Forgive this brief encomium but my wife has recently read my blog.
“It’s a bit sweary” she said.
“You mean my use of the authentic demotic?”
“Yes, and it’s also a bit sweary”.
So forgive me if it is, it’s largely the reported speech, or phrases common amongst my peer group and I don’t feel particularly like bowdlerising what people have said. I shall try and be circumspect.
I shall also avoid reintroducing characters each blog. If you’re interested enough you can always trawl back to find out who they are. Shug, for example, my bass player. (I don’t mean ‘my’ in a proprietal or arrogant way, I’m sure in the context of The Cheating Hearts, he refers to me as ‘his’ piano player).
Shug is a talented swearer. He also has the largest vocabulary of anyone I know but it is interspersed with a great deal of perfectly apt swearing, emphatic, scabrous and invariably very amusing. Anyone who, as we stand outside his old farmhouse in Padiham luxuriating in a late evening cigarette, can turn to you and say, “Look at that Nick, crepuscular or fucking what?” Well, you get my point.
So it’s 1972 and I’m standing in my room at Clifton College Nottingham. I’ve trimmed the cut of my flares so I can tack gently in a following breeze to the union bar later and I’m just wondering how to mount my platform shoes unaided without serious injury when there is a knock at the door. I open it to reveal the looming figure of what one could only call a thug. The thug is clearly pissed off that he has been foolish enough to answer a ringing telephone in the union building which has resulted in a quarter of a mile tramp across campus to find me. “Call for you” he says. I am apparently, I find out later, not fulsome enough in my thanks for this act of civility. I suspect I was simply startled it could talk and was eyeing the window nervously as a possible means of escape. He lumbers off into the gloom, giving a resident turning into the entrance way a thorough fright.
The thug was called Brendan, a brooding presence around college with a propensity to violence if called for. And in those days it called him, siren-like, rather more often than might be thought right.
I became uneasily aware over the coming months that Brendan bore a grudge about this incident and to Brendan a grudge is like a Werther's Original, as Yorkshire as he is, there to be savoured, rolled around the tongue and made to last as long as possible. I avoided him whenever was practicable.
A year later I am walking through the union, and from behind a wooden screen comes the sound of great blues piano playing. Captivated, I peer behind the screen. To my great surprise it is Brendan sat at an old upright, ripping out great riffs and figures and it sounds fabulous. I perch next to him on the piano bench. “Budge up” I say, somewhat recklessly under the circumstances. He eyes me suspiciously but carries on playing. After a particularly intricate bluesy figure I say, “Do that again”. He frowns but does so. “Play it again slower” He looks at me with irritation but plays it slowly and deliberately. “Do it again, but, like, really really slowly”. I try copying. After a few attempts he grunts. “Yeah that’s it”.
We have been friends for almost 50 years now.
He taught me how to play basically. Most musicians in the sixties and seventies started young, some basic gear from the local music shop, or the yellow pages and you were off, usually in your mid-teens. Guitar and an amp or an old drum kit, just a microphone if you were a singer and you were on the road to a life of stardom. Well, if not stardom, at least frequent disappointment and humiliation. To some extent the music was the motivation, but largely it was hormones. For the piano player it was less simple. Try getting a Boosey and Hawkes overstrung on the bus for one thing, especially upstairs if you wanted a smoke. There were only two available portable pianos, the Fender Rhodes or the Wurlitzer, and they stretched the very definition of portable. There was a thing called a Hohner Pianet T which was wonderfully light, but they were rare and didn’t have a sustain pedal, which was limiting. My first Wurlie, bought brand new from a music shop in North London cost £350 in 1976. You could buy a terraced house in Blackburn for that if you weren’t too choosy, or as near as dammit. The Rhodes was variable in tone and action, and too mellow, though beautiful. Joe sample of the Crusaders could make it sing, but he wasn’t battling with a crazed Jeff Beck wannabe half a metre away with an old Fender Twin amp, delusions of talent, and at least one cloth ear. The Wurlies had bite, cut through in the mix and had a great tremolo. Anyway, a Rhodes was like carting a leather chesterfield round with you. I did have a rare Rhodes 54 note at one time and I’ve looked around for one since but they are a ridiculous price. A great tone through a Roland Jazz Chorus amp though. Piano players tended to be late developers unless your dad had a car or could afford to buy you a Hammond organ and a Leslie cabinet, in which case he needed a van. We didn't have a car until 1971 and there was no way I was going to get a piano into a Ford Anglia.
The girls went for the strutting guitarist, or the lead singer. Some, possibly the tone deaf ones, went for the drummer. You wouldn’t want to know the ones who went for the bass player.
No one went for the piano player though. Possibly because he was puce and cross-eyed from carrying the damn thing up a couple of flights of stairs. Possibly because he was statically tucked round the corner, wheezing. Or possibly of course, now it occurs to me, it was just me they didn’t go for.
So decades later, Brendan is doing his regular Saturday solo gig in a restaurant/bar in Manchester. He hates it. Situated between the bar and the restaurant area he plays to a crowd of footballers and their entourage and ‘faces’ from Granada Television. No-one has the manners to clap politely, (the bare minimum of the social contract between musician and audience in my opinion, they don’t have to mean it). A figure weaves towards the piano. Brendan cocks the piano players ear to whoever it is hasn’t the manners to wait until the song has finished, expecting him, as they do, to carry on playing, singing, and registering whatever dreadful request they have, usually something obviously inappropriate. (‘Ere mate, know any Kraftwerk?)
The bar is noisy, Brendan is irritable, not perhaps concentrating as he should and the guy leans over and appears to shout
“You play like Les Dawson”.
Like a viper, Brendan is off the piano with a cinematic thump of a discord and has the guy round the throat.
There's a shriek from a nearby girl and the thrum of the bar stops abruptly. The guy with Brendan’s hands round his windpipe looks wild eyed and and terrified.
“I said”, between gasps,”Your left hand is awesome”.