I love sitting in with bands. Obviously I love ‘The Cheating Hearts’ more, but I enjoy the challenge of being asked to fill in, or even just put something together for a one off gig. I like being on my mettle, though I have absolutely no idea what mettle is if I was perfectly honest. Often it will be a genre I’m quite comfortable with, and sometimes I have to prep furiously so I don’t make a complete tit of myself, a technical term amongst we musicians. On those occasions I like to exude an air of relaxed insouciance, as if it’s just like falling off a bike to me. (Which I’m also quite good at incidentally).
I do, actually, have a rather odd disability for a musician in these circumstances and that is that I am completely tone deaf. I can hear where chord changes are coming, even quite odd or sophisticated ones, I can throw out an adequate solo on the piano or the Hammond at the raise of a lead guitarist’s eyebrow, or a nod from the singer. I usually catch the stops or the pushes and more often than not I finish at the same time as everyone else. However for the life of me I can’t tell what key we are in unless someone tells me. It is most peculiar, but there it is. I suspect my hearing has never been 100% but apart from that I can find no adequate explanation for it. Throw me the key though, and I am away, I can busk with the best of them. Mostly.
There is a North Manchester band, ‘The Johnny Friendlies’ who I sit in with occasionally. Phil, the lead guitarist and singer and, I suppose, Johnny Friendly himself has a great repertoire of songs, everyone to my taste, and it’s always a pleasure to play with them. The entire band are good players, civilised guys, humorous and engaging and because I only sit in now and then it’s always fresh and new. Phil will only play a number he believes in and when he sings a song, it stays sung. Living in Spain, lockdown was more arduous for him than over here and to entertain himself, and us, he recorded a song a day. He was well over a hundred songs when he called it a day. In a sort of retaliation I tried to record a song a day promising I would stop when I performed one that Phil had at some point or other in his 45 year career had sung live. I picked out a list of obscure songs I was sure he wouldn’t have ever done. I got to three. No one likes a smart arse.
Another North Manchester Blues band called me last year. They had got my name from somewhere and the lead singer and guitarist was desperate for someone to sit in for two important gigs. He offered to come round there and then and talk about it. It was a bit like a cartoon. As I put the phone down there was a squeal of rubber outside the house and there he was, just like Roadrunner. “My he’s keen”, I thought. The band had a very professional website, a couple of albums out, write ups in the more esoteric blues mags and slots at big festivals coming up. Oddly I didn’t recognise any of the tracks on the website, but to be fair, they sounded alright. A bit tricksy, requiring a bit of learning obviously, not songs you could easily busk but better than average.
We had a coffee, played through a couple of the tracks and chatted a while. He seemed well connected and the band was well set up. They even had a tour bus. A converted Luton van with aircraft seats fitted in the back and a couple of bunk beds. This was on a Saturday morning in June. I hadn’t recognised any of the material because it turned out they were all originals. My heart sank a little, there would be quite a bit of work involved, and it wasn’t three chords and the truth sort of blues either, more Robyn Ford than Howlin’ Wolf. They had just lost their keyboard player (Try and think where you last had him, I was tempted to suggest, but he looked so stricken by it that I didn’t).
They were due to do a warm up gig, and then an evening at ‘The Bulls Head’ in Barnes, Middlesex. This is quite a prestigious venue and over the years nearly everybody on the blues scene has played there, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton to name but two, but its a big two to be fair. Georgie Fame was on that week. “Sounds good” I said, “when are the two gigs?” “Erm, Tomorrow” he said, looking uncomfortably down at his shoes. I must have looked startled. He began to plead. It was ‘The Bull’s Head’. He said. Everybody who was anybody would be there. It was an all ticket do. There might be an American tour. There were headline gigs at big festivals. Please, they would really appreciate it. I’d be helping them out of a hole. He looked plaintively at me.
Now I’ve been around the block a bit. I have a lot of experience of bands and their various machinations. I am not easily taken in. My practiced and somewhat jaundiced eye can spot when something is maybe not quite as advertised and I’m certainly, absolutely not easy prey to obvious and crude flattery. “Please” he said. “You’re such a fantastic player”. “Oh alright”, I said.
