardly convenient for a band based in north London. I set up my drums (Dennis was sure I’d feel more comfortable playing my own kit), greet Terry and Chas (bass player), and listen to the story of the band.

V1 formed in 1977 (the year I was born), after Terry and Dennis left Iron Maiden – Dennis thought Maiden were going nowhere fast and Terry didn’t rate the other guitarist who’d just joined. V1 played all over London and recorded demos for an album with a drummer the name of whom no one can remember. Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris loved the band and the demos, and took Maiden to record in the same studio. V1 were offered a record deal, their management told them not to accept it and their career stalled. Iron Maiden soon took off (allegedly with a bunch of lyrics stolen from Dennis, but that’s a whole other story), Dennis became an antique dealer, Chas worked for the council and smoked copious amounts of weed, and Terry played guitar in obscure rock bands, while earning a living as a tradesman. They all have kids my age now, and Chas is even a grandfather. Due to significant interest on Facebook they are awakening V1 from a 37-year hiatus and plan to record the album they demoed in ’78 before touring the world at last. Lest I question their commitment to the rock and roll cause, Dennis tells me that, following his exertions on a one-off comeback gig with a stand-in drummer last year to test the water for the project, he needed throat surgery. His voice is back now and the only thing missing is a reliable drummer.

We set about playing the four songs I’ve practised much less than I would have preferred, and I remember I always hate and fail auditions, though I’m grateful that at least this one is loud. We play the songs ok, no better than that, then stop for a leisurely cup of tea. Chas insists on buying a round of Snickers as well. Caffeinated and sugared we play the songs again, and this time I feel able to stretch out more. Terry grins a few times in my direction and Chas and I lock in pretty tight. I pack up, resoundingly underwhelmed by my performance, and contemplate the late-Sunday traffic back to London and the fact I’ve just wasted another afternoon hitting things when I could have put my time to better use as a dad, husband or academic. When my stuff’s in the car Dennis tells me they’ve all had a chat and they’d like to offer me the job. I can’t believe my ears! I tell them immediately I accept, text Alex to thank him for the heads-up, and drive home feeling like a teenager in love: I HAVE THE GIG PLAYING DRUMS FOR V1!!! So, just eight more songs to nail, an album to record, and a touring schedule to figure around my full-time job and family responsibilities. Marvellous.

The band starts meeting for regular practices in Storm Studios on Holloway Road. Magdalena who runs the place is perpetually grumpy, and seems irked we show up to rehearse, but I can get there easily on the bus in under an hour, the price is reasonable, and – uncharacteristically for affordable rehearsal spaces – the rooms don’t smell as if people have been left for dead in there in pools of their own beer-induced vomit. Sometimes it’s managed by Eddie, who is more welcoming but constantly stoned, with a frustrating tendency to send each member of the band to a different room. Rehearsals go increasingly well, especially with the arrival of Dwight who will be performing bass duties live. The sound we make as a four-piece in that 30” x 10” room is phenomenal. The late-70s guitar riffs and rock-funk bass lines with the double bass drum pedal I dusted off specially for this make for a Very Rock Sound indeed. There are no click tracks, Autotune or backing tracks. This is raw, analogue classic rock. When the public eventually hears us (or even if they don’t) “V1 rocket’s gonna rock your house down!”

The members of my new rock family say to me everything I most want to hear. Things like “this song needs plenty of cowbell” (this applies to more than one song), “we’re not going to tell you what to play – drums is your department”, and “where would you like your drum solo?” I have long maintained I was born 30 years too late; the music I most love to play – with big drums, lots of fills, badass riffs, awesome solos, and unashamed lyrics about sex and how great rock is – is unfortunately unfashionable these days. But V1 doesn’t care. They’re here to right the wrongs of 37 years ago, allowing me to play some fantastic music with three awesome guys who had a foretaste of fame and a powerful sense of purpose at a time when the music industry told the public that rock was righteous and drum solos were cool. To paraphrase Miles Davis, this might just be the best feeling I’ve ever had with my clothes on. 

New Direction: Oh Standfast

I was becoming bored of (and spending a small fortune on) playing in the Toxic Twins Aerosmith tribute band, and wanted to make new music at the drums. I quit with the firm intention of not playing any more rock for a while, unless it was of the ‘feral pop’ variety discussed by Charlie Bramley (2017), or in projects with Stephen Wheel or the Eruptörs. I had also recently burnt all my bridges with the London musical theatre fringe circuit by fathering a child and therefore not being in a position to do gigs for free any more. I was still playing in pop-noir electro-swing band, Sweet Tooth, whose gigs and rehearsals were consistently beautiful, immersive quasi-cinematic experiences that kept me technologically on the edge of my seat, but I wanted to express myself a bit more on the drums – to breathe, move, listen, respond and emote. Jazz might have been the logical vehicle for such an endeavour, had I not long ago abandoned its oppressive subtleties and sophistication for a post-quiet performance aesthetic that allows me to play as loud as I feel I need.

At one of the monthly Cabaret Futura events hosted by legendary London musician and curator (and one-time olde-English executioner), Richard Strange, I absorbed the performance of spoken word artist and self-proclaimed “shouter of words”, Oh Standfast. Having seen him play at another event a few months prior, I was excited to be bombarded by his bombastic bardery for a full fifteen minutes and gave him a lift home after discovering we lived in neighbouring regions of north London. My rock covers holiday inspired me to contact him later by email, and he was curiously accepting of my invitation to meet in a rehearsal room to see what would happen. I confessed at our first session, I had been struck by a video that caught my attention on Facebook, of a drummer (and bassist and keyboard player, but I wasn’t at all interested in them) playing along to this advertisement for Jones’ Truck Rental and Storage.

One of the things I most liked as we jammed was how Oh Standfast did not recite things exactly the same way every time. This was perfect! I needed to listen, react like lightning, stay in the moment, and play. We found it helped for me to count “1, 2, 3, 4” in to each ‘tune’, although the tempo at which I did this was not necessarily indicative of the speed at which we would take a given poem; it functioned more as an indication of when we should start. At times, Oh Standfast clearly followed my rhythm, although he would phrase things in the way the words dictated, so I needed simultaneously to follow him. The interplay between sections of swinging momentum, and moments of rubato and responsiveness, was intensely exciting for me as we learned and developed our mutual grove; the liveness in our collaboration was a thrill.

Although the pieces were very short, the intensity of each was profound. I deliberately avoided writing any ‘charts’. I audio-recorded our efforts in rehearsals, but also studiously avoided listening to the results. I wanted to learn this stuff in my body, head and hands (Merleau-Ponty 1945; Nancy 2007; Sheets-Johnstone 2009), to know the music as aesthetic experience (Shusterman 2000, 2008). We worked out no visual cues for each other either, as we discovered we did not look up much when we played (despite having rearranged furniture and instruments in the room to face one another); we negotiated all by sound and feel.

Three of the pieces we play have more traditional, repetitive drum patterns, although they are through-composed to the extent that this suits the material. These tracks are “Tabloid” (a quasi-rap sort of about passengers, pasties and politics), “Bag for Life” (to my mind a country-inspired, upbeat observational comedic punk poem about consumerism) and “Gourmet” (an homage to food served in less-than-appropriate vessels). The other two are, respectively, “Meal for One” (a melodramatic ballad to dining alone on instant microwave meals) and “Judge’s Notes” (a parody of comments made by adjudicators in TV ‘talent’ shows). We set a date to record our epic four-minute set in a studio at IMCP.

