I’m basically a band player, a section man. Squeezed into a corner, largely unregarded, filling in that middle and swelling the Hammond organ into the choruses. I sing a few of the set, invariably drowned out by the rest of the guys, (sound checks are for wimps is The Cheating Hearts decided view, despite all evidence to the contrary) and I solo in most of the songs. James, the lead singer and guitar player considers these piano solos as something as a longeur and gets fidgety with nothing to do. I think he refers to them as ‘The little death’. Once, in a pub near Burnley I had taken a solo and was wandering into my usual impenetrable thicket and wondering how to find my way back before the chorus, when I became aware of a Pete Townsend-like howling from James’ new Roland guitar amp. Bored by having to have a piano solo thrust upon him, and there being no magazines with a crossword handy, he was crouched over, experimenting with how much feedback the new amp and his Stratocaster could manage between them. Quite a lot as it turned out.
There is no such thing as a quiet guitarist. Your hearing is partly facilitated by tiny little hairs in your inner ear, the first to go are the ones nearest the outer ear, the ones that pick up the treble, the high frequencies. For musicians this degeneration is compounded by a lifetime sat in front of eye-wateringly loud amps and speakers. For guitarists those amps are part of the sound and they need volume and headroom to achieve it. By about 40 years of age guitarists are uniformly cloth eared and I spend a lot of my time on stage squinting and having decibel induced panic attacks. I have learned there is little point saying anything. They all have the same response. “It’s only on three!”
In about 1993 I was in a pub called The Lord Rodney in Colne playing with an excellent and talented blues band called ‘The Diving Ducks’. The landlord, Oliver, a sweetheart, booked us regularly simply because we played his favourite Steve Earle song and he would get up and join in the backing vocals. The Ducks had a decent reputation in those days and the pubs would be pretty packed when we played. Tony Duck, the eccentric lead guitarist had a lovely old Fender Twin amp. There is no hiding from a Fender Twin, it follows you round the room. The back is open so you can’t sneakily manoeuvre yourself behind it to avoid going cross-eyed and disorientated during solos. It’s just as loud behind as it is in front. We played a couple of long sets and Tony really went for it. He was a great player and could get those singing curves of sustain and barking chords that made it so bluesy. Lovely playing but fuck me, loud or what? He might even have been on four.
Ears ringing, I was coiling up my leads and packing up when I saw the pub cat, a particularly docile tabby, emerge from the back of Tony’s amp. It yawned, stretched and padded contentedly away to the kitchen for a little light supper. It had been curled up asleep in a hundred watt Fender Twin for the entire second set. I was astonished. It must have been the deafest cat in the North West, either that or incredibly keen on Stevie Ray Vaughan.
(Tony was an interesting bloke. He was surrounded by a constant air of serendipity. He would find, or happen across, the oddest of things in his excursions to and from the pubs of Burnley. Distinctive in his leather waistcoat and porkpie hat, he was a familiar sight in his local area, usually carrying something he had found. One afternoon down a back alley of the terraces where he lived in Gannow Wharf he came across a high powered military flame thrower. Just there, on the cobbles, with the webbing, back-pack, everything, just lying there, an actual flame thrower. What bizarre concatenation of implausible events resulted in it being abandoned in a back alley in Burnley I can’t even begin to imagine, I’m not even sure I want to, but there it was, and inevitably it was Tony Duck who found it. Even for Tony this was an unusual find. The only way to get it home, and of course it never occurred to Tony that he shouldn’t take it home, was to wear it, back-pack on, straps in place and nozzle, or whatever the term is, carried lance-like 6 feet in front of him. Walking rather awkwardly back through the streets, he passed his local churchyard and took a short cut. A wedding had just finished and the photographer was busily organising various groups of relatives for the album. Tony became aware of this just as he passed between the photographer and the groom’s close family, best man and bridesmaids. He turned to the camera as he realised what was going on. The bridal party had become a little subdued at the sight of Tony, fully armed like a Desert Rat and one or two of the more alert members were sidling cautiously out of shot. Now, I have never been lucky enough to ever see that wedding album, but I bet it’s a cracker and I would pay good money for the chance to leaf through it for ten minutes or so. I do hope there was a slide show narrated by the father of the bride as well.
Back home Tony, with a level of curiosity that was matched only by his carelessness of personal safety, decided to see if it was fully working, Emptying a petrol can into the back-pack he went out into the back alley and tried the ignition trigger. A thirty foot sheet of flame screamed the length of his street and lit up the South Pendle area like the bombing of Dresden. He incinerated three lines of washing, two window boxes, finished off a rickety back gate and illuminated a thoroughly startled courting couple in a doorway forty yards away. Tony stood appalled for a moment, and then he flung down the flame thrower and fled indoors. Panting, he locked the kitchen back door, shot the bolts and never went back to retrieve the flame thrower).
I digress. So as well as playing in bands, I have also played in various duos, and done the occasional solo gig. They have their downsides, particularly the solo gigs, but the sound is more controlled, the volume is lower, setting up is easier and they pay more money. I quite like duos. Also with backing tracks, the drummer always shows up and never slows down or misses a fill.
(Drummer joke: We had to sack the drummer, he was hopeless, no timing whatsoever. Anyway, he took it badly, got depressed and threw himself behind a train).
In 1988 I started doing a few duos with a nice guy called Wayne Avanson. Good guitarist and a great harmony singer. We got our bookings via a legendary local agent with the film-star like name of Wally Day. I never met Wally Day, we communicated entirely by telephone but he was a typical agent of that period. That is to say, he would carefully appraise which venues were best suited for your particular style and target audience, a club or pub where you would be sure to be well received and then book you into somewhere entirely different. We turned up at a club one night and as I carried the piano to the door I caught sight of a big banner. ‘Irish Night’ it read. Wayne and I looked at each other uneasily. The manager came genially out to greet us. “Hello lads, Black Mountain Band of Donegal?” he said, expectantly, “Where’s the rest of you?” He looked at our blank faces, sighed and shook his head heavenwards. “Fucking Wally!”
Wayne was good fun but mainly the gigs were dismal. Usually the audience couldn’t even work themselves up to hostility, just a kind of passive-aggressive politeness. In fact after the experience of playing with ‘The Escorts’, (the name of the duo) Wayne gave up playing altogether and pursued a career as a film maker. At least he told me he’d given up playing.
We got a lot of last minute bookings, filling in for bands that had cancelled. We were the newcomers after all. One Friday I got a call from Wally. Could we do tomorrow at the Earby Brass Band Club? We could. Obviously someone had dropped out at the last minute. The following night I picked up Wayne in the red Transit I would borrow and we headed for Earby, a tiny Lancashire mill town. Posters in those days, before the ubiquitous Microsoft Publisher, were an A3 sheet of livid fluorescent yellow or pink paper with the text in heavy felt tip. Some people should never be asked to write these. The very same people in fact who invariably are asked to write them. (Shug once worked in a carpet shop and had to spend some time dissuading his colleague from putting up a sign that read ‘Sale Now Over!’)
As we arrived, on the door, we saw the inspired poster that would no doubt have them packing through the doors by 8pm
Tonight
THE ESCORTS
(Due to illness)
I wish I’d kept it.