The warm up was in small unpromising pub in Stafford. The band had brought their own PA. At least they said it was their own. Unloading, I did think it might possibly have been Bon Jovi’s old stadium rig. I’ve never seen so much gear for a pub booking. I set my keyboards up at the foot of what was supposedly a stack of PA cabs, but it could just as easily have been the great pyramid of Cheops, but a bit heavier.
Having run a little late I just managed to get a pint in when one of them said, “right, let’ show ’em”. Without further ceremony, on the count of four, we proceeded to blow the windows out of the pub. I can’t remember what the first song was called. If I had to choose, I’d probably go with ‘Stun Grenade’, but I do remember the landlord looking wide eyed at us and silently mouthing “Fuck me”, though. The tiny audience looked horrified and clung onto their pints for dear life.
After the gig it took seven minutes longer to carry the gear out as it had taken to play the entire second set. I timed it, out of interest, in between developing a suspected double hernia. Back on the bus the band seemed pretty complimentary about the keyboards but to be honest my ears were ringing so much they could have been saying anything. I was stone deaf.
The following day was the trip to London and the famous ‘Bulls Head’. Frankly, I was regretting the trip already by this point and in a big slow Luton it was going to be a long haul. Travelling in close company for several hours with people you don’t really know can be quite taxing. You have to feel your way cautiously around stuff before revealing too much of yourself. It’s easy to commit a faux pas or even cause offence. It calls for a carefully tuned social antennae and sensitivity. Qualities, I admit, I have never mastered. The topics of conversation ranged over a number of subjects and eventually, as these things do, alighted briefly on politics, having covered wives, divorces, wives again, tastes in music, football teams and the usual anecdotes centred around playing in bands. Now, like many in the arts, (there, I’ve said it now) I am basically of the left. I’m hardly what you would describe as a raging Trot and If you came to us for dinner you might get a mild bit of the usual liberal lamenting but it’s wouldn’t be an evening of Marxist dialectic over the Pavlova. I do, admittedly, very occasionally tramp round doing a bit of door stepping for the Labour party but I’m worse than useless at it. I’m more of a liability than anything else and I probably lose more votes than I win. I’m apologetic when I should be persuasive, crestfallen when I should be combative and wet, cold and miserable when I should be uplifted by the cause. To be fair, they’ve stopped asking me to go out canvassing anymore and just give me envelopes to lick. (Which is odd, because mainly they use email nowadays). I am essentially a mild liberal menshevik of a very English sort.
Quite unlike, as it turned out, my travelling companions that day who it would be difficult to describe as mildly anything. They would probably have been admirers of Hitler if he hadn’t been so soft on social policy, the snowflake. An awkward silence descended for a bit. I tried to change the subject by asking if anyone knew what the horrendous hold up was that had had us stuck immobile in traffic for longer than we might expect even for London. “Its Donald”, said one of the band admiringly. Donald Trump he meant, who was making his first presidential visit to the UK and they’d closed the sodding bridge we needed to get across the river. The band were clearly Trump fans. “For fuck’s sake” I groaned silently to myself. “I’m 65 for Chrissake’s, how did I end up here?” (Answer: You fell for it again didn’t you, stupid? How old are you again?”)
The venue was at least an attractive large thirties pub, bathed in the warm afternoon sunlight by a crook of the River Thames with excellent beer at prices that made three pints a definite possibility, if I didn’t have anything to eat and could find a couple of stubs to smoke on the way home.
We had a decent PA at our disposal and an engineer who knew what he was doing and the sound was great this time.