When we made the recordings we did a few takes (usually no more than three) of each song, and there was pleasure in getting these spot-on while retaining the essence of real-time, energetic musicking and fun. The trickiest corner to nail, towards the end of “Bag for Life”, was resolved when we finally decided to stop putting a count in a silence (the count had been my suggestion to help us ensure consistency), and instead do it by feel, which worked, satisfyingly, on the first attempt. This reinforced for me the importance of understanding and knowing music in a deep, feelingful way, without thinking about it consciously. The exception to my ‘no-practice’ rule for myself was that, ahead of the recording session, I’d practised over and over with a rehearsal recording of Oh Standfast reciting “Judge’s Notes” because this was especially tricky for me and involved many different time signatures, feels and grooves (should one wish to conceive of them as such). I was delighted that, on the day of recording, my collaborator recited this piece with variations from the rehearsal recording, and a little differently each time too. After nailing the piece in recording, I transcribed the “Judge’s Notes” drum part for reference (below), to see how our music might appear when coded (entirely inappropriately) in standard staff notation. Most of the instructions on the score are replaceable, transient and secondary to listening and responding in the moment of live collaboration with the shouter of words.

Six months after making the recording, we reconvened for a half-hour rehearsal three days ahead of a gig – our first and only to date as this blog entry goes to press. We agreed it felt good, acknowledged our mutual surprise at this, decided not to over-do things ahead of the big night, and went home. The gig was a marvellous experience. The stage was huge, and the audience of 500+ tipsy Freshers’ Week students was bustling. The band before us played singalong pop/rock covers, and the next act was the butt-kicking rock singer Erika with Skunk Anansie’s drummer and band. Oh Standfast was fresh from a summer of solo festival gigs and a seasoned performer in front of new audiences. I was my usual mess of anxiety, terror and self-deprecation. Our set was electric. Oh Standfast played the audience, took several dramatic pauses and made me think on the spot. I had to slow down and speed up for quarter-seconds at a time, wait for up to a minute, poised to strike the next drum and/or cymbal, and once we were finished there was laughter and applause. I took these as positive signs.

Videos of Oh Standfast with Gareth Dylan Smith.

Unhelpful notated chart for “Judge’s Notes”.

References

Bramley, C. and Smith, G.D. 2017. Feral pop: the participatory power of improvised popular music. In G.D. Smith, Z. Moir, M. Brennan, S. Rambarran and P. Kirkman, eds., The Routledge research companion to popular music education. Abingdon: Routledge.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.

Nancy, J.-L. 2007. Listening. Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. 2009. The corporeal turn: an interdisciplinary reader. Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Shusterman, R. 2000. Performing live: aesthetic alternatives for the ends of art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Shusterman, R. 2008. Body consciousness: a philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Office Space

I have no office in Kilburn to call mine. There’s an open-‘plan’ one, which feels much more like a tragic accident than the outcome of any actual intentions, but I have no room with a door and all my books in where I can meet with students or read, write and think. After a handful of abortive attempts about seven years ago to hold office hours in the shared call-centre space, I gave up even pretending I could concentrate, or that 40-odd desk jockeys staring at screens, wearing headphones, and simultaneously milling around laughing raucously with each other right behind me all day were at all conducive to (for instance) conceptualising the complexities of a heteronormative media industry with a questioning/transgender student in the throes of dissertation panic. All of our roles in that room are necessary, and they exist in a beautiful symbiotic dance – a dance that I perform by working mostly at home and in cafés.

If I have nothing scheduled till the afternoon I’ll usually stop off at Owen’s in Muswell Hill, a couple of hundred yards up the road from my daughter’s nursery and on my way back home to the flat. There are two tables at which I can plug in my laptop – in the front by the window or next to the toilet. I get to choose between workstations, as I’m generally half an hour earlier than the screaming horde of mothers and toddlers who descend at exactly 9.20. The window seat is best, as it’s just far enough from the preferred centre table of the large French lady who expends great physical energy adjusting all of the furniture and scraping it gratingly across the floorboards, repeatedly dumping hard-bottomed bags on the table then making a half-dozen Skype calls to clients, wearing earbuds and shouting into the mic she holds up millimetres from her lips. The coffee here’s good, and the cups nice and heavy like that green, Methodist Church china but handmade. The chocolate brownie is to die for – two might mean to die from – but it’s really tough not to give in, especially since the custard tarts, while conceived with the best of intentions, are overwhelmed by over-ambition, folding in far too much blueberry confit. The male staff are unusually upbeat for bearded straight men in their 30s, but the women (all younger) seem disgruntled. The exception is Mrs. G. (the only older lady), whose kids I taught music ten years ago and who shows me photos of them, grown-up, on her phone. She’s lovely and smiley and seems pleased to serve me. I have to try harder to look busy when she’s on, as otherwise she pops over again and again. The wifi here’s super-fast, and the mushrooms-and-poached-eggs-on-toast, while pricey, is utterly fantastic.

When I teach in the mornings, leaving me the afternoons to write, I have to choose between a handful of Kilburn Cafés. Caffè Milan has long been my top choice. It was opened in late 2011 by an Ethiopian man called Solomon, employing a small team of charming but disorientated Brazilian and North African waiting and sales staff who knew just a handful of words in English. Solomon is warm and kind, and was there every day for the first year of business. His son, Matty, was about to begin nursery, and would run around the place in afternoons, drawing just enough attention to himself to be cute and just little enough to remain so. The place serves cheap, strong coffee, and hot Ethiopian food to those who know how to ask for it. This tempting and presumably delectable fare is not advertised inside or outside the café, though, so I have yet to remember or to pluck up the courage to ask for any of the mysterious grub. I swear one day I’ll do it, because it always smells incredible, and every time someone orders it I feel like the stupidest, whitest man in the world. The music here is bizarre. The playlist reflects an unquenchable taste for Kenny G, and includes a near-infinite string of ambient, trancy quasi-jazz tunes occasionally interspersed with epic 80s power ballads. Combined with the near-total bewilderment of the staff every time I asked for a drink, and their diligent inability to stock up on bog roll or towels for the men’s toilet, ‘Milan’ provides the perfect ambience of an office for the nomadic teacher-scholar after lunch. The place is poorly heated too, at a temperature that keeps me alert enough to stay focused, but not so chilly that my fingers go numb.

My favourite spot to be hunker down here is a table out of sight from the street – as you walk down the length of the place the room expands to the right behind the wall where the coffee machine resides. A table against the wall, right by the double electrical socket, keeps me undisturbed by colleague and student passers-by, and means anyone meeting me here for tuition has to really commit to seeking me out. A couple of years into my tenancy at the hidden table, Solomon unashamedly papered the wall with brick-effect floor-to-ceiling paper. It was a bizarre decision that warmed up and weirded the feel of the space. The TV screen in the back is, conveniently, permanently frozen, unlike at the front where that one plays European football and CNN loudly all day as the staff let in suppliers, customers, heavy Kilburn traffic noise and a permanently chilly draft. The place remains under-frequented until the evenings when intimidatingly confident groups of ex-pat Ethiopian men sit down to shout and laugh at the telly

Caffè Milan is next door to popular restaurant, Nona, thus oft overlooked by those who prefer the faux-Italian pretentions of Serbian hustler, “Alex”, whose local wheelings and dealings include surprise ownership of, and apparent parking privileges for, a sporty, high-end Mercedes saloon. Alex also allegedly likes to pay staff massively below the legal minimum wage and to retain a “deposit” of one third of their wages that they can receive back from him after six months of continuous service. He also owns Small and Beautiful, a café 100 yards north from Nona which is neither of the things in its name but whose coffee and waitresses broadly match these descriptors. S&B is the site of many meetings with academic colleagues when we succumb to the frequent need to meet in a less stuffy and stifling environment than in school, and to experience the thrill of risking students and the public overhearing our confidential discussions. This place advertises bottles of Champagne for up to £300 (maybe for the proprietors of the dodgy snooker club over the road, whose doors were once, and possibly still are, darkened by younger male students from my school who favour lunch with pool and Mary-Jane). It’s also one of a tiny handful of establishments in Kilburn to accept card payments. Nona’s chorizo and potato three-egg omelet is beguiling, especially when served with the house green salad. Both establishments feature as evening table decorations old wine bottles with many generations of expired candles’ wax billowing like Disney cartoon sails.

