Being in a band is expensive, time-consuming and incompatible with marriage. God, I love it?
There are many small irritations inherent in being in a middle-aged man band. One is how little regard the contemporary live music scene has for sensible bedtimes. Another is chronic object attrition: in the rush to get out of a venue before midnight on a Sunday, possessions are inevitably mislaid or left behind. In the past month alone I've lost two coats, a harmonica (key of E), a quantity of cable and a pair of needle-nose pliers.
The band is off to Oxford for an engagement that has already given us several causes for concern: we've had to hire a lot of sound equipment one might normally expect a venue to supply; we're being made to play two 45-minute sets, even though experience shows that a longer single set is preferable; and, despite the distance, my wife is threatening to come.
As an audience member, my wife has a patchy history of support. At one gig she heckled so mercilessly that I threatened to ban her. At another she was seen chatting to a woman who subsequently tried to storm the stage with a broken bottle. "It was nothing to do with me," she said later. "She was just at my table. I was the one who stopped her!"
On arrival in Oxford, we are presented with a three-page contract, largely listing the conditions under which we might forfeit our fee: failure to start on time; failure to finish on time; failure to play two 45-minute sets; making too much noise. Clause 6 defines too much noise as a sound of such volume "that a solitary blackbird cannot be heard trilling outside the venue". We hand the contract to the fiddle player, because he has an understanding of such things ? he is a barrister.
My wife turns up at about 9pm. I greet her amiably but briefly. I don't want her to get the impression I regard her presence as a bad omen, like some lonely blackbird trilling by the bins out back, but I also see no reason to tempt fate.
"Good luck," she says.
"Yes," I say. "Thank you."
After the gig, several strangers congratulate me and ask when we are playing next. They all seem genuinely enthusiastic. I try to pause and enjoy the moment before I start thinking about packing up. My wife approaches, glass in hand.
"The sound was terrible," she says, smiling broadly.
"Really?" I say. "Because other people have come up and..."
"I'm not saying you were terrible. The sound was terrible."
"It's a challenging space," I say.
"Just awful," she says. "And playing two sets is a mistake."
"Well, we had a contractual obligation," I say. "Otherwise..."
"Lots of people left in between."
"Did they? It's funny, the feedback I'm getting is largely..."
"When are we leaving, by the way?"
In the car, my wife and the drummer get into a heated debate. It is the drummer's contention that human civilisation could not have evolved as quickly as it did without intervention from alien life forms.
"Bollocks," she says. She turns to me. "The sound was terrible tonight."
"You said," I say.
We get home after 1am. I go to bed but cannot sleep. I lie awake thinking about how thankless it is being in a band, and how expensive, and time-consuming, and incompatible with marriage. Then I think about how crushed I'd be if it all had to stop tomorrow. It is, I realise, secretly the most important thing in my life.
Next morning I go down to find my wife in the kitchen, looking a tad hung over. I feel a sudden dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach.
"What's that look for?" she says.
"I left my cardigan behind," I say.
"Rock and roll," she says.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/26/band-middle-aged-tim-dowling
No comments:
Post a Comment