The only downside was the audience. There wasn’t one. They hadn’t sold a single ticket, a fact they had forgetfully omitted to tell me when I said I’d help out. That’s not quite true actually. There was in fact an audience of one, eventually. In the second set a guy wandered in, apparently lost and looking for the gents, and who inadvisably sat down for a minute. As we finished the song he clapped rather self consciously and peered round in the gloom only to realise he was quite alone. From that point, bless him, he was clearly too embarrassed to get up and leave as that would, in effect, be the entire audience walking out on the band. Humanely, he couldn’t bring himself to do that, though to be fair, his agonised body language suggested otherwise. He even, and this was a final act of cruelty on the band’s part I felt, had to sit through an encore that he most certainly hadn’t asked for. At the end he gave us a tiny little wave, a wan smile and scurried gratefully out into West London’s late summer night, or, possibly, into the comforting and final embrace of the River Thames.
I did get asked to do the Californian tour. I’ve never been to America. My wife lived and worked as a dancer in Texas and we often talk about a trip there. In the end 9 nights and 11 gigs, carrying hired gear in a Mercedes Sprint and sharing a room with some other band member (possibly in his Klu Klux Klan outfit that he’d been waiting for a special occasion to wear), in the US equivalent of a Travelodge was a step too far for me. Building up my motel tan just didn’t appeal. I had gotten too old I realised, with disappointment tinged with relief.
I did notice via social media that by the time the band went over to the States they had lost not only their keyboard player, but their drummer and bass player too. They were a good band, but careless, obviously. They posted lots of pictures of small groovy Los Angeles clubs but, whether it was just coincidence or not, or they took the snaps just after setting up, none of them had actual audiences in the shot.
I have a favourite sitting-in gig which I do a couple of times a year. This is with a country singer called Bob Morgan. Six foot four inches of Liverpudlian good nature, he is the best country singer I know and a talented multi-instrumentalist as well. All of which he will firmly deny should you suggest it.
My wife often runs dance and country weekends. I go along and help out with them. As far as the dancing is concerned, I’m kind of the special needs assistant. Our favourite venue is The North Euston Hotel in the Lancashire town of Fleetwood. Fleetwood was purpose built to receive Northern travellers who had to decamp from the railway onto the ferry to proceed to Scotland or the Lake District because they hadn’t found a way to extend the railway line through the hills of Cumbria. Virtually the day after it was built, the engineers solved the construction problem and within twenty four hours of opening, Fleetwood was in decline. It’s been that way ever since. Possibly one reason ‘The Cheating Hearts’ are quite popular there.
The Hotel is a masterpiece however. A convex rather than concave crescent, it has the best Victorian ballroom of any hotel I have been in. The first ever manager had been an equerry to the Emperor Napoleon. How you get from ferrying military instructions through the lines during the opening cannonade of the battle of Austerlitz to running a hotel in Fleetwood in the space of one lifetime is beyond me. I mean, even I have trouble with the language barrier in Fleetwood.
On the Sunday of these weekends Bob and I are the ‘act’. In the afternoon we play a country set and in the evening we just play an eclectic collection of country, ballroom, rock and roll and anything else that takes our fancy. We take it in turns and neither of us knows what the other one will play next. In between we have a meal, drink, swap stories and drink some more, (bollocks doesn’t talk itself you know). It’s a bit of a musical highlight for me. For Bob, who works incessantly all over the country its probably just a another perhaps more relaxed gig but I’m always very grateful to him for turning up and doing them.
Bob used to be a civil servant, before becoming a professional musician. One of his staff, Eric, had to do an appraisal of one of the counter staff where Bob worked. He called him into the office.
“You’ll have to do this again; I can’t send this through to head office”
“Why, what’s wrong with it?”
“Well, you just can’t say stuff like that Eric, it’s unprofessional”.
“Look Bob, it’s an honest appraisal, it’s fair, it’s measured, it’s what you asked me to do”.
Well, you’ll have to do it again; I’m not having this sent off with my signature on it”.
“What are you talking about?”
Bob passed the sheet of paper and tapped the bottom of it with a pencil.
“Read that to me”
Eric found the bit Bob had pointed to.
“His relationships with colleagues are very good but with customers he can be a little curt”.
“Sorry?” said Bob
“He can be a little curt” said Eric
“Curt?”
“Yes, he’s a bit curt”
“Give it here” said Bob looking closely at the sheet.
Eric handed it over.
“Your handwriting isn’t that great is it Eric?” Said Bob