The warmest (unless some moron leaves the bloody door open) of my the cafés occupying the northern half of the High Road – excluding CoCo because the place doesn’t have wi-fi despite the excellent tea served in huge floral mugs by a man who looks like a light heavyweight boxer with the smile of a charming Mafioso – is Caffeine. It’s the only one that offers a loyalty card – I own but never ever bring one with me. The acoustics in this place are frustrating, and are the principal reason I don’t go here more. I can stay here for days on end, though, ideally at the round table by the window, which is the one with the stablest cast-iron legs, the best shielding of the breeze from the door, and the greatest distance from the excruciating coffee grinder. I swear that if I ever run a café I’ll put the grinder – and the ice-crusher too – in another fucking room to the customers; these machines only ever make people shout at each other when a spoken conversation was fine, and their unpredictability and endless capacity to grate nerves mean they can ruin any phone call, even before it has started. The place has a high turnover of staff, thanks mostly to the smooth-talking owner-manager who sips espressos at one of two tables, interviewing new staff every other week with condescension and a B5 spiral notepad. The main reasons I come back to this place are 1) unlike at Caffè Milan I have never seen a cockroach, 2) the ‘staff only’ sign on the toilet door is a hoax, 3) the carrot cake is pretty fucking amazing, 3) the latte is the best in a mile-and-a-half radius, 4) the hot-drink-and-cake-£3.50-deal is tempting to the point of mandatory, and 5) the regular white Americano, although small, is superb. Reasons to avoid Caffeine include the fact that I feel obliged nearly always to buy cake, and its position between the tube station and my college make me an open target for colleagues or students wanting a piece of me for any reason at all.

When I can be arsed to walk for ten minutes to West Hampstead, there’s the new-ish café there in St James church. Kitted out after they closed the Post Office, the Sherriff Centre café offers insane chocolate and Guinness cake, but in this cavernous space the children’s adventure soft play climbing frame makes for a disturbing writing environment at best (although the complementary water comes with cucumber). There is also Sweet Spot, down the road a little bit from Milan; they are mostly here for ice cream, though, so the coffee is only ok. Plus it’s kitted out like an American diner, which just feels inherently strange. 

A Quiet Afternoon

A multiple-toddler play date at home and the open-‘plan’ office at college mean I’m working in cafés again today. Strangely, this is easier in Kilburn than Muswell Hill (where I am now, because I have to pop to the opticians' again in a bit and it’s far easier here to get a birthday card that I needed for Steve because he’s turning 40 tomorrow and even though I think he’s probably at his parents’, whose address I don’t have, I couldn’t not send him a card lest it look like I forgot his birthday which I did in 2003 when he was ill and alone and I called from an amazing gig I was playing to talk about how wonderful my life was). Nothing feels like it should be easier in Kilburn, but actually many things are. The place looks and feels completely chaotic, but things are set up pretty well, with every mad thing coexisting with and dovetailing into the next. It’s become a second home, where I feel like Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six, except I know who Number One is, and the new Number Two is all right.

So I’m confronted with a café conundrum. I’m often in Nero, but didn’t go there today, for a range of interconnected reasons. The Nero staff – especially the humourless, overweight lady who only works evenings – have a particular enthusiasm for throwing the crockery around, creating an outrageous, deafening racket that even my custom earplugs cannot muffle; it’s also a bit out of my way – not much, as Muswell Hill’s hardly big, but Costa is between the card shop and the optician, both of which I needed earlier on. Plus the coffee tastes better at Costa, and my phone connects to the wifi in some special way because it’s O2 (at least I think it does, or is that in Nero?). Nero has almost nowhere to plug in a laptop but has superior cakes and closes at 6; Costa has multiple plug sockets but scores of screaming children and the air conditioning set to "Antarctic"; it's open till 7.30, though. Starbucks closes at 7; however, their wifi is dodgy and, again, few plug sockets. Plus Moving locations means buying more fluids and cakes.

A collaborative hush descends over Costa and lasts all of about four minutes. Then more girls arrive, all 13, and all testing their outdoor voices. As I abandon attempts to write anything sociological and instead start to vent silently in a blog (huffing occasionally, though, so they know), one of the party remembers she skipped lunch, so they must adjourn to Starbuck’s. I really need to stand up for a bit now, but have achieved roughly fuck all with my afternoon so stay seated. My fingers are freezing and I didn’t bring my hat. I need access to books that are at home, and to a PDF on a hard drive hidden cunningly in my bottom desk drawer so no one will find my backups if they break in. Maybe I’ll just order some wine online. Could pop to the loo again, I suppose.

I'm Glad I was Wearing My Helmet

I have a tendency to fall off my bike every few years, although it appears to be becoming more frequent. I normally land on my back or left side, every time questioning the value of the range of helmets that I have worn devotedly since they came to the attention of my parents’ generation when I was about twelve. The only time to date that I found actual value in a cycle helmet was in 1995 when, chasing a friend up the street from Brighton Jazz Club because I was late to meet him, I saw him walking away from the entrance and wanted to catch up with him before he caught the bus home, so in my blinkered, sprinting haste I charged full-pelt in to a steel lamp post, shattering the helmet, winding myself badly (but protecting my ribs) and making Mike think someone was attacking him.

Heading back from work to collect my daughter from nursery via the Hampstead Heath route I have ridden nearly every day for close to seven years, there is heavier traffic than usual on Bishop’s Avenue, and when I turn left toward East Finchley tube Great North Road is in gridlock. Using The Force (as is my wont) I weave confidently between the door mirrors and bumpers of the teeming scores of vehicles inching their way north towards dinner.

During an especially mundane manoeuvre around the front of one stationary car and the back of another to claim a short, narrow strip of de facto cycle lane in the midst of the calmly chaotic ‘drive-time’ crawl, I clock the front wheel of my bike dipping onto the sunken square of a manhole cover. In the darkness I instinctively anticipate the drop in momentum and plan to pull up on the handlebars slightly, giving me the lift back to level road where I can power back up with an extra little push on the pedals to keep me upright, get clear of the car, and make a full ten yard dash in a low gear before darting between more mirrors at negotiating speed and on towards the lights at the Bald Faced Stag

As I look up, past the grate, the front wheel dips further in than I expect, and time slows down to indulge in the moment (I recall the night years ago that I drove my car into a layby near Guildford to turn around, only to discover that the layby was a ditch and my front two wheels were hanging over the edge, and I needed professional assistance to get out). The forks strike metal with a thud and I tip forward off the saddle, land squarely on my helmeted head, shout “ass cunting fuck” and land again on my backside, my lower left thigh wedged painfully between jackknifed sections of bike frame, the front wheel lodged, I notice with amazement, between the diagonal slats of a drain cover. Thank god there are only stationary vehicles this evening, although had the traffic been flowing I would likely not have ended up in such a humiliating pose, recumbent on both my pate and derriere like an improbable yogic madman draped in cheap cycling regalia and regret.

