Newton Abbot

I’m on the road, working as an external examiner for a big English university. They have me visiting Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Cochin (India), and the provincial towns of Swindon and Southampton. Tonight’s stop is Newton Abbot, known to me previously only through English folk-rock outfit, Fairport Convention’s 1971 concept album “Babbacombe” Lee, about a young man called John who visited the town in order to join the Navy, and was later convicted of the murder of his aunt, Emma Ann Whitehead Keyes. He was hanged for the crime, but the trapdoor failed three times, so he spent a lifetime in prison, all with a lilting and brooding proggy folk-rock post-Sandy Denny soundtrack.

I am here, however, ahead of conducting a quality review on a validated partner of the Big University, and about to spend my first night ever in a Premier Inn – with Lenny Henry’s Good Night Guarantee (*or my money back). The room seems nice enough. There is a TV. I don’t recall the last time I switched on a TV in a hotel room, although it was probably in March 2008 when I drove through Oklahoma and stopped for the night in Muskogee – totally because of the Merle Haggard song “Okie from Muskogee” – and watched a documentary about the ill-fated Hindenburg and the subsequent collapse of the burgeoning blimp /air ship industry. The window is sealed closed, and bears an irritating notice telling me this “convenience” is provided because air is pumped into my room at all times.

I haven’t eaten since noon, and since I’m on expenses I am especially hungry. I agreed to meet my travelling companions in the Beefeater restaurant attached to the hotel at 7 PM, but find they are not there when I arrive. The half-empty restaurant is allegedly so busy that we cannot be seated for another hour, so I book a table and agree with my colleague, who I meet on the way back to my room, that we’ll meet back there at 8. I spend an hour ignoring a pressing pile of marking, and instead email Americans about prospective upcoming projects.

The Beefeater by 8 PM is practically deserted, but still our sluggish waiter takes ten minutes to ask what we’d like to drink. Following our fiendishly complex request for three pints of lime and soda (one without ice), his colleague returns twenty minutes later with the beverages, hotly pursued by the original waiter attempting to take our meal order. We ask if there is a menu of gluten-free items. Clearly angered, the waiter leaves, returning shortly with a pink plastic folder labelled “Allergies” which he thrusts towards my colleague, who opens it to discover an unbound pile of 50 A4 pages of Excel spreadsheets in a font barely discernible to the human eye. Across each page and 30 columns is listed every item the restaurant sells, with every allergen known to our species. We note with interest that there is no meat, dairy or nuts in the English Breakfast Tea. We spend 15 minutes chatting until our tip-averse server condescends to return. When we ask if he has any recommendations for a customer with Coeliac disease, he hides his exasperation with the grace and charm of Basil Fawlty, helpfully advising that the potatoes are safe, that he can’t be expected to memorise the ingredients of the whole menu, and besides, it is the responsibility of customers to know what they can eat or will possibly die from. Duly informed, we order burgers and a jacket potato, which take a further 40 minutes to arrive. When they finally grace our table the meals are small, overcooked and missing my side salad (a dry and unappetising collection of leaves is soon brought over in response to my reminder).

During the wait for this utterly shit meal I made up quite a few opinions on things, and learned about nothing at all as we attempted to fill the silence created by unfamiliar colleagues and a spouse-chauffeur sitting waiting for food in an over-air conditioned low-budget eatery watching rain descend greyly on a small A-road in Devon. I miss my planned Skype with a co-editor in Arizona by a little over an hour. I return to my room, rearrange the video call for tomorrow, and head down to the bar for a drink and dessert. A glass of cheap Malbec has to suffice, as the kitchen has already closed. I start writing this blog, last orders are called, I head back to bar and ask for a JD and water, adding “since I can’t have any pudding”. Serendipitously then, the chef emerges, declaring “I have one brownie left!” The bar tender, sharing my delight, pours me a triple measure of Tennessee sour mash and my warm cake and ice cream go down a real treat, Mr Daniels in quick, thirst-quenching pursuit.

Cart and horses, Stratford

I receive an email offering me a gig in London’s east end on Saturday night for £70 to play classic rock covers, with the assurance that if I don’t have time to practise, rehearse or learn any of the songs “we can just wing it on the night”. My correspondent underlines that she is only offering me the gig because the regular drummer is unavailable. Such news always comes as a relief, and is the second time in as many days I have been tempted by the allure of filling in because someone else can’t make it. It's a comfort to know that there’s something there when you scrape the barrel – even if it’s usually just me adhering tenaciously to the bottom.

As Saturday rolls around I am delighted to discover that am afflicted by many of the symptoms of an influenza virus, replete with chesty cough, which are massively exaggerated after I’ve loaded the car, necessarily exerting the maximum possible physical effort in order to produce the minimum achievable noise negotiating narrow doorways, creaky stairs, the safety gate on the landing and all manner of obstacles in the hallway so as not to disturb our dozing daughter. Amazingly, she remains asleep as I wheeze, sweat and splutter my way several times to the car.

Owing to some issues with my mobile phone (smashed screen, wrong story told to insurance people, sim card incompatible with wife’s emergency backup handset, still two months remaining on contract till due an upgrade), I am left to locate the gig venue following directions and a map. This is intoxicating, and takes me back to the days prior to my unquestioning adoption of Satellite Navigation via my iPhone. I am off-grid! And it’s fun again to see the context for my journey, to have to attempt reading road names in the dark, to think I am lost so pull into a side street to discover the turn I need is actually the next right. With no one robotically “recalculating” for me, displaying graphics of my car in a field, or telling me to “turn around when possible”, I feel – despite debilitating symptoms of manflu– like I am at least to some extent master of my own destiny. I feel my way around the one-way system like in the old days, and pull up deftly outside the door to the venue.

I’ve been scared about the gig, if I’m honest – “east end” always suggests to me the Cray Twins, Guy Ritchie films and the certainty of cruel, bloody violence. So I am relieved to find the bouncers are a cheery, fresh-faced pair and that the pub exudes an easy, upbeat vibe. People move politely out of my path as I carry drums in, and apologise if they find themselves in the way. There is a mad Romanian man waiting outside, who accosts me en route to the car, exuberant about the possibility of live music and delirious that he’s talking with the drummer. The bouncers tell me that “he’s not the full ticket”, so they have to keep him outside. It’s with an uncomfortable mixture of sadness and joy that later from the drum-stool I half-watch this delighted gent as he bounces, waves, jiggles and grins at the window, loving every song and each guitar solo. He must be freezing.

The Cart and Horses is purportedly the birthplace of Iron Maiden (so says to the pub’s website). I wonder if this is merely local lore, probably apocryphal, or something one denies in public for fear of reprisals and only the NWOBHM anoraks care about so keep silently to themselves. I need not fear, however, since the pub’s proprietors apparently have no shame about it. Beneath the exterior banner bearing the name of the venue is a permanent sign declaring “birthplace of Iron Maiden”, and the wall-space inside is covered with Dozens of Iron Maiden posters. The edge of the stage bears a banner reminding us again that this really is the birthplace of Iron Maiden, and there is a beer on draught called “Trooper”, the tap featuring artwork from the band’s song of that name. At the back of the stage is a huge board used (from 11 pm) to cover the pool table – also adorned with Iron Maiden artwork – and across the room from the stage are individual photos of members of Iron Maiden. I panic momentarily, in light of the absence from my band’s set list of any songs by the godfathers of heavy metal. But then it strikes me that playing Iron Maiden songs here might be a bit like carving an instruction manual on Mount Sinai, or drafting a contract for world domination and protracted ideological conflict in Yalta – we’d come across as sad, derivative and maybe a bit desperate.

The stage is tiny, but the band fits nicely (Iron Maiden must have been mostly draped around it!). My Echo Custom Drums look stunning, as always, and the sound of that snare drum again makes me beam. I feel very little anxiety, since I am meant to be winging it, we are billed anyway as “a new band”, and the audience all appear in good spirits. Plus Terri and Jan are both tremendous musicians. Drumming with Terri on bass is like accompanying a thunderstorm, and Jan can really play guitar. Being in a three-piece demands that we each fill the space, and we do so with gusto. We sound-check with “Pride and Joy” by Steve Ray Vaughan, giving me a chance to air my Texas shuffle – I haven’t played one in a good few years, and never on this snare drum, and man this feels fantastic! The groove is like butter (I think!). The momentum is effortless and driving, the band is cruising at 30,000 feet, and there is blues-rock alchemy in our fingertips and our feet. There are approving smiles from expectant punters too. The flu symptoms disappear for a while without trace, leaving just the momentous groove.