Voices ask if I am all right, and I feel a man help me clear of the pincer while another kind soul lifts the wheel from the grate. A third guy apologises for not having filmed it all on his phone ‘so I could show my mates later’ (but I suspect he has been taking photos), and a woman hands me the casing of my still-flashing red rear light that she’s picked up out of the road. Mildly shaken, and concerned with being punctual to meet Esme from nursery – before they start to charge by the minute for late-comer parents – I check the wheel for buckles, and incredibly it’s totally fine. The forks seem okay too, and my bag is still balanced on my back. Another nice lady is asking if I am okay. I say I think so, my voice less shaky that I expect.

Back on the bike to navigate more nudging and bumpers, 100 yards on I see the cause of the congestion – an ambulance accommodating a fellow cyclist on a stretcher, with blue flashing lights and calm, medical voices handling the recurrent statistical inevitability. Wondering how much longer I have before I’m the guy on the gurney, I focus harder on staying alert and getting to Esme as soon as I can (I make a mental note to buy a new helmet). When I’ve loaded the bike in the car and am standing in the lobby at the school, I experience a funny few seconds feeling faint, then a delighted little girl with a beaming grin sweeps me up in to the role of Daddy. She needs a snack, and we need to head back into the gridlock. 

An Exciting Opportunity

I accepted with enthusiasm and alacrity – admittedly tempered by creeping exhaustion, deepening sense of worthlessness and bloated weight of obligation to accept – the opportunity to assess the doctoral thesis of a famous musician, an idol of mine since my teen years. I could not believe my luck – I would get to examine the work of a guy I waited for backstage in rainy car parks, who I fought to get seats near the front for at countless gigs around the country, and whose drumming I am still amazed by. He is like a god to me. And now I am Guardian at the gate to his academic future. After months of informal and formal emails I finally get the thesis through in the post – all 280-some pages of it. I figure that that if I work efficiently I might, including a day at the university for the viva ('defense' in US-speak) spend 5 days working on this. I don’t want to rush it, and if I am going to be the guy who examined the PhD of this very famous musician, then I’m definitely not doing this half-arsed. And as an early-career scholar, nothing I do can be half-arsed anyway, or I’ll not survive my enduring probation in academia. For my troubles I will receive £175, exactly £35 per day (including expenses). Better than a kick in the teeth (as my father would say), but I find my mind wandering to theme of what else I could do for that money or more (maybe enough, one day, even to save for the deposit on a house!).

As I struggle to surmount a pile of undergraduate marking that reaches deep into the December afternoon and now evening I am spending blogging in a café near my home, I am also intermittently negotiating a price with removals companies so my family can move house next month before our landlord ‘needs’ to sell his property. One company is asking a modest £1400 for the day to transport our stuff four miles across town in two vans with three men. Assuming a three-way split between the removal guys, they will each walk away with £466 (including expenses). If we assume a five-way split with 2/5 going to their manager, they will take home £280 each. While the latter figure is only eight times what I earn as a leading scholar in my field examining doctoral theses, if the first figure were to turn out to be closer, the movers would each make 13 times my fee.

I enjoy examining PhD theses, and recognise the privilege of the role. I love the idea that I’m a gatekeeper for new knowledge, with keys to the door of academia, and I’m dead excited to be reading the writing of a man who I have followed as a musician for decades. But with the timescale and my current workload (my own full-time job, plus the responsibilities of a colleague who recently walked out, that was passed to me as an interim measure), it also fills me with panic that I must do this to the best of my ability at the same time as I’m moving house and completing a second master’s degree (I suddenly cannot recall why I am studying for an MMus). Once the removals guys have departed, leaving things in roughly the right rooms, and have gone home or perhaps down the pub, I will, no doubt, be up late, reading theses and marking and worrying, before a short nap and a pre-dawn anxious awakening in my chair to continue where I left off with work.

As a man who likes reading, writing and teaching, and who distinctly recalls being a drummer, I also like driving vans and carrying stuff (intrinsic to the life of a drummer). So, for the sake of argument, I wonder: is being a removal man as self-congratulatory and as self-fulfilling, as self-flagellating or as self-defeating as being a sociologist of music education?

(In order to find out, I think I’ll ask the movers. I will conduct and video-record semi-structured interviews with each of them, following up a month later with secondary interviews. Then I’ll do focus groups with their colleagues, based on questions derived from the first and second sets of interviews, plus a lengthy and gratuitous, reflexive and excruciating autoethnographic essay. That ought to help establish where I stand. In about three years’ time, once this research has been peer reviewed and published, I’ll know whether or not to retrain as a removal man, or if staying in academia and music is/are likely to work out for the best.)

A Trip to Cleveland

I am on my way to Cleveland, Ohio. En route I have a five-hour layover at Chicago O’Hare. I chose this option for three reasons: 1) if my first flight is delayed, I am less likely to miss my connection (this has happened before); 2) if everything runs to schedule it’ll give me a nice big window to plug in and recharge my laptop and get plenty of work done; 3) the talk I’m flying in to give isn’t for another three days, so I don’t mind an epically long day now since I can plan on a decent seven hours or so in bed tonight. Last night I got in just over three hours after an exhausting day directing and performing in a video and photo shoot, learning some songs, playing those at a gig in Soho, and then hanging around to lend a guy another drummer my gear for the headline set.

After a minor altercation with a silly lady on the plane who walks into me from behind and argues that there’s no need to look where she is going, things go smoothly – the line is short at immigration, my bag is one of the first to appear on the carousel, and I discover (albeit too late for this trip) that TSA regulations have recently changed to allow passengers to leave iPads in briefcases when passing through airport security. I look forward to the day that I leave mine in there, only to find regulations have changed again and I am subjected to a full cavity search by a gloved and greased border guard. My mind wanders to the time I stood just behind Sen. John McCain at security here a couple of years ago, and everyone asked for his autograph. Nobody asks for mine, even though I have “I drum, therefore I am” (the title of my recent book!) emblazoned on my snare drum case – I guess it’s cool to be incognito. McCain should be so lucky.

I find a power outlet and sit down to work. Torn between editing a book proposal, drafting a blog entry and writing an article for Rhythm magazine that was due at the publishers yesterday, I decide to check Facebook. O’Hare has a generous policy of granting travellers 20 minutes free wifi access, so I reply to messages from students, Tweet a sincere haiku I composed about drumming, notice that I have insufficient time to download the audio from yesterday (tantalisingly a Dropbox link away until I get to my hotel eight hours from now), and then lose my connection just as I try to access my work emails.

Everyone around me sounds like a movie character. I suppose that’s normal, since most of the films we are fed are made in the US, and characters would naturally be composites or cariacatures of real-life Americans. It amazes me, though, just how much the Hispanic guy with a clipboard behaves exactly as Modern Family would have me believe he should, and how the black guys and gals serving beverages have Leon out of Curb Your Enthusiasm off to a tee. A guy sits down next to me and in a voice straight out of South Park calls a credit card company to advise them his name is Guthrie Shaffer. My fellow patrons of O’Hare all walk like Americans.

My people-watching is interrupted when an American Airlines pilot sits to play Scrabble on his iPhone, stands to get something from his bag, trips on my MacBook power cable, sends the adaptor flying and bellows “shit!” across the concourse. There’s another scene from “Curb” as a fellow AA pilot joins him, and they talk planes, engines, brakes, wives, and college fees for their daughters. Close to them a trio of pilots from another airline gathers, and one of them (a thinner, less Essex version of a successful theatre Musical Director I know) rails against the hike in gym membership fees for pilots at O’Hare – “it used to cost that for the year!” Clearly a Union Guy, he has all the gossip, and his colleagues are trapped, so they get to hear it all. The Scrabble-tripping-pilot leaves his phone and headphones plugged in next to me and takes off for his flight. By the time I’ve noticed, he’s long gone, so I interrupt the fomenting labour dispute, and Gym Fees strides off with purpose and his rival’s handset.

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According to my reading of Google Maps' representation of Cleveland, the Agora Theatre and Ballroom is a short walk from my hotel, and Downtown (with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum) just a little farther down the road. Waking up on my first morning in Ohio I check my emails, reply to urgent ones, and prepare for my customary morning run – hopefully to the Hall of Fame and back. It’s only when I have been out for a few minutes that I clock the descent of the street numbers – I began crossing 100-and-somethingth, and have now reached 101st. The 90s pass slowly, and I realise that a Downtown loop would be a two-hour mission. I have no intention of putting in a half-marathon before breakfast and a much-needed day of reading and writing. I'm giving the biggest talk of career in two days’ time, and have to know I'll be ready. Plus I’ve a date tonight with heavy metal, so time is tight. I decide to run as far as the Agora, which should be at 55th, then turn back. Signs inform me that I'm in Uptown, which is full of hospitals, dental practices and a sprawling Cleveland Clinic. Suddenly civilisation disappears, and I'm pounding through a post-apocalyptic landscape reminiscent of documentaries about central Detroit. Signage of a different hue advises me that Midtown is one of Cleveland's primary centres of rejuvenation. I am unconvinced, as abandoned buildings and vacated lots echo to the sound of my breathing and footfall. A bus occasionally passes. Quickening my pace, I reach the Agora, which may once have been glamorous, and turn back toward the Courtyard Marriott, welcoming the hastening security of the town cars and mirrored surfaces of private healthcare facilities Uptown.

Work on my talk goes well, and by 7.00 pm I’m basically done, enough that I can head to see the Metal Alliance Four on tour motivated, but calm. After a very brisk 45-minute walk, the Agora appears like an anonymous motel in the middle of urban nowhere. The neon sign would proclaim that the Theatre is world-famous, but there is no hyphen, and the lights are out in the world. Inside, someone has stripped the venue of paint as yellowed plaster and concrete greet me along with the sound of HM cranked to well over 11. I have forgotten my ID, so the fat seated bouncer concedes he can let me in as “under-age” if I'll let him draw crosses in black marker on the backs of my hands so I can’t buy beer. I accept, and head to the Theatre auditorium where I spit and scrub the prohibition off my hands, buy a huge can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and check out Befallen in the Ballroom, where more neon lights fail to shine. The sound is enveloping and intoxicating, as the crowd of fewer than 100 stands appreciatively in front of these loose but committed death metal die-hards in hoodies and plaid. I return to the Theatre for the second half of 1349’s incredible set. The drummer is phenomenal – that he can play that fast for so long is astonishing. Metal drumming is often faked on recordings, but Sondre blows my mind with a flawless performance. Behemoth are next, and they too are good, but their show lacks the intensity of 1349’s. Their songs are shoutier and more predictable, and I can’t help feel that the louder sound and flashier lights are compensating for an unconvincing show by a half-arsed band. By the sixth or seventh song the strobes in my face are doing my head in and I can’t look at the stage. Midtown is no less bleak than before, and I tense at the handful of stumbling strangers who share with me the city night. The Pabst assists my striding home, taking a full minute off my time. I am back by 11, and for a nightcap grab a Blue Moon from the bar.

The following night I have a ticket for Nile – more death metal at the Agora. I don't fancy the walk, though, so book a cab. The driver is incredulous that I walked the route twice last night (I don’t admit that I ran it in the morning as well), saying it’s really unsafe and I’m braver than him. Feeling naive, lucky and stupid, I accept his business card; I had planned on walking back after the show, but I call him later instead. Rather a roaming charge than be mugged or worse. And Nile are effing brilliant. George Kollias is probably god.

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I intend to look around the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum while I’m in Cleveland. It’s one of the reasons I’ve booked to be in the city for two days ahead of my talk at Case Western Reserve University. I was flattered and surprised, however, when, a couple of days before I leave the UK I received an email from a colleague, offering to hook me up with some people at the Rock Hall (as it likes to be known). I was copied in on an email to the Director of Education, who in turn copied me in to an email to the Manager of Artist and VIP Relations, asking her to ensure I am well looked after (I can only imagine it’s a quiet time of year for VIP Relations.)

En route to the Hall of Fame, the cab driver seems to think there are two kinds of musicians – ones he’s heard of, and those he will do soon. He therefore decides that I am an “up-and-coming drummer”. I don’t spoil his day with the details of how and why I and most musicians contentedly fit neither of his categories, and as I leave the cab he tells me I’ve brightened his day. Must have been the $4 tip. It’s raining, and the squashed glass-and-steel pyramid of the Rock Hall beckons me indoors. Inside I am met by Shelby and Jason. Jason is the Director of Education, and has half an hour for me. We spend an hour together, though, as he shows me around the exhibitions, pointing out cool stuff (Johnny Cash’s guitar, Muddy Waters’ guitar, John Lennon’s Mellotron – the one the Beatles actually used to record Strawberry Fields), and adding in awesome details like “we are the only museum that the Elvis Presley Estate works with”, so they routinely switch exhibits with Graceland. I thought I would hate this place – glass showcases crammed with memorabilia from people who succeeded despite not-necessarily-superior-artistry-or-songs in an industry that makes and breaks fortunes and lives with callous disregard for people and peoples and ethics, creating tastes and demand and commodifying the previously meaningful – but I love it here. I love ZZ Top’s bearded drum set, the sincerely eclectic and non-patronizing approach to the music’s complex past and present, the balanced and honest dealings with issues of race (if not gender, so much), and I really dig the epic model of The Wall from the Pink Floyd album occupying much of the 4th floor. There is a strong sense here that they’re curating (rather than creating, which had been my fear, although inevitably they do this too) a history of my favourite kind of music.

It's pouring with rain as I leave to head across downtown to the Library and Archives. Craving fresh air, I stand expectantly by the vacant taxi rank. A cab pulls up and the driver asks if I am Mr Sergeant. I tell him I am not, and he says to get in anyway – Sergeant is nowhere to be seen (quite possibly because it is raining and he’s sensibly waiting indoors). The driver asks what I'm doing in town, so I tell him. He asks who I’ve played with, and I run through my muddled mental list of tenuous connections to remotely famous musicians. He is sort of impressed by Richard O’Brien, but rightly points out that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not really rock and roll. Herbie Flowers means nothing to him, and he’s clearly not a Deep Purple fan. I offer to get out. Changing tack, he says I must be decent if the University is paying for me to be here. “Flattery will get you everywhere”, my judo instructor used to tell me; I was never sure about that, but it seems to be a mantra in the (I feel, somewhat over-zealous) tipping culture of the United States. Of course I tip my driver heavily, despite the fact I only work three days a week and my wife has been on maternity leave for a year and we can’t afford any of this. After all, I am a university lecturer, this guy’s a cabbie, I'm white, he's black, and the class rules are clear. I consider again the probability of success were I to attempt instigation of a tipping culture for drummers and music teachers in west London.

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The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's Library and Archives are housed in a conspicuously new and functional building on the grounds of Cuyahoga County Community College on the outskirts of Downtown Cleveland. I am greeted by Andy, Director of the facility, who shows me into his office and asks me to sign copy of my book. I am flattered, astonished and taken aback that this place would even stock my work, let alone want a signed copy (after all, who the hell am I?!). I feel momentarily star-struck in my own presence. He apologies twice for troubling me with his request, apparently unaware (surely not?!) of how rare is my being asked to sign books for the collections of world famous institutions dedicated to the preservation and documentation my favourite art form.