Primed, and appetites whetted, the audience lies low for most of the first set, but 100 Stratford revellers are on their feet and dancing by the time we hit “You Really Got Me” and “Sharp Dressed Man” (although the whole way through this song, I know I am no Steve Moore) the party was kicking! There is meek acceptance as we abruptly close the first set, then utter delight as we shortly career into the second with (I feel certain, sure-fire-failures) “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (G n’ R version) and “Wish You Were Here”. The crowd goes wild! With the set-closing combination punch of “Whiskey in the Jar”, “Smoke on the Water” (which I haven’t played since I was 14 – 24 years ago!!!), “Born to be Wild”, “Purple Haze” (not since I was 13), “Foxy Lady” (only ever air drums, mostly when watching Wayne’s World) and “Free Bird”, the room is ecstatic. Part of me can’t believe people are so easily pleased, but it does feel nice. During the fag-break before the last set it transpires that the leaping, energetic Italian girl near the bar hails from the same town in Tuscany as our bassist. I am briefly the fourth wheel in a three-way dispute about the typical traits of Turkish girls in the covered smoking area, before we return for the third set where we capture the level of audience euphoria achieved in the second – so maybe next time we’ll switch those sets around: I can really think of no better way to finish a gig at 3 AM on a Sunday in the butt-kicking-est of homage-to-rawk venues than with the epic shred-fest that is the immortal Skynyrd anthem to end all classic rock archetypes. *

* Although the Eruptörs’ “Leaving (on the wings of an eagle)” makes a close, albeit sincerely and massively ripped off, second.

Day Trip to Malaysia

In the middle of a five-week run of pantomime during the run-up to Christmas, my plan is to do the following:

  • Fly to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 22nd December on behalf of my university employer, to attend a 90-minute exam board meeting on the afternoon of 23rd.

  • Fly back to London on 23rd and be home for breakfast on Christmas Eve, do the washing up, and wrap Christmas presents.

  • Drive to Essex in time to play drums for two performances of Peter Pan in the afternoon and evening of 24th.

  • In the meantime, dep out my panto obligations on 22nd and 23rd to a colleague, and have her go on ‘stand-by’ for the following three days, in case my flight back from Malaysia is delayed.

My mum tells me this is mad and unworkable. I think it’s brilliant and flawless. I plan to do tons of work on the 12-hour outward plane journey, and while in KL I want to make use of the hotel’s excellent gym. I have a Skype call lined up for the evening from my departure gate, with a colleague in Canada for whom it will be 13 hours prior. At 11.59 pm the night before the trip, I receive news that a revised article of mine has been accepted by a major journal in my field. This excellent news sends me to bed happy, and excited to finish the cosmetic adjustments necessary to prepare the paper for publication. I bring my news to my sleeping wife, who diplomatically mutters something that means I should have waited ‘til morning to tell her.

I arise at 6.05 am, go out for a nice 4-mile run in the mild December morning, and am back in time to complete a few sets of push-ups and crunches before the baby wakes up. I get some breakfast, and pack quickly (with, I suspect but only later discover, an insufficient number of socks). My wife and daughter drop me at the tube station, and a train takes a Christmassy 15 minutes to arrive. On the tube I go to write down the address of my hotel, so I can show it to a cab driver in KL. In the same email as the hotel address is my flight itinerary. I feel my face and whole upper body flush with panic as it registers that my 12.25 flight departs not at that time, but at 10.50 (I had noted not the flight’s departure time, but its duration). If I remain on this train I will arrive at Heathrow airport shortly after the plane is due to take off. I stand up and wait with mounting anxiety as the driver announces we are being held at a red signal. Five minutes later, the train creaks into motion, pauses again, and eventually rolls at stoner speed into Arnos Grove station. I sprint up the road to find a taxi office, miss, and sprint back again, this time finding one. Wheezing, I order a cab, am advised it will arrive in one minute, and wait a long, desperate six minutes for it to come. It is 9.30, and the gate for my flight will be closing in an hour. The cab stinks of cigarette smoke, and the driver seems unusually slavish to the speed limits, especially considering the obvious desperation in my voice and manner. I tell him we need to stop to get cash, which irks him. I try to check in using my phone, but online check-in isn’t an option and none of the advertised phone numbers for the airline seems to work.

We stop for cash at a petrol station, and the ATM there refuses both of my cards. The driver, now deeply suspicious, pulls off our route so I can use another cash machine, that turns out not to be there. We continue to drive in the opposite direction from the airport terminal, and I spot a branch of Barclays Bank. We pull over, and I wait behind a short, white-haired man who is staring minutely at the screen, collecting receipts. Five minutes passes, and my first card is accepted this time without hesitation. I give the driver much more money than he asks for, and he redirects us once more towards Heathrow Terminal 4.

The taxi pulls up hard outside the terminal building, and I leg it inside. The Malaysian Airlines counters are free of queues, and the guy behind the desk tells me to relax. I have 34 minutes until take-off. I have only carry-on bags, so I run to the security queue and prepare – belt off, laptop out, pockets empty, liquids bagged – only to find three groups of people in front of me who apparently can’t read, or who think the instructions about jackets, pockets and electronic devices are only meant for others. I wait ten minutes behind these seven people, whose bags are also held up in the scanner because they’ve left water bottles and shampoo in there. It’s now 10.35, and my gate is closing. Head bent, I charge to the gate and the last eight people boarding the flight. Sweaty, wheezing again, and incredulous, I board the plane and head for the loo to freshen up. The flight is fantastic – I finish revisions to my article, draft a blog piece (not this one), watch The Dark Knight Rises, and sleep for 90 minutes. The Malaysian Airlines economy breakfast is sensational – delicious spicy prawn curry with rice and an omelette. The coffee is appalling.

Arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, I am amazed to be here and not home instead in a massive deep sulk, pissed off and to blame for missing my flight and the exam board meeting, and trying to think up excuses to tell the university why they spent £3000 on not flying me to Malaysia and to explain to my wife why I’m paying someone to cover a show from which I could easily be earning some money. I try to withdraw cash, and am intrigued to note that my debit card doesn’t work. My credit card works fine, so I head for the train, to find the ticket machines don’t accept the cash I withdrew. The credit card triumphs again. My taxi from KL Sentral train station gets me to the Renaissance hotel just before 9.30. Checking in, my debit card again fails. (In an intriguing twist in the tale, I will learn the following evening that while I was mid-air over central Asia, someone in Asda in north London successfully defrauded me of £653.01 using a clone of my credit card.)

In my room I change into gym clothes and briefly imagine what the inviting king-size bed would be like to lie in. Having been boxed up for 12 hours on the plane I am gagging for a run. I first throw myself at the free weights – I’ve been excited for weeks about the dumbbells here. I then hit the treadmill hard, making a fast 5-K, and go back to the weights. Feeling pumped, tired, hungry and drunk, I head out to the pool – which is actually the main reason I agreed to this trip. The cooling water feels amazing. I slowly swim a length, and stand up at the far end and just take it all in – I am in Malaysia, alone in a big hotel pool, there’s a guy preparing drinks at the swim-up bar, it’s 31 degrees and sunny, and I feel good. I relax for maybe 60 seconds, and swim a few more lengths. By the lifts, there is incense burning in the corridor, advertising a special massage spa treatment, which I fleetingly consider as an entry on the University’s expenses claim form.

I iron shirt and trousers, sink two bottles of water from the minibar, shovel down a bar of chocolate, take a gorgeous hot shower, check for wallet, laptop and phone, and head to the lobby past the fake gingerbread house and epic five-star Christmas tree. Despite the taxi driver not believing that the college I am visiting actually exists, I help him find it, and we roll up four minutes early. After a brief friendly chat with a colleague, I am shown to a warm, stuffy work room, where I turn up the air con to “so cold it’s guaranteed to keep you awake” and help myself to a mocha-flavoured muffin-kinda-cake and a horrendous Necsafé three-in-one instant “coffee” with sugar and milk. I take in submitted work, make notes, and attend the exam board meeting (during which I drop off to sleep just seconds before having to make my pronouncements as External Examiner to the entire room and to those who hire me and are Skyping in from Birmingham). Too tired even to try to gauge how badly I mask my somnambulant state, I nonetheless overhear myself making superciliously sincere pronouncements about “quality” and “standards”.

After the meeting I read a handful emails, mark them as unread, and make small talk with a secretary before being whisked off to dinner in a steak house dating back to the 20s. Despite the weighty postcolonial guilt that this place inspires, the meal is lovely, and the coffee the best I have yet to drink anywhere east of Germany. I make it to the hotel and the train and pass out, waking up just in time to dive on to the platform at the airport before the train doors close. The Skype call with Canada happens, and I dash to a toy shop to buy the contents of my daughter’s Christmas stocking for tomorrow. On the plane I watch Man of Steel, enjoy a better-than-average curry, drink one can of Tiger beer and two glasses of wine, and fall into deep, seated slumber. I awake next to breakfast being served (4.30 am UK time), and after three more flying hours, one 90-minute tube ride, a 4-mile run, breakfast with the family, and an hour’s drive later, I am pulling up outside the theatre ready to help Peter Pan to defeat Captain Hook all over again…

Rehearsal Space

The dedication of a musician to his or her life pursuit is likely determinable as much as by any other measure as it is by his or her tolerance for spending time in affordable rehearsal studios. More than ten years since the instigation of the UK ban on smoking in the workplace, I still miss walking into a hot, windowless room in Acton’s Survival Studios after five men have been chain-smoking and spilling beer in there for six sweaty hours or more. My nostalgia for those heady, carcinogenic evening rehearsals late every Monday and Tuesday in my twenties meets with some comfort in the new and emerging ways that London’s (and, doubtless, every other UK city’s) rehearsal rooms have come to embrace and embody the furtive musical existence of the originals band