Andy is, like his colleague Jason at the Hall of Fame and Museum, very generous with his time, showing me around the young library and vast archives. Amidst unsorted collections of donated LPs and boxes of papers from people I should have heard of, a few items give me chills. I see and touch the original hand-written telegram from the Wiltshire Police to Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend, informing her of his tragic and dramatic death in a car crash in Bath, England. I leaf through Hal Blaine’s datebook – Blaine, almost certainly the most recorded drummer in history, played on thousands of records, films and TV shows in LA in the 50s and 60s, and he has the phone numbers in here of literally everyone. I nearly pull out my iPhone to photograph some of this, and then check myself. Andy is committed and knowledgeable, giving me the certain impression that the future history of rock and roll is in safe hands. He even gives me a ride back to my hotel. What a nice chap. I wonder what will befall the records of my significant contemporaries – everything we have is in iCal, the “cloud” or a Google doc.

Back at the Courtyard Marriott, I pop into the Starbucks franchise Bistro for an espresso and a turkey ciabatta. The guy serving asks “are you in a rock and roll band?” to which I reply that I am, but none that he’d have heard of. He then asks “do you eat bats, like Ozzy Osbourne? In my head I remove the comma from his question and reply with a witty “no, I have a whole different technique”. However, I suspect he’s just after a tip because he’s young, black and hip, and can’t be into anything so unfashionable or white-British as rock. And then the whole catastrophic scene from the movie Crash plays in my head too, where Ryan Phillipe’s unconsciously racist police officer unleashes his wild supressed anger and all goes horribly wrong in his car; so I just laugh and say that no, I don’t eat bats, but that maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong.

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In a cruel distortion of the This is Spinal Tap lost-back-stage scene from this city, I am beginning to think I might never leave Cleveland, Ohio. Waiting at Gate A3A, Cleveland Hopkins, I grow glad of my impending six-hour layover at JFK. I have been lucky with the day so far – I woke up ahead of my alarm, spry although mildly hung over. I had a decent gym session (25-minute run, did two short sessions with weights, a few press-ups) and made it to check-out in time for my cab. As I was getting the valet parking charges removed from my bill (I hadn't driven a car on this trip), a guy from across the lobby asked if he could share my cab to the airport. Happy to split the cost (although disgruntled at the loss of working time and the need now to chat politely to some dude for half an hour, but Britishly powerless to say so), I agreed. Turned out we both face changes tomorrow (he would begin a new job, and my wife is due back to work after maternity leave). I ended up dispensing advice to him for his girlfriend, about to graduate as a classical violinist. Tempering my counsel should prove handy practice for the talk I’m giving the next day to my own undergraduate music students, ominously entitled “Next Steps: Professional Development”, like I am in a position to help. The saving I made on the cab fare made up for about half the “sundry [beer] costs” accrued on my hotel bill. Airport check-in was quick and painless, and Security equally smooth. Opposite my gate is Starbucks. Starving, I order a sausage muffin and a scone with my “tall blonde roast” (?!) coffee (she disappoints somewhat). And then another scone (the danger of proximity to cakes). I edit the video of my talk from yesterday into a movie of just under an hour, and add titles, pleased I'd downloaded a couple of tutorials about the new and utterly counter-intuitive version of iMovie. Then the fun begins.

There is a “technical problem” with our plane. The flight will be delayed by at least an hour. Or possibly 10 minutes. But probably closer to 90. So please stay in the gate area. My laptop battery drained from movie-editing, I hunt for a power outlet. We are soon told that the plane is mechanically in great shaper (good to know), but that the GPS is not working – in such a condition, we will of course not be allowed into New York air space (subtle deflection of responsibility for the situation from airline to New Yorkers. Deft, I feel). After an hour-and-a-half, the plane's SatNav is fixed. No one boards when groups 1 and 2 are called, so confusingly I board first with group 3.

Once everyone else is in, sat and belted, a very frail, old lady is assisted aboard by her son, his wife, and the sole flight attendant. They walk comically slowly, as if mocking the arthritic, or deliberately holding up the flight yet further. They are seated, and the plane remains stationary. As the female pilot (I actually had no idea this was even a thing) tells us half an hour later that we are almost cleared for departure, the daughter-in-law behind me begins shouting and yelling about three lost passports. After much conspicuous unpacking and repacking she and her relatives are escorted from the plane with the same Python-esque urgency with which they had joined us. Once the family is departed, the pilot appears in person to explain that in order for the funereal group to be allowed to remain at or ever to leave the airport, they need their suitcases, which are now being dug-for among everyone’s luggage, which has just been removed from the hold. This will probably take ages to resolve, and everyone is very sorry, not least the captain, whose frustration shows through her cracking professional veneer. The flamboyant flight attendant comes around with glasses of water and frees granola bars. Saves me having to buy lunch at JFK, at least. The woman next to me starts to cough, admitting she’d thought she was over her bronchitis.

The Coat

When I arrive back in London from Ireland with punk rockers, Neck, for the second time in as many weeks, I pop to Camden, which I appreciate for its non-judging embrace of my wardrobe needs; the market is handy for cheap cotton t-shirts, and there is stereotypical rock attire aplenty. Today I am intent on buying a black, floor-length leather coat to quiet the persistent niggle that I’ll be much, much happier (and cooler) when I have one. I try several shops in search of The Coat, and, as is my wont, end up back where I started buying the first one I saw. I fall for the tobacco-y smooth talking of a portly Italian who appears to know a lot about leather, and am bowled over when he proves the garment is made from real lambs by confidently waving the flame of a cigarette lighter near one of the sleeves. An expert haggler, I talk the guy down to £400 from almost exactly that figure, whip out my credit card, conceal my wonder that it works after the beating it just took on tour, and stride home tall, draped gloriously in far too much coat.

I wear it to a gig that evening in Acton, by a blues band featuring Leigh, whom I’ve just spent three weeks on tour with. Marion, Neck’s incredible fiddle player, is also there and greets me by acknowledging my new purchase and saying that in late August, such as it is, the weather’s too warm for my coat. Although I agree, Marion is wrong, for it is – as it will ever be – precisely the ideal temperature for it. What Marion fails to realise is that the coat is perfect – it goes splendidly with my trilby. Over the next few months (and subsequent years) I slump majestically as I walk in my regal attire, stumbling on stairs and snagging the hem on brambles, hedges, bushes, fences and gateposts, and shutting it in (my) car doors. To counter this, I develop a protective gait that works hardly at all but which succeeds in making passers by appear nervous.

During that winter’s run of the anti-pantomime Christmas show, Little Shop of Horrors, I tear the right breast of the coat widely on the door of the Upstairs at the Gatehouse theatre when exiting in haste to meet my brother who – in traditional legendarily supportive fashion – is coming to London especially to see the show, even though he dislikes musical theatre and has yet to make his mind up about me since that time we were kids and I moved aside at the top of the stairs when he ran hard towards me and I watched him tumble loudly to the bottom and amazingly recover with no physical injury. In my haste to leave the theatre I catch the billowing cloak on the tapered end of the push bar of the fire door at the bottom of the playhouse’s front stairs. I feel it catch, hear the rip, and enter instantly into a period of disappointment and self-loathing that lasts the best part of a year, even past the successful near-invisible mend that I secure for a reasonable price at the hand of a tailor on Gloucester Road.

My mum says she likes the coat. Liz, representing the mainstream, asserts that it would be okay as a costume, but can’t believe that I wear it not in jest. Gavin, in my band, threatens repeatedly to cut it in half to make it ‘the right length’. Atar states plainly that he’d very much like to burn it. Liz’s best friend, Jen, ever the diplomat, tells me it’s cool, but I later come to understand from my wife’s brutal teaching that, when anyone says to me that they ‘like that shirt/hat/full-length leather coat’, what they actually mean is that they notice I’m wearing something upon which they cannot help but remark, so say that they like it, which they most certainly do not. Even the German family who live in Switzerland and who we’ve been friends with for years fail to hide their dismay that I openly wear it not only in theory but also in practice.

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After Liz and I marry, we move, eventually, to the other side of the North Circular Road. I drive less to work, ride my bike more, and stop going out in the evenings (except to play drums). As such the coat enters a period of decline. I start to consider whether I might have outgrown it. I wonder if – as years ago happened with my awesome red leisure suit that even my mum thought I shouldn’t wear to friends’ birthday parties – maybe its moment is up. It hangs solemnly like a cassock on the back of the music room door, waiting for me to revive our communion. I wear it occasionally, usually feeling regret, tinged with the fear that I’ll be beaten up, or, worse, that I’ll be spotted stepping out by Atar or my wife. I even consider that I might throw it out, but I can’t face up to that yet.

One day, one November, a colleague – the editor of a major international music magazine – makes good on her acceptance of my invitation to give a guest lecture to one of my classes. One of the many things I respect about Gemma is that, somewhat beguilingly, she publishes balanced reviews of events in which I do not necessarily toe the industry standard practice line of saying that everyone and everything are fantastic. During the class we to and we fro, and I recount for students how I met our guest on the set of a television commercial for which we were hired to help sell the new Sony Walkman (which instantly bombed as iPod sales soared globally). I describe how I lied to the producers about attending a particular music college, and Gemma explains how our working together is a perfect example of successful networking – individuals should always try to stand out. It transpires she remembered me, for years, solely as the guy who wore the unnecessarily long, black coat.

And that is it – vindication. After the mockery, the uncertainty, the shame, the impracticality, and the relentless pressure from everyone but my mum never more to wear my favourite robe, I now know that my epic black family of lambs’ skins fire proof blanket and go-to garment, my (sans Technicolor) dreamcoat is the reason I keep receiving tickets and passes to prestigious musical events like the London Drum Show this coming weekend (Gemma has even secured a free pass for my toddler daughter, whose name, too, will be on the door). So shove that in your pipes and smoke it, EVERYONE I HAVE EVER MET – my coat ROCKS and I have a published, in-depth interview with ‘The World’s Global Drumming Ambassador’, Dom Famularo, and tickets to a U2 concert to show for it. I begin in that moment to marvel at what I’ve no doubt is the untold story of my coat’s infinite other successes. It probably brought peace to Northern Ireland, and engineered Corbyn’s socialist revival.

One thing is for certain – it’s back. I’m back. In black.

Out to Get Me

At a couple of months shy of 18, cycling home one day from college in Hove, I was hit by a Police car. More accurately, I cycled directly into the vehicle. I did so because cycling in a straight line on a straight road where I had complete right of way seemed like the right thing to do, and felt safe. I was told after the event, by a Police officer trying desperately not to get sued, that his partner (the driver) had responded to the driver of another vehicle about to overtake me, who had waved them across into a side-road. It was apparently not the norm to react in this way to such hand signals, in case a driver had not properly checked that the coast (so to speak) was clear, lest there were, for instance, a pedal cyclist hugging the curb out of sight of the Police driver. However, on this occasion making an exception, the Police turned hard right in front of me, I smashed into the side of their car and was catapulted over the roof, landing firmly on my rear. The front wheel of my cycle was massively buckled, and the frame internally damaged. Sussex Police bought me a replacement bike and that evening I was taken home in a Police van, worrying my dad as we pulled up outside the house – but at least I wasn’t in cuffs.

Since that watershed incident 20-odd years ago I continue most days to experience attempts on my life – some admittedly more earnest than others – as I bike with caution and confidence, assertiveness and prudence, to work or back home. It feels necessary to note a handful of these instances while the impressions are still fresh – raw, one might say – not because I hope to impress anyone with mundane tales of commuting, but to highlight just how utterly moronic drivers can be. Maybe after articulating it all, I’ll side with the manslaughter muthafukkas I meet every day in East Finchley and Hampstead, instead of being so caught up in my own selfish desire to not die. So here goes.

Generally, people are pretty nonchalant about trying to kill me. There’s a casualness to the attempts on my life that smacks of resignation – like they don’t really want to do it, but they’re going to clock the cyclist, calculate my speed and trajectory, and then, seeing that we’re bound to collide without some nifty intervention from me, move off gently from stationary anyway, mainly to see what will happen. A prime example of such dispassionate cruising for jail-time occurred just today in Muswell Hill, when a lady in a Mercedes Smart (ahem, not smart enough!) Car pulled gently across my path, forcing me to brake hard and swerve. She didn’t acknowledge me and didn’t look back. Perhaps she didn’t even notice me, which would be odd if not alarming, since it was broad daylight and I was wearing a bright white t-shirt with a high-visibility backpack cover and was cycling towards her in the centre of her field of vision, rather fast. Luckily there was nothing overtaking me, and the road was dry, so my braking and leaning worked and I survived, feeling slighted but mostly just meh.

The closest I have come in my 38-and-a-bit years to a serious cycling injury occurred just this past winter as I was cycling downhill along Frognal in Hampstead, a route I have frequented for six years. I was riding quite fast, despite the rain, confident (essential on the road, or you get in everyone’s way and annoy them into spite) that I was relatively safe, owing to my high-vis attire, priority on the road, and sensible, visible road position just left of centre, bolstered by the knowledge that I was not closely followed thanks to my cyclist’s attenuation to sound not dissimilarly honed to that of a professional audio engineer. It was thus that I saw no reason to slow down or stop when a car in front of me on the other side of the road started signaling the driver’s intention to turn right. In 27 years of biking I had not encountered a situation where a motorist in such a position would fail to account for my speed, right of way, eye-catching electric blue helmet, and pull out in front of me anyway. But pull out, the guy did. This driver, by all accounts (well, by mine) a complete dick, stared at me, then waited until I was but a few metres from his vehicle before turning right in my obvious path – without speed or apology, using instead stupidity and funereal slowness, his minivan the backdrop to my life flashing before me. Thanks to the lubrication of the road by the steady downpour and the cold, when I applied the back brake and half my bike swerved to the right, I maintained the same forward speed, experience keeping me upright and fate intervening so I missed the car’s rear bumper by less than an inch. I expected, in the split second that everything slowed down in my brain, to wind up underneath a car that morning, perhaps distributed across the high middle class thoroughfare, causing, I’d hope, quite the ruckus. I arrived at work angry, and was wired the whole day, shaken, and scared to ride home, which of course I did later anyway.

The top spot to date, though, for sheer unrepentant, brutish driving muthafukkery, goes to the driver and passenger of a soiled white van who cut me up (figuratively) this week at the Spaniards Inn bottleneck atop Hampstead Heath. I was heading downhill, gathering speed, when this van pulled out from the right, heading to the car park on my left. I braked very hard (again, dry road!) and leant back so as not to fly over the handlebars. As the van revved noisily inches from my face, both occupants shouted at me in dissonant unison, “go fuck yourself!!” As well as being a don’t-give-a-damn attempt to run me down, or at least to really piss me off, this seemed a bizarre and malicious provocation from two of Britain’s finest moron minds. Why did the occupants of white Ford Transit van, registration number PF03 RRZ (FYI), behave in this aggressive and threatening manner, rather than, for instance, just waiting their turn in the traffic? Who gained anything from this?!