Sweet Tooth has acquired keys to a free rehearsal space in central London. Of all the dingy, dank and claustrophobia-inducing places I have rehearsed with a band, this has the distinction, every time I set up to rehearse, of impressing upon more any than other location, that the end of it all could well feature in the briefest of tragedy pieces in the Metro about a bunch of stupid indie musicians burning to death dramatically but discreetly in an inevitable fire in a hidden underground room. I expect either this, or at any moment for the police or gangsters to burst in and arrest, shoot, or torture us. The place is probably illegal – it was kitted out by a friend of the singer, who works for the Council. To reach it, one descends the stairs outside of a prestigious concert venue, where waiters from the restaurant put out the recycling. Miraculously, I can normally park with a few feet of these stairs, whence I carry as much stuff as possible, painfully stretching tendons and muscles up and down my arms and back, in part because carrying tons of stuff makes me feel strong and manly, and mostly out of laziness, inasmuch as I hate to return to the car for one damned bag that I couldn’t be arsed to mange on the first trip. Just beyond the foot of the stairs there’s a door that opens about 45 degrees, adding tremendously to the fun of stumbling under eight heavy bags. That door is followed by a dip in the tiled floor generously filled with a puddle, which each week claims one of my shoes. On the left, then, is a door, dramatically marked “Electricity: Danger of Death”. This opens a full 90 degrees, revealing a doorway 4 ½ feet high (I tore my scalp on this one evening when wearing a baseball cap, despite having ably navigated the aperture on dozens of prior occasions). Steep stairs lead to a short corridor, past a couple of generators, and to two more doors concealing the small, dark, navy-carpeted room with a six foot six ceiling and a miniature, hardworking dehumidifier, functional back line for a band (PA, bass amp, drums, stacks of cases, mic stands) and a vacuum cleaner. There is one crude strip light, that we habitually switch off after unpacking, collectively in favour of the dark yellow mood lighting that shrouds the dusty, thick air, making silhouettes of the rest of the band so I can see only shapes, and find out later that the bassist was mouthing to me “quietly” or “stop playing now”.

The band rehearses late, arriving after 8, and finding our groove around 9.30 or 10.00 pm. I set my gear up at the far end of the room, sitting against the back wall. It takes a while to de-bag and ergonomically situate my headphone amp, iPad, sample module, sticks bag, shakers, tambourine and set list out of range of flailing sticks. Unhampered by the oppressive light and the musty, stale aroma, Hugh the bassist times his arrival to fit in with me getting the set list in place, headphones on, and sticks into eager hands. From time to time the lighting cuts out abruptly with a bang, and the singer rushes, mobile phone flashlight aloft, to replace a fuse in a mouldy corner. Our basement accommodation is air conditioned, as much as might be expected of a homemade concealed space beneath a major London thoroughfare. From time to time, however, the air con fails, and we schedule our breaks according how long it takes for the first of us to succumb to the spores and we all lunge for the succession of doors, gasping in lungfuls of the glorious fresh night air of subterranean Bloomsbury.

I quite like the subversive feeling of banging the crap out of a drum kit in a fantastic-sounding band in a secret rehearsal space underneath _______ Street. There’s something naughty about it, like hiding behind the garden shed at my parents', or shagging in the practice rooms at the Royal Welsh College - it’s just a tiny bit dangerous. Despite my classical music training, or, more likely, because of it, I also enjoy or imagine a feeling of rebelliousness against the high culture of chamber ensemble performance adoration and toffs pompously dining just a few feet away, and the juxtaposition of that audience with the band’s middle openly class aspirations to creatively autonomous, safely chic and quasi-bohemian lifestyles in which we connect cool people with luscious pop music music in venues not smug enough for a string quartet, but sufficiently legitimate to make into The Guardian Culture section or the Royal Festival Hall.

I’ve usually loaded back into the car by shortly after 12, and there is traffic on the way home. One of the things about London that continues to impress, anger and disappoint me in equal measure, is the inevitability of the midnight traffic jam. The only time of day I’ve consistently found endearingly little traffic in the capital is at 4.00 o’clock in the morning – the golden hour – when once upon a time I would drive epically home from Mike’s (south of the river) after sleeping off a night of movies and marijuana and music.

Staying with Jen

Jen is a year younger than my wife, which makes her two or three years younger than me. She is very pretty, extremely fit, an ex-gymnast and cheerleader, has a highly-paid job as an advertising executive, lives in downtown Manhattan, recently dated both a millionaire with a private jet, and a member of the Yankees baseball team, and is very, very confident. She wears make-up, probably votes Republican, and has virtually nothing in common with me or my philosophies, beliefs, hobbies, or taste in music, literature, art or film. Jen is also tremendously friendly, and possesses, amongst other things, an innate ability and willingness to make conversation with anyone, a memory for details from the briefest of chats several years ago, a deep, unquestioning love for my wife, and a hospitable streak as wide as her ass is most certainly not. I find her highly intimidating, and she’s putting me up for three days while I give invited-slash-hustled talks at NYU and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Entering the New York subway system from JFK with groundless certainty of my route to Jen’s apartment, I do not even check a city map. Knowing that Jen lives on Worth Street, I get off at a station that has an Avenue in the name, and begin the two-minute walk to Jen’s apartment building with my backpack, briefcase, and bodhrán. After ten minutes of walking briskly what feels like south (the street numbers are getting lower), I concede to consult a handy map at an intersection and realise with inevitable and familiar annoyance that, while I am on a north-south avenue, I am about thirty-five blocks north of Jen’s. Feeling all-of-a-sudden sweaty, heavy-laden and stupid, I remove my jacket, and pick up my pace, halting grudgingly at every damned intersection for a month while the lights change, and switching hands every few minutes when the home-mended handle of the drum case digs into my palms.

I arrive at Jen’s building much later than anticipated, but relieved that I got here at all. I clock the door guy, and panic about tipping, recalling the $100 bills in my pocket, and something horrific Jen said once about her massive obligatory Christmas donation to this large gent. He seems courteous enough, and believes my story about why I’m here. Jen hasn’t told him I’m coming, so he can’t find the key she told me she’d leave with him, and of she’s not answering either of her cell phones. My resolve waning, and anxiety rising, he gets the measure of me instantly. Pitying me, he concedes to let me wait in the lobby until Jen either arrives glamorously in a cab or powerfully sends word. We eventually hear from Jen, and he is suddenly able to locate the apartment key she clearly has left for me after all. I negotiate the elevator rather well, frankly, see myself in to Jen’s tiny, immaculate flat, and sit at her polished breakfast bar to begin work on the paper I’m giving the following afternoon at Columbia. Jen gets in a after a couple of hours of me putting pictures into a PowerPoint, and we head out to dinner at an Italian place nearby where we’re shown to a small table by a chirpy waitress who brings crisp, white wine. Jen is warm and enthusiastic; I am nervous and surely pathetic.

Jen and I hardly know one another, but we’re both kind of intrigued, I think – what, after all, does my wife (her best friend) see in me? I feel we sort of owe it to my wife to become more familiar (plus, I’d like to know Jen better – she seems lovely!), but with Jen’s career success being symptomatic of her expert gregariousness, and my dubious credentials being indicative of my considerable social retardation, we are not equals. We ask about one another’s families, and she suspects that I smoke weed. We discuss her sister’s pregnancy, and I compliment her on her clothes. She keeps the conversation flowing like a pro, and dupes me into drinking 3/4 of the bottle of wine. We head back to her place, one of us merry, and she dons her pyjamas. I put mine on too. I don’t, as a rule, wear PJs, but figure it could taint our developing relationship if I were to sit self-consciously under a blanket, butt naked, on her pristine couch for the rest of the evening. Plus, her curtains don’t close, which could also get awkward. A friend of Jen’s has loaned her Hitchcock’s Rear Window on DVD, so as neither of us has seen this we watch a lot of it before falling asleep and conceding we should hit the hay.

Next morning, I arise from the sofa and go for a run across Brooklyn Bridge and back. I decide that running into the sunrise over Manhattan across that iconic landmark is a fantastic way to set me up for a day’s work. Jen gets back from her epic and gruelling cross-training work-out while I’m drying off on the couch, animating the slides for my talk in lieu of adding content. She chats to me for a couple of minutes, showers, hurries to her bedroom wrapped in a towel, emerges five minutes later fully clothed, and sits with the bedroom door open to ice her feet (her arches have fallen) and apply makeup. On third morning we observe this same routine, she says it’s getting like Groundhog Day. Since Jen’s fridge contains just three bottles of mineral water, two bottles of prosecco and nothing else, I forage daily for breakfast at a local deli and buy far too many carbs. I love New York.

 

A Good Week So Far

I park above the band's rehearsal space, feeling unusually fantastic. Generally by the time I pull up outside the dank, cramped room beneath Euston Road I am ready to pass out after a(nother) restless night, a full day teaching, and the emancipatory drive from the burbs to the centre of London. Last time the band met to practise, I fell asleep in the car for 45 minutes the second I’d turned off the engine. Tonight, though, I am buoyed by the week’s work – I have been preparing for tonight’s session and the upcoming album launch gig that we have in two weeks’ time, with renewed enthusiasm. I brought extra bags, even after consolidating. I cheerfully make two heavily-laden trips down the stairs to the stinky, humid chamber, a spring in my step. It’s been a marvellous week so far, and I’m encouraged by the fact it’s Thursday so there’s precious little time left for the positive trend to alter significantly before the weekend. As I left the house almost an hour earlier, it seemed that the baby might be about to demonstrate her commitment to a new vomiting bug – her second in as many week – so I am glad to be underground for a few hours with no mobile phone reception; not that I don’t want to be able to help, and to mop up a good deal more vom today, but to rehearse with no distractions like this is a luxury I loathe to contrive, so separation being forced on me is welcome. I put my phone on Airplane (Apple means “aeroplane”) Mode, so that I cannot receive a distressed SMS about our ailing child and then have to face the mutual frustration and anguish of not being able to reply to a message that my wife has seen I've received.

I take half an hour to set up – there’s a lot to plug in, especially for a luddite tub thumper who has so doggedly and deliberately pursued a career playing a gloriously cumbersome but feedback-free and bug-averse acoustic instrument. But I am chatty and excited, although confused by the passive DI box not also directly outputting (kind of the only reason I brought it with me) the sounds of my trigger pads. I am also enlivened by my new noise-cancelling headphones. My previous set of cans, that I have used for three-and-half years, always made me hot, sticky, and generally feel pretty oppressed. They squeezed my head, pushing my glasses painfully against my ears and skull, and giving me headaches. I really have no idea why I sought no alternatives in the whole time I had them before they broke. The new set – Metrophones Studio Kans – feel like someone is cuddling my head and playing sweet music (albeit an abrasive cowbell click track) into my caressed, contented ears. They more generously accommodate my shell-likes, and have gel padding that works beautifully to preclude the need for the vice-like pressure of the old phones. I am completely ready to play darkly assertive electro swing pop noir.

The rehearsal is probably our best to date. I drum well, and the effect is clear on the others, who are all grins. At the last rehearsal I managed to fuck up a song we’d played thirty times in succession for a video recording two days before, and the bassist rightly got pretty annoyed. Tonight, though, I am on a roll – musical, dynamic, effortlessly in time with the click, and loving the process. In the zone! Hugh thinks this is all on account of the new headphones, which I let him try on because I am evangelising about them. A few cool things have happened this week, though.

On Tuesday I wrote the proposal for a research project that’s been brewing for a year, and then turned the proposal into a blog article that I submitted to a colleague’s semi-cool website about music and academia. I finished another blog post, about ups and downs of life in London. I finished the review of the Mr Big gig from the previous Friday at Koko, and sent that to the editor of the drum magazine who commissioned it. I conducted a handful of interviews for a book chapter I’m writing. On Wednesday I sorted out the complications around maybe popping to Malaysia in the middle of the panto run at Christmas and meeting simultaneous contractual obligations in two other cities. I obtained consent from the band members and producer on the panto to conduct some ethnographic research during the production. I finished a bunch of admin for the Moodle at my college, and planned a day's teaching. I went running. I worked out. I put new laces in my shoes. I did the washing up, two piles of laundry, and took the week’s mugs and wine glasses out of my office. I caught up with correspondence for a book I’m co-editing with a colleague. I received (and promptly tweeted about) the news that another book I’ve been planning for ten months was accepted by the publisher. I finally got around to testing, trouble-shooting and re-booting the live setup I use with Sweet Tooth. I bought new cables, DI boxes, and a mixer. I tested, recorded, emailed and discussed different drum and sample sounds vaguely imitating Native American Indian instruments. I bought a djembe stand. I purchased ear defenders for my daughter, an analogue synth, and a ticket to the London Drum Show.

Today was positive too – I taught research seminars half the day, and was on top of my admin by mid-afternoon. I got a “very good” (one down from “outstanding”) overall in my annual performance appraisal, which is decent enough since I am probably misconstrued in my place of work and trying desperately to leave there anyway. All this, plus the bottle of 2012 Pillastro I opened last night to help calm me down was especially robust and fruity. Can it only be downhill from here?

 

Repairing My Glasses


I need to get my glasses fixed. They’re six years old, and it’s been four years since I sat on them, bending one of the arms horribly out of shape (then sort of nearly back again), and a month since I ham-fistedly glued the four-ply horn frames together in two places with Araldite epoxy resin. They’re already coming apart again, and I have attempted twice on consecutive evenings this week to mend them after the weakened arm separated during rehearsals for international Guitar Idol finals on Thursday. My first repair survived a second day of rehearsal, but then caved at the prospect of a 90-minute midnight video conference session with master’s students in Boston. The subsequent repair, less confident than the first, lasted through a family photo-shoot but then crumpled ahead of a tube journey into central London, leaving me to wear my nondescript boring replacement pair that make my nose hurt and my eyes feel strange.

I really rather love my exclusive buffalo horn glasses. They have come in a way to define my look. I’d never really thought, until very recently, that I had a “look”, and although I probably don’t have one now either, these glasses have meant more to me than any essential accessory since I went through a mandatory trilby phase for about eighteen months in my early twenties to (fail to) disguise a disastrous attempt at growing my hair. The glasses tie together my professional personas, I feel, providing a sort of GDS brand unification (a notion, be assured, that definitely feels like utter tosh). They suit the self-deprecating comedy blogger well, and round off the scholar nicely too – they go especially well with the beige Ferrand corduroy jacket with elbow patches and hot pink lining that Atar Shafighian made me buy in the late summer of 2011, in time for the College Music Society conference in Richmond, Virginia where the temperature was 20 degrees higher that I’d expected and on which trip I discovered I’d forgotten to bring any shirts (that was also the visit where I found the best hot sauce I’ve ever eaten - it was green, and in bottles in a Mexican restaurant on my way back to the motel along Highway 29. I brought some back for Atar, who was immensely grateful, but have never found it since, except for on a website that doesn’t ship to the UK). And when I play drums I like to think that the glasses imply such an air of literary and academic gravitas, combined with inevitable stilted and groove-less un-musicality, that audiences are pleasantly surprised when I drum with a heady cocktail drawn from: loudly, appropriately, rocking, too-fast, and kicking-more-ass-than-they-might-have-expected.

I have spent three of the past 24 hours browsing the website of luxury opticians Cutler and Gross for possible replacement spectacles, and, following the expert counsel of my wife, decide to visit the store this afternoon and ask about repairs. Liz’s advice is a sensible response to my discovery that the glasses I own retail at £1,095, without lenses. That I was sold mine for just a fraction of that, by a former driving student who worked for this Knightsbridge purveyor of eyewear to the stars, is humbling and motivating. It is with some trepidation that I take the glasses to Cutler and Gross for termination or transformative surgery.

The girl serving customers eyes me distrustfully, as though, in drum t-shirt and Converse, weighed down with a snare drum, cymbals, double bass drum pedal, sticks, and an oversize ‘90s headphone amplifier, I can mean only trouble. She fails to disguise the condescension in her voice as she asks to see my frames, and equally to mask the disappointment on her face when she finds that I am indeed a bona fide pre-existing customer with some tasty boutique glasses, her attention, and, now, the upper hand. She says she has to go and get someone, and darts from the store at a run. She returns three minutes later, alone (I was expecting bouncers or perhaps an ophthalmologist), and promptly serves another customer (somewhat rounder, and clearly more handsomely-paid than I), who has just arrived in the store. As the fatter man leaves with two pairs of new glasses, another staff member arrives with some lunch and I notice in her face a resemblance to Minaz, who sold me my specs six years previously. I ask if they’re related, and she affirms that they’re sisters. Suddenly we’re the best of friends, and joking about her sibling’s driving. She deftly beguiles me into giving piano lessons to her six-year-old daughter, even after I have said that I can’t and I won’t, and between us we accidentally convince my previous interlocutor (now completing the relevant documentation) that my name is Gareth Southgate. As she changes my details to the correct ones (a Gareth, resident in Southgate), she softens, laughs, and asks her colleague to confirm the cost of repairing my frames. My new BFF Sharezah says not to worry about the price, as I’ll receive the friends-and-family rate. Naturally, I do not ask what this means, instead assuming it’s fantastic, and immediately planning to buy a further unnecessary and expensive pair of super-chic spare glasses for, well, no real reason at all. I sadden at the news that my glasses will take four weeks to be fixed, but lighten my step when a third staff member hastens to open the door for me as I lift the box containing my bass drums pedals to do the same. I leave feeling weird, and hungry for chocolate or cakes. 

The Guy Next Door

The people next door, despite definitely never having been called Sidney and Betty, tell everyone these are their names. It’s charming to think of a Cypriot couple in their late 70s having aliases or noms de plumes, but a bit weird, like the hotel staff in Beijing whose name badges falsely claim they’re called “Tom” or “Alexandra”. I like “Sidney”, although I hear he’s unwell (from Sue, two doors down). He seems better of late, though, as he’s been doing the odd spot of gardening and has taken to putting the bins out for us, because (I think) he would rather I did it on a Sunday evening than early on a Monday morning; but I like to see if I can beat the bin men to the punch. We sometimes exchange “hellos”, and Sidney seems harmless in the way that I assume all old men to be. I strongly suspect he and Betty threw away, rather than ate, the apple pie I made them upon my return from Colorado, since they did not return the tin for a fortnight (it was way too good to last more than a couple of days, and they have nothing better to do with their retirement apart from eating and being neighbourly), and when they did finally condescend to give it back they placed in it an Asda madeira cake – a clear indication of their disdain for and distrust of my baking. Because of this I suspect the couple of being ex-spies, turned by the British in the mid-‘70s and housed out of harm’s way in this quiet suburb of Enfield. Much as I try to like my neighbours, I deeply fear them, crafting them personas somewhere between Rosemary and Fred West, and the ill-fated Irina and Ricki Tarr from Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy.

Thus it is that when, on a barely sunny Monday afternoon in August as I am walking my daughter around our garden in her running buggy (we call it her chariot) and collecting rotting apples to tidy the garden ahead of the barbecue we may be hosting at the weekend, Sidney comes ambling through our back gate brandishing a three-foot wood saw and a half-smile, I imagine taking him down like Jason Bourne, saving my daughter, and all possible legal, physical, logistical ramifications for my family, whilst I greet him with a calm, frozen stare that betrays my paranoia. I stand rigid and mute as Sidney totters towards us, she utterly unfazed by the saw or the Cypriot. He says he is bothered by the tree near our kitchen, and offers to cut it down. Because I do not want, like a scene from Kill Bill, to start and lose a fight with an ex-Soviet spy wielding wood tools only feet from my infant child, I say that this is fine, and attempt deliriously to engage him in conversation as he bemoans the absence of the landlord and the rate of turnover of tenants in our home. I say we’d buy the place if we could, while he deftly reduces the eight-foot tree to a stump and I help him put the branches beside his garage, at his decidedly strange request. Escaping our ordeal unscathed, I walk my daughter inside for some pasta, bravely lock the doors, and take a moment to enjoy the unimpeded view from the kitchen.

Congestion Charging London

I return from a conference in Colorado feeling jolly impressed – I still have my shaver, passport, wallet, keys and laptop, and I know where my front door key is after almost two weeks on the road! There’s a week before wife and child are due back in the country, so after a good night’s sleep I mow the lawn, plan to clean the oven (it takes me another four weeks to follow up), and – upon spotting the out-of-date disc on the car – set out to pay my road tax. Which is when things start to unravel.

I recall there being an issue last year with the car’s Registered Keeper (me) being on file as living at our old address. I was puzzled at the time by the DVLA’s confusion. I told them I’d moved, and they sent me a new driving license showing the new address. Because they are called the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, I unconsciously assume that someone (or even a computer) will notice the growing body of evidence (I am the keeper of my car, I have moved, the DVLA knows and acknowledges this, they have sent me a license bearing my new address, to my new address) and register my car ownership at the place where I obviously live. Of course, this hasn’t happened, so I pop round to our old flat to see if there’s any post. I sort of know there will be, because I definitely have still to change my subscription to a hip-hop magazine, and haven’t been round to check in well over a year. Actually, last time I went to check for post I let myself in to the lobby because I still had a key and no one was in when I rang the bell. There are no magazines (humph), but there is the document from the DVLA that I require to purchase the road tax. There is also a note from Equita Bailiffs, calmly stating that I owe them £512 to meet a Distress Warrant for their Client, Congestion Charging London. The note says that they visited the property while I was in the US to collect goods to the value of £512, as I had not replied to their previous requests to give them the money; unsuccessful in this attempt, they will be calling again soon.

I very nearly soil myself, but am overcome with anger, again fear, disappointment, a wave of excitement, some mischief, utter disbelief, then the dawning realisation that I have utterly fucked up. Sifting through the mail – and checking my mirrors for bailiffs, imagining myself executing a wicked J-turn like Jason Bourne would (obviously not have to) do if they suddenly were to jump out from behind a wall – there is quite an evidence trail. There are several letters from Congestion Charging London (FUCK! I didn’t notify them that I moved house either! Balls, crap and arse!) referring to a parking fine that I apparently incurred on 16th February on John Street, Islington. I was there for three minutes, and the company has plenty of photographic evidence to support this claim. The original Penalty Charge Notice is nowhere to be seen, but it is nonetheless clear I have committed a parking infringement that should have cost me £60, for the not-paying of which I now owe nearly 10 times that sum. I am now very glad my wife is out of the country.

I see a handy phone number for Phil, the Bailiff, which I ring. He does not answer, so I leave a voicemail message asking him to email me. On a separate piece of correspondence is the number for the Traffic Enforcement Centre in Northampton, whom I also call. A lady there tells me that all I have to do is fill in a form (which she kindly emails me), send it back to them, and they will then contact Congestion Charging London to say I never received the penalty charge notice, thereby giving CCL the option of asking the Bailiffs to stop terrorizing the new occupants of my former rented accommodation for money that I probably shouldn’t owe. I fill in the form, and notice that it needs to be signed by a Commissioner for Oaths at a Country Court before it can be returned. Trying to find contact details for, or the precise location of, a Commissioner for Oaths puts my research chops to their fullest test in a while. The county court naturally only takes calls between 9.30 and 11.30 am, and 1.30 and 3.30 pm, Mondays to Fridays. It also, apparently, does require anyone to actually pick up the phone when it rings. After a couple of hours on hold and listening to busy tones, I give up. I head for the bailiffs’ website, thinking it might be easier just to pay the damned bill and move on. The website loads none of its pages, a problem which recurs for the whole of the following day.

A couple of weeks later, following twelve packed days of teaching, supervision, assessing, writing, and furiously organising a conference at my institution, I receive an email from the guy who now lives in our old flat, saying the bailiffs have been round again, and they’re growing all the more keen to take their good-to-the-value (still, thankfully, £512). Very kindly, the chap did not give out my new address, instead emailing me a photo of the notification from the bailiff. I call bailiff Dave, and again there is no answer, so I leave a message offering to pay the debt in full – wife and daughter are home now, and I’m worried that the bailiffs will turn up at the house when Liz is home with our daughter, take my drums, the TV, or god-knows-what, and leave me with too much explaining to do. With another meeting to go at work, I leave this for yet another day.

I have a window the next morning, and call Congestion Charging London. Their hold music is the most obnoxious I’ve heard. It’s distorted and loud, comprised of two arppeggiated major chords alternating and making me want white noise or for someone to stab me. After half an hour being passed from pillar to post (with, believe or not, actual humans), my fate is confirmed – I cannot pay the fine to CCL, as they have now given the debt to the bailiffs, so I can only pay Equita. I visit Equita’s website again, the pages do work, and I become really irritated by the similarity in the site’s appearance to commercials for laxatives – too much of a floating leaves kind of vibe. I can, honestly, imagine no graphics that would not massively piss me off at this point in my hectic day when I should be in a student meeting, but this seems like it’s mocking me. I spend about ten minutes on hold before realising my credit card is at home. I have my debit card, but that stopped working yesterday because I sat on it and cracked the chip. I hang up.

Upon reflection, cycling home, I realise what a bunch of total wankers the people at Congestion Charging London must be. Why did they not contact me another way? Had I known they wanted me to pay a penalty charge, I would have paid it, and in good time! Surely when I did not reply by post, and before they resorted to sending the bailiffs in, they might first have Googled me? When I last checked I occupied the first three pages of search results for “gareth dylan smith”. The top hit is my website, which contains no fewer that six contact forms, all synced to my personal email account, my MacBook, iPad and phone. I am on Twitter. On LinkedIn and Facebook I list the places I work, yet they did not contact me at the Institute or through Boston University. How is it possible that CCL would choose not to email me? Why the bullying? Why the exponential increase in the fine? Why harass the new tenants of a place where I clearly no longer am resident? The answer is, of course, money – there is little to be made from trying to help.

That evening I have a rehearsal on Wigmore Street. It goes great, despite our starting an hour late because, having parked, I immediately fell asleep in the car. As we leave there’s a guy settling down to sleep in the doorway of the Wigmore Hall, and Gav, our guitarist, in a simple act of humanity, stops to chat. It turns out that the guy had a good job, lost it, and in a very short time lost his home, his daughter died, he spent a month sleeping on her grave, was moved on by the authorities, suffered considerable physical abuse, had all his possessions stolen, and now finds himself grateful for the warm, dry spot in central London to rest his head. I dash to the comfort of my car, feeling empty, sad and spoilt. This man’s sad downfall, whatever precipitated it, could so easily be my own. It isn’t. Perhaps it will be. Feeling vulnerable, weak and ashamed, I ache for this man, and accelerate hard down the street wrestling selfishness and guilt. Entitlement evaporated, I resolve to pay the bailiffs in the morning. It’s an irritation, and I can ill afford the cost. But I messed up. I have a credit card, a steady job, and my stock is rising in academia. I need to stop being a twat. Pay the bill, call Congestion Charging London, and change my address. I am not above this. Be grateful for the privilege that I have to sleep under a roof in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. I may not share as abundantly as some in the billions that keep us atop the global HDI, but I can do better than to whinge like a brattish child over a pathetic middle class problem of my own creation. Maybe the money Congestion Charging London earns from me will help keep the streets safer for people like the guy who gave me some bloody perspective.

The night I trespassed on John Street, Islington, I paused in the car, engine running (as though this would save me) while I called the bandleader of the London Gay Symphonic Winds for whom I was drumming that night at a benefit concert raising money for elderly members of Islington’s LGBT community. I ended up owing more money in parking fines trying to find the back entrance to Finsbury Library than the concert – worthwhile as it was – raised for the charity. But that’s hardly the point. I feel mistreated and annoyed, but more just like a total idiot. The guy in the doorway put me right in my place. He has no fight left, and I have everything I need to be happy. I’ll just be grateful tonight.

Welcoming Back the Ladies

With wife and toddler daughter due home tomorrow after a trip to New York to see the in-laws, I’m a little bit worried about living with my family again. I’ve been a free agent – travelling alone, sleeping alone and, occasionally, drinking alone for the last three-and-a-half weeks. I’ve travelled to the US, Brazil, and the US again, and been to conferences, rehearsals, gigs, parties, and even made an apple pie for the neighbours. I have been productive (finished the revisions for a journal article I’d been putting off for months), and right until just before I go to bed this evening I feel kind of annoyed about spending my last evening alone clearing up behind myself in the house. I feel jolly proud of myself, though, when I bake banana bread (my best one yet) and another apple pie (this one’s for the family). I even put away the laundry and empty the bins! The house looks misleadingly (albeit in some places genuinely) both clean and tidy. Wish I’d made time not only to remove but also to replace the sheets on our bed. Finally, I clean (the most visibly dirty parts of) the bathroom. My dad would be proud.

I am nervous I’ve forgotten how to be a dad, and that Esme won’t remember me from the fun we had before she left. It’ll be very nice to have my ladies back, but I worry about arguments as we negotiate work and schedules to accommodate three complementary and conflicting personalities and agendas. If only I’d managed just one day more of writing before they got back, but I chose, against my better judgement, to spend much of the past week applying for another tenure-track position at a prestigious US institution that is, more than likely, way out of my league.

I have the fruit snacks for Esme, and a bottle of water and cereal bar for Liz. I have 23 £1-coins for parking. In heavy traffic en route to London Heathrow I finally become more excited than anxious, a shift I anticipated but which nonetheless comes as a relief. When my family emerges from Customs in to the Arrivals Hall, I bound instinctively to greet them and relieve Liz of their luggage. Esme is nonchalant, playing it cool. She dozes a bit in the car, but after I feed her blueberries at home we soon bond over a game where she sits facing me on my lap, placing in her mouth and then mine one wooden jigsaw piece after another. I never really understood this sort of thing before hanging out with my daughter (I believed having kids would be tiresome or boring until they were about 15 years old), but she and I both experience total delight in the silly, fun moment we share. The joy and wonderment on her face are priceless.

Liz has to go to work, so Esme and I practise walking up and sitting (and re-sitting, and re-sitting) down the stairs, and then chase one another around the dining room while she clutches her new cycle helmet. We then play a game where I put on my bike helmet to try to show her that it’s okay to look like a tool if you subscribe to the notion that if the rest of my unprotected physical self should be mashed and severed in a road traffic accident, then we’ll be grateful that my mind escaped, forever to endure the crippling depression that is sure to follow this previously-ambitious drummer and writer to his grave (we discuss all this only briefly, though). Mostly I wear my helmet, she ask for hers, she takes hers off, she puts it on again. There is a minor complication when she finds the pink helmet doesn’t fit me, so we switch to experimenting with a ski hat.

After a hearty lunch of celery and more blueberries (her) and a tuna-and-mayo-with-Sriracha-chili-sauce sandwich (me), she looks tired, so I put on the Daft Punk album from 2013 that everyone hates the single from about staying up all night to get laid. Esme droops, and as the first track fades she sinks deeply into my arms. I have a new favourite thing. Better than drumming or writing or wine or driving or running or summer or coffee, I like to cuddle my daughter. I choke up holding her there and as I tiptoe out of the room at the 120 bpm of the last song, then hold her a while by her cot. I give her a gentle squeeze and kiss her twice on the cheek. She gives so much, with such innocence, trust, and complete, unconditional love. I lower her into bed with the soft toys, and cover her little arms with a blanket. She starts snoring – a cute snuffle like her mum’s, the kind that makes me love the both of them more and more. I choke up again.

A Night in Miami

I am on my way to Porto Alegre, Brazil, and stop off in Miami en route. The layover is 17 hours, and I could have stayed with my friend Radio (that’s his actual name), but he and his wife very recently became parents again and their place is way out from the airport so I would have spent a fortune on cabs there and back. Valiantly forgoing rudeness, expense, and being woken by the baby, I opt for the Airport Marriott. Having failed on the plane to write more than just under half of two of the five papers I am scheduled to present over the first three days of next week, I decide to finish one of the slide shows before hitting the hay. Since I am starving (I use the term somewhat loosely), I pop down to the restaurant, which is, conveniently, also the bar.

When on holiday (another term I use with artistic license, since I am on company time and have a shit-ton of urgent work to complete), I adopt the unlikely belief that I do my best work after beer, wine or a substantial measure of whisky. At home I know that I work well only after tea, coffee or water. Nonetheless, I ask the barman to recommend a beer, which he does. The drink hits the spot, and I down most of it before the excellent buffalo wings salad arrives replete with chunks of bleu cheese. (I still don’t know why Americans spell “blue” in French when referring to cheese. It seems like a distinctly arbitrary choice – why not also use le francais when describing the colo(u)r of, for instance, jeans, the sky, or one’s eyes?) I depart from the salad plate and pint glass with a lighter head, accompanied by an unexpected (that holiday influence again) yet convincing sense of exhaustion, and head for the lift. I pride myself on deflecting the bartender’s suggestion of a second beer.

I lie down on the bed in all my clothes with my glasses next to me, counting on some other rules that only apply in hotels, namely 1) that I will not in my sleep roll on to my spectacles, 2) that I do not need an alarm to wake up in time for the plane, and 3) that I will only nap for a few minutes, wake up, and immediately continue working for a good few hours. Knowing that there is precedent for the first two assumptions, I subconsciously ignore the third, and wake every two hours with the air con, lights and my shoes on before forcing myself off of the unruffled bed at 6.05 am feeling disorientated, confused, and grateful for the coffee machine. Caffeinated, I dig for, find and don gym clothes.

The Marriott’s fitness room is a trek down a corridor, across a dark courtyard (it isn’t dawn yet) alongside the pool, into the adjacent hotel, and through a series of doors to where the treadmills and ellipticals (weird) await. I pound out four strong, fast miles, lift some dumbells, do sit-ups and press-ups, take care to grimace manfully when other gym-goers look my way, and head back to my room to finish off the complementary coffee. En route, in the bustling lobby, I am suddenly self-conscious of the sweat-drenched USF t-shirt I am sporting. Part of the problem is that the University of South Florida is definitely in central Florida, whereas Miami is obviously south and I don’t own a U of M top. Safely back in the room, I do the tiniest amount of work on a PowerPoint about music teacher identities, before bravely selecting my University of Southern California t-shirt for the flights. At the terminal I buy an oversize Mediterranean Wrap just in time to eat it messily and stinkily on the plane. As we taxi for takeoff, I become crushingly self-conscious about the aroma of olives and feta cheese that emanates from my lap.

Visiting Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre, Brazil is the host city for the 2014 world conference of the International Society for Music Education. Uncharacteristically lax in my preparations, I allowed colleagues to arrange most of the trip, and agreed to it all without fully paying attention. Things at work were so crazy that anything beyond the immediate future seemed fascinating but unimaginably surreal.

I find myself on a plane to Miami, making an apparently urgent phone call to distant cousin who, tracking me on Facebook, got wind of my Colorado expedition and asks if he can have a jacket modeled by one of his favourite HBO stars delivered to my hotel in Fort Collins. Baffled, I agree, and spend the flight negotiating vigorously between my laptop’s battery life, the ridiculously over-reclined seat of the guy in front, and the pressing need to come up with five coherent presentations in under 48 hours (how the hell were they ALL accepted by the conference committee?! This never happens, and isn’t even allowed).

The overnight Miami layover is humid and brief, but features an excellent salad. After a run and some weights to take the sting out of the impending 16 hours on a plane, I pack wringing-wet gym clothes into an Asda carrier bag, bury them deep in my suitcase, and board the flight to Porto Alegre. Although the gate information monitors says we’re flying to Curitiba, my boarding pass works, so I keep quiet. The plane then indeed pauses in Curitiba, where the passengers “de-plane” (since when did we cease merely to disembark?!), visit the restrooms (a far-fetched euphemism that bemuses me time and again) and re-board for Porto Alegre.

The Brazilian authorities allow me through Passport Control without troubling themselves over the two vital immigration documents I painstakingly completed midair, and I am jostled into a taxi manned by an aspiring (or maybe retired) getaway driver. At close to 100 mph, with tyres screeching and pedestrians scattering we hurtle towards the city centre, the driver’s broken Portuguese distorted by the voice box that he holds to his laryngectomized throat. Outside Rua General Andrade Neves 90 at 11.30 pm I over-pay the cabbie, then my Floridian colleague Clint greets me in his pyjamas in the Air B ‘n’ B apartment he found online. I hand him $350 in cash for my room, and he gives me the tour. There is no heating, no cold water (although we do have warm), and no towels. The dimly lit bathroom is muddy and hairy. On the upside, my plug adaptor for the laptop works, and Clint successfully did a load of laundry that afternoon. From his balcony you can see most of the city and can access every other room in the apartment. None of the doors have locks. We have blankets, though, so in the absence of roommate Joe I assign myself the bed furthest from the window and curl up. It’s winter in Porto Alegre, and cold.

Buying Custom Drums

It is time to buy another snare drum. I have a small collection, but there is one drum missing. Something happened to me when I played a Ludwig Supraphonic 402 a few years ago. On that occasion I walked away, but that drum what did what no other drum I’d played had done – it answered back...

I met the EcHo Custom Drums team of Dave Sr. and Dave Jr. while selling my book from an Ashgate Publishing stand at the UK National Drum Fair in 2013. The EcHo stand was opposite mine, and we got talking. Dave Sr. kindly bought a copy of my book, and I spent most of the day staring lustfully at the gorgeous brass drum kit they had on display. This kit and the snares they had on show seemed to have personality – unlike most of the drums I saw that day which seemed, well, just a bit ordinary. When I began talking with EcHo Custom Drums about us establishing a mutual endorsement, I told them my ideal snare drum was probably the Ludwig Supraphonic 402. Dave Sr. said EcHo could produce something even better. I was sufficiently impressed to arrange a visit to the workshop in Cheshire for a couple of weeks hence.

The drive to the EcHo workshop in Stalybridge puts me in a great mood. The M1 is uninspiring, but gives me – as is its wont – a chance to learn some songs for an upcoming recording. Google Maps’ polite lady navigator asks me to take the A616 and then the A628 cross-country. The sun is just at the roof-line of the car, casting a misty effect over the stunning scenery of the Peak District National Park as the road undulates beneath me, the majesty of the drive heightened by the soundtrack of Slowly Rolling Camera. When Dave Sr. greets me at the door to the EcHo workshop in an old mill building I am pleasantly surprised to discover I will be his sole customer this afternoon. He makes me tea, shows me around, and we chat over dinner and a pint in a local pub about drums, education, family and life in general. Certainly I feel like a valued customer. And then the fun begins.

I try the full range of beautifully engineered custom snare drums in the workshop. I work my way unhurriedly through brass, stainless steel, copper and aluminium, all in a range of depths and thicknesses. Aluminium sounds the best to me. It’s not that the drums fashioned from other metals sound bad – far from it: they are all very finely crafted musical instruments. But the aluminium drums produce a wonderful decay, and the ideal combination of overtones. It’s as though the middle frequencies are turned down, with plenty of punchy bottom and top (I picture the EQ curve to which I always return when setting up a stereo in my house or car). And the thinner the shell, the better – the bigger the dynamic range, the freer the sound seems to be. The aluminium snare drum with a 1mm-thick shell and a depth of 5.5 inches is the one. It packs a punch (to say the least); it rasps it simmers; it has power and subtlety; it cuts like a knife and keeps tugging at the leash. Playing this drum, I now sound (to me!) a lot like John Bonham. So I play bunch of Zeppelin grooves – The Crunge, Moby Dick, Good Time Bad Times, Since I’ve Been Loving you. Two aspects of this drum captivate me: the sounds it makes when I strike it (at any velocity) – crisp and confident at all loudnesses – and its sheer dynamic range. Jimmy Page, in the film It Might Get Loud, talks about dynamics as a “whisper to the thunder”. This drum does that all right.

The Ludwig Supraphonic 402 I’d played a while back was thrilling to play. On that occasion, however, I opted for a 14x6.5-inch brass Tama Starphonics snare drum. In doing so I became the driver of a Bentley – a drum that is smooth, beautiful, sophisticated, and consistent across speeds and dynamics. Sometimes, though, it’s too conservative, lacking in passion. This new custom snare drum from EcHo is vivacious and expressive. It demands more of me, and it gives back at least as good as it gets. It is the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 I’ve always dreamt of throwing around the contours of an alt. rock gig with Stephen Wheel or a psycho-ceilidh gig with Neck. I can’t wait to do both.

It is delightful to select the finishing touches for my bespoke new snare drum, with Dave acting as Head Waiter and Sommelier. The default snare throw-off on an EcHo custom snare drum is the classy Trick model, available in black or brushed chrome. I decide I want everything on the drum to be silver, from the aluminium shell to the triple-flanged stainless steel hoops. The model I try out has cool EcHo custom lugs with a slightly oversized hexagonal nut in the centre. These lugs are brass, so Dave orders chromed lugs specially to fit my design. The vent-hole-surround (brass on the test model) is also available in silver. Dave responds with courtesy and patience to my every question about cosmetic alterations affecting the sound of the instrument, and to queries based in my massive naiveté regarding all aspects of drum manufacture.

The spun bearing edge of the shell is at 45 degrees, and I choose to keep this feature since the drum sounds so wonderfully open and responsive in part because of this. My drum will have none of the Greek-style patterning that is engraved around the shell of the test-drive model; I will keep just the protective lacquer on top of the sensuous brushed aluminium. The two “beads” around the drum have to stay; these two slight bulges add strength to the cylinder – essential for an instrument that has its future in pounding rock and roll! My first choice of batter head for years has been the Remo Coated Ambassador – it’s versatile, punchy, warm-ish, and works great with brushes. However, the drum I am trying out uses a coated Evans EC Reverse Dot Evans head, and it sounds so good that I instantly switch allegiance. The drum comes with a 20-strand snare as standard, and I see no reason to change this. The crowning glory of the drum will be the engraving; including the EcHo Custom Drums logo is only fair, and I ask for my name in the same font.

Before leaving, I have a quick bash on a drum kit that’s set up in the studio – the Apollo 1, with 3mm shells – and find it less than thrilling. So I arrange to come back in a fortnight to try out the Apollo 2 kit, with 2m shells. I intended to drive back to London today having designed a snare drum with an outrageous colour scheme to wow audiences. Instead, I come away looking forward to a drum understated in appearance, and barking mad under the bonnet

I return to Stalybridge two weeks later, and am, I confess, a little dubious, having been away from the mill for a fortnight and thinking about wooden drums rather a lot in the meantime (drums are, after all, meant to made of wood, aren’t they?! Especially drum kits). Since my previous visit to Cheshire I have visited another custom drum manufacturer, worried that I’d been seduced by the Romanticism of the scenic drive, and that sleep deprivation had induced a kind of aluminium delirium of which I would be sure to purge myself upon seeing and smelling quality craftsmanship in wood. Contrary to my expectations, the vintage mahogany-and-die-cast-hoops left me cold; maple, though, was sonorous and enticing, while bubinga looked gorgeous and sounded thoroughly promising. I decided that I would politely play these aluminium drums for twenty minutes or so out of gratitude and respect for Dave’s hard work on my snare, then beat a hasty retreat to London, call the guy I’d been speaking with in the Channel Islands, and order a proper drum kit made of wood. I even started to doubt my prior convictions about the custom snare drum.

When I arrive at the mill my stunning custom drum occupies pride of place in the EcHo workshop. I’ve never normally been one to get excited about the look of a drum – they all appear broadly the same (round, more or less shiny, seething with noisy potential). This looks like a Formula 1 car, and oozes pure class. The Apollo 2 kit that I’ve come to play has another snare drum set up with it already, but I need to hear the kit in the context of my new acquisition. I swap them over, and play. What a sound! It is electrifying! So good, so full, so dynamic! My new snare drum is ALIVE!

When I play the Apollo 2 kit – 10x7”, 12x8”, 14x12”, 22x18 – I am genuinely excited, and grinning. Playing this kit is addictive. Half an hour slips into an hour, turning quickly to 90 minutes. The Apollo 1 left me wanting, but not this kit. The drums are calling to me, singing loud and clear. The batter heads are Evans 360s – the same as were on the maple kit I’d found pretty enticing a week earlier in Sussex – but the sonority here I prefer, with the “EQ” similar to that of my new snare drum. I’ve heard talk that aluminium drums are loud – maybe too loud – and while these drums are loud when I hit them hard, they are sweet and quiet when I play them gently. Like the snare drum, the kit has a responsive, enhanced dynamic range in comparison with my Premier drums and the various DW and Mapex kits I play at the college where I teach. These EcHo drums produce wonderful, alluring tones all the way from pianissimo to fortissimo. I re-tune all the toms to try and catch them out, plagued by my conviction that I shouldn’t like the sound of a metal drum kit. But I love it. My only worry is what colour to choose, as I am unconvinced by the red of the kit I’m playing. I think for a split second, and realize the only way to go is to finish the whole kit in the brushed aluminium of the snare drum. I leave, grinning like a child.

I had been concerned about the drive home – three-and-a-half hours on the M1 got really boring last time, and I had to pull over for a nap. Not this time. I am buzzing! The sound of those 2mm EcHo drums has me thrilled. Soon I will own a set of the best-sounding drums I’ve ever had the privilege to play. And, to boot, they will look cooler than cool. I use the return journey to London for rehearsal of the songs I’m recording later in the month with Stephen Wheel.

Do I Fancy Another Trip to Brazil?

I received an email from a colleague inviting me to send him an idea for an abstract for potential inclusion on a panel next summer in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The email was sent to a few people, and inclusion on the panel would be on a first-come, first-served basis. I ignored the email for a couple of days because I was feeling tired and massively under-confident. Couldn’t the guy just ask me to join the panel?! Apparently not. I know I don’t deserve to be selected – it’s a small panel, and a growing field, and many better-known and better-connected people are doing way cooler stuff far better than I am. I should probably feel more flattered that he asked me at all – he’s at Oxbridge, after all, and I’m part-time at small private institution in a former Job Centre off of Kilburn High Road. I decide to reply, because according to a talk I gave three weeks ago at a big American university and then put immediately up on YouTube, this is the area of scholarship I care about the most. Plus I do know all and like most of the people the email went out to.

But I’m already going to Brazil this summer, albeit with a bunch of people from the other side of my scholarly life (I am even agnostic about what field I’m in, which is crazy since neither one I’m pitching for really exists at all yet). Getting to Brazil is a massive pain in the arse – it’s horrendously expensive and time-consuming, and trying to fund my travel is causing friction between about a dozen people in two organizations in two countries. And I’m knackered! At the moment I really want just to watch a film on TV, and drink most of a bottle of wine. But there is no future in that, so I Do The Right Thing, stay up a bit later, and write a response:

Hi ____ and all,

 Thank you for thinking of me. I’d love to be involved, but regret that I must decline on similar Grounds to ____. 

I am attending the ISME world conference this July in Brazil, and have found it rather awkward (not to mention costly) to fund - at present I have an outbound flight to Porto Alegre, and one back home as far as Rio, but nothing all the way to Blighty. I am rather hoping that the two institutions (threatening to be) funding me value having me in the UK sufficiently to find the cash to get me back across the Atlantic. 

I’ll be sorry to miss this - there is something very appealing about consecutive summer conferences in Brazil. 

Best,

Gareth. 

But as I am about to hit ‘send’ I realize that this could be a tremendous opportunity – what if I do get the job I’m being interviewed for tomorrow, instead of the one I really want that I was invited to apply for but that’s in a field where this resaearch and conference would seem utterly superfluous? I gather some strength and alertness out of nowhere, and craft a motivated-and-excited-and-sort-of-confident-fresh-young-scholar email as well:

Hi ____ and all,

Thank you for thinking of me. I am not 100% certain I will be in Brazil next summer. However, I have very nearly scraped together the funds to be there this summer for the ISME conference, so I’ll throw my hat optimistically into the ring. Plus the ISME conference isn’t going to Sao Paulo...

This panel would be of great interest to me and of huge relevance to my current work. I will present data from a study I am carrying out this Christmas, about perceptions of consistency in time and timing when playing an identical musical theatre production to click track multiple (54) times over 30 days. I presented a lecture on this nascent project by invitation last month at Case Western Reserve University, and it was well received, so hopefully this could be of interest to the proposed panel. 

All best, and thank you again, ____, for thinking of me. 

Best,

Gareth. 

I leave both emails open on my desktop for about twenty minutes, pour a glass of wine (even thought it’s nearly 2.00 AM and I have get up before 6.00 so I can beat the waking of the baby and get to the café near the office to get a couple of hours’ writing done before I need to teach). I decide out of a vain hope to raise my spirits to send the second one, and go to bed. In the morning I find that, because I was too depressed to reply at all for 48 hours, a respected colleague has beaten me to the draw. But I’m on the bench in case he decides he doesn’t want to visit Sao Paulo for a week to (drink a lot and) attend a conference about popular music. As if.

 

Haircut

I want a haircut. This is to say that I have been in desperate need of one for a while, but today I find I have mostly important and very dull things to do, so with wife and daughter both a bit under the weather and my enthusiasm for doing the laundry all used up, procrastination is necessary. There really is nothing like a haircut to use up valuable time when you’ve got marking to do – there’s the strong likelihood of a queue (I don’t go to places where you can book ahead), and the walk there and back to begin with.  And the great thing about a haircut is that I always look better for having had one, so it’s completely justifiable.

I don’t know if the barber’s is open today (it’s Easter Saturday), so I’ve brought my laptop as a contingency – I’ll pop in to a café or the pub and work if there’s no cutting today.  I get to the shop and find a guy I don’t recognize hanging listlessly by the door, and as I head inside he follows. He grunts, and gestures towards a vacant chair. I thank him, and sit. The sight of my hair in the mirror is harrowing. It needs an intervention. He spots this too, and possible clocks my look of mortification, which I cunningly disguise as mild scorn begging pity. He politely asks what I want. I resist the urge to say “a haircut” (whew), and tell him I liked the way it looked two weeks ago; I didn’t actually like it all that much, but my experience is that barbers without fail remove more than you ask them to, so I expect a month’s hard cultivation to be undone.

I wish haircuts were more straightforward, but find I am lost in a maze of psychology and peril. The fact is that, whatever power I might think I have in this relationship, I am sat in a chair in front of a guy brandishing razors. And I have never fully dealt with the fact that a friend from my hometown (another Gareth, a year younger than me) had his flowing locks reduced to stubble in one fell swoop of misunderstanding. There is an underlying ethnic tension (in my head at least, which is, right now, where it matters) because everyone else in here is Greek Cypriot and I am white British with a posh accent (I always sound fraudulent if I try to disguise this). There is also the difficult moment every time I visit a barber, when they offer me a wash. I don’t want my hair washed, for three reasons – 1) it costs more (too much!), 2) this is something I Can definitely do myself, and will feel the need to anyway after being shorn with public clippers), and 3) after a haircut there are always bits of loose hair lying around on my head which I’ll need to wash out, so obviously I don’t want it washed twice (although I have never quite articulated or understood why that should seem like such a dreadful thing to do – did I hear it would fall out?). He can see my hair needs a wash, and he has just called me out on this. I say I’ll do it when I go home and take a shower; this then unhelpfully implies that I either a) haven’t washed yet today, or b) think this place is unclean. The fact that both a and b are accurate makes nothing better.

So I face the facts – I look ridiculous, I am dirty and rude, I only narrowly avoided a massively sarcastic and alienating retort upon arrival, and everyone here speaks to one another in Greek, really loudly. When the guy asks me how I am, I say far too much (too quietly, having to repeat myself), over-compensating very obviously – and now he’s wondering what for. I can’t give him my inner monologue, because he’s holding scissors, and neither can I say I’m not over-compensating, because I am, he knows this, and he’s holding scissors.  He comments on the short bits of hair on my crown, and the barber next to us pipes up – he’s cut my hair here three times already. I confess (again) that I can’t help twiddling my hair there when I’m anxious or writing (which is all the time). The two barbers and another customer talk in Greek about me and laugh, and I feel about 8 years old. Then he deliberately (it can’t be accidental, can it?) cuts one side of my hair shorter than the other. I wonder if just it’s me, so I tilt my head, and then freeze as I catch his eye in the mirror – does he think I’ve noticed, or that I'm a total moron, or both? This is so intense. What if he really did cut it lopsided by accident? Either way I can’t mention it, can I? He dries it and asks what I think. I say it’s fine, enjoying vicariously the power trip he is savouring over me (god, this uncomfortable and weird), but somewhere I find the courage to ask if he wouldn’t mind thinning it out. I had already asked this about twenty minutes ago when I sat down, and I interject late because barbers always seem to leave this to a different point in the haircut, just to test, I ‘m sure, whether or not I have the balls to remind them. The stress is becoming unbearable. My haircut is, fortunately, OK. If it wasn’t, the guy would have won the ultimate victory – southern Europe over the North, working class over middle, sword (well, scissors) over pen (laptop). Then he asks me for £10. It was bloody £9 last time!! Damn it! Unquestioning, I give him the money, then he ups and leaves! He basically runs down the high street and in to the distance. Does he even work there?! Does he just go and hang by random shop doorways, fooling customers in to thinking he works places, and then giving them uneven haircuts, estimates and lattes?

I head to the Heritage Café, a broken man. I am defeated and shorn and in need of some coffee. The café to is run by a nice man who looks a bit like my dad did twenty years ago, and the music is quiet so I can work.

Losing It

I was excited to be having a rehearsal with a band called Sweet Tooth. I had heard the band’s music over a year ago, met Gavin, the evil genius behind the multi-arts music project that we all hoped the band would become, and we’d all met up once at the apartment of Fleur, the singer. Her flat was on about the 19th floor of a Victorian townhouse in a terrace in Kensington; Fleur had made and served us lemon drizzle cake and tea – this was the sort of band I wanted to be in: one that rehearses in upmarket London suburbs and has fresh homemade cakes as a rider. Also, Fleur’s crystal-clear, dessert-wine voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Anyway, after sinking a few beers with Gavin last spring, and this successful living room audition with a snare drum eight months later, we were getting together in a bigger space to make louder noises, and we were doing it with a bassist. I had helped recruit Hugh to the band, and was quite proud of myself because Hugh is very good indeed. He’s solid, grooving, highly capable, and interested in just about all music that sounds and feels good. Hugh and I were the power behind (or underneath) the panto we had just finished in Chelmsford.

Sweet Tooth always sounded fantastic on record