Perhaps, then, it was collaborators of this unhappy couple who attempted to take me out this afternoon (only minutes before the Smart Car woman took her pop). At the mini roundabout, also in Hampstead, where Jack Straw’s Castle once stood, having signaled my intention to turn and without anyone to my right to prevent such a move, I accelerated hard out of the way of those idling in the road to my left. As the supreme idiots emerged from the left in their Vauxhall, they did so, I’ll concede, with some urgency, but then stopped abruptly in front of me when they spotted that the traffic (equally visible from their prior vantage point 50 feet behind them) prevented them from going any further. I braked hard, giving them a “thumbs up” and a grin (it was too hot for middle fingers today, and besides, everyone makes mistakes), and the driver shouted to me as I curled around his car, “you’re welcome, mate”. Now, mates we’ll not be, but a twat he most definitely is. I mean, why couldn’t he just have said “sorry”? Why try to make out that I’m wrong? Is it pride or stupidity or guilt? Does motoring do this to people? Does the sarcastically named “rush” hour make drivers behave like pricks? Are these people like this in other areas of their lives? The inconsiderate, mindless driving is one thing; but to blame it on a vulnerable, two-wheeled cyclist as I again escape with my life in their wake is another. I am increasingly less inclined to believe what that Policeman told me over 20 years ago – that this behaviour is not the anticipated norm. I suggest, moreover, that it totally is, that my fellow road users are all cunts, and that you’d all run me over if you could. Am I wrong?

Edinburgh

The last time I had a gig in Edinburgh it did not go well at all (playing for 45 minutes to an empty venue at 3 in the morning after an eight-hour drive, firing our manager, and returning to a hovel of a wasted apartment full of drunken actors, for which triumph the guitarist missed half of his family’s fortnight holiday in Devon), but when I was most recently in the city for other work I came away with an editorial team for a new book, buy-in for the project from a competing scholar, and the feeling that I might actually be getting somewhere in my chosen – albeit unpaid and as yet non-existent – niche in higher education. So I like my chances.

Showered, and packed for the road, drum stuff all in the hall, toddler car seat removed and indoors, I finish deflecting emails and make it to bed, wired and tired, a little before 2.00 AM. Waking with resentment and resolve at the 5.30 alarm, I make lunch and a flask of coffee before loading the car and heading to the bus stop at Brent Cross shopping centre where Andy the guitarist is waiting with Les Paul and backpack. We’re at the singer’s in under five minutes, and although “on his way”, he takes 25 minutes to get to the front door. Leaving London half an hour later than planned, I mentally shorten our lunch break. The drive is fantastic – motorway, sunshine, heavy traffic all heading in the opposite direction, time on our side – marvellous! I need to re-learn songs for the gig, so stick on the playlist, which sends the singer soundly to sleep – he lies down across the back seats, snoring and occasionally shouting at himself in Hebrew, awaking when we pull over six hours later, in Scotland.

I have to call the bank. Through to an “advisor” after ages on hold, the signal cuts out, and I try again. Ten more minutes… and I ask to extend my overdraft till I am next paid. A conversation ensues that confounds me – I can probably pay the rent without overdraft or the necessary money (?!), but the system has to decide. I ask what the system is, so I can perhaps work out the odds, but am advised that the system is “the system” and that we know not of what parts it is comprises, or how they function together: my rent may go through, or, equally, it might not; same for the overdraft application, which ends up being accepted, but won’t make funds available until after the rent leaves (or doesn’t). Delayed now by 40 minutes, and annoyed that I’ve held us up more than the singer, I advise my estate agent I may (and may not) have the money to keep paying for my family’s home. I face the M74 with irritation and a Whitesnake album, and set the cruise control for 76 mph.

The singer and guitarist arrive in Edinburgh well rested. I download an app to pay for parking and leave the car by the door of the venue – Bannerman’s. We pop in to find a chirpy young lady, all smiles and happy to help, her accent an intriguing blend of Scottish and northeastern European. She shows us upstairs to the band flat. We’re early for sound-check, and the bassist and other guitarist are still in their beds asleep, having arrived the night before. Wringing blood from a stone (my destiny in all bands), I glean from the bassist that we are waiting for the sound man to arrive. I buy a horrendous latte from the charming bartender, whip out my laptop, dive into some emails, and catch up on the office in London.

The sound guy arrives only 40 minutes late, and we head downstairs to the venue and its low, brick ceiling that does not bode well. My wedding ring splits under the weight of the amps in flight cases I’m carrying on top of one other to avoid multiple trips to the car and back. The friendly bartender has been replaced by a shorter, angrier lady who will not permit us free food or alcoholic beverages, but who really is sorry that the boiler is broken so there will be no hot water in the flat for at least another week. (She will later smile coldly as she serves me the greasy, expensive and lukewarm house cheeseburger shortly before we play.)

Set-up begins with a battered Pearl kit, exhumed, and dumped on the stage. After surgery with gaffer tape, felt and pliers, the cymbal stands are usable with caution. Of the floor tom’s three legs, two clearly work fine, and the bass drum’s rickety pins are cause for concern – our guy claims they “are never normally a problem”. Two beats into sound-check, and the bass drum is gliding across the stage, so the resourceful engineer brings breezeblocks to slow the drum’s migration toward the audience. Staggeringly, then, balancing the bog-standard sound of drums, two guitars, bass, backing track and a singer takes a further two-and-a-half hours, in this venue where the engineer works several nights a week. Every mic lead is changed at least twice, and one even gets re-soldered. And still the monitors sound fucking awful.

I struggle to keep down my burger throughout the gig, wishing we’d been warned that the food is appalling, costs too much, and is only be available when  the least conducive to rocking hard for 90 minutes. In every song that we play, the drums and bricks slide coyly away. I pull them back, they move again. I am ever hopeful that the sound man is paying attention and might produce, say, concrete or granite to help with this crap. He does not. During the hard-hitting work-out of Mama Kin the kick drum wanders so far that I pull a muscle in my thigh, the pedal comes off, and I finish up the song playing anything but Aerosmith on the floor tom, which duly collapses. Raging and livid, I walk around the kit, shouting expletives, throwing it back together with the grace and dignity of a marauding orc. The ride stand caves, and when the gig eventually ends I find a 3-inch crack in my Z-Rock crash. Looking forward to replacing the £300 cymbal, I regret again the overpriced, shoddy, veg-free dinner, and ruminate on the parking charges, rivaling central London, being levied on my vehicle while I pack up amid the gig detritus.

Before I can bring myself to lie down in the curtain-less bedroom upstairs, I take up the bassist on the offer of a Carling that she’d sensibly brought up from London and put in the fridge in the flat. Too sober after this, I head back downstairs to try out some Scotch – I mean, when in Rome… A bearded bartender authoritatively recommends the Ardbeg, which I purchase and sip to unwind. Fighting the urge for a second whisky, I instead wash my face with cold water and antibacterial hand-wash, brush my teeth, and pass out in my clothes.

6 hours later it’s a revitalising Edinburgh morning – sunny, chilly and fresh. I go for a run round this beautiful city, scoping it for places I can later have a wash. There’s a piper playing on the Royal Mile – I stop, call my mum so she can hear him too, and sprint back to the flat. Grabbing my laptop, I walk briskly to Pret à Manger, avail myself of the soap and warm water, sit down with a smoothie, sandwich, pastry and coffee, and get cracking with dissertation marking. Twenty minutes I want more coffee, so I order another with a second cheeky pastry. The cashier says I can have the cake free! I chow down, drink up, and get looking for evidence of critical thinking. Four extended essays later, we hit the road for Glasgow, arriving to find a one-way system, a team of helpful roadies, enthusiastic and capable tech crew, a fridge full of beer, a huge, comfy dressing room, and ample changeover time before a butt-kicking gig to a more than appreciative audience of drunk, rocking Scots. This is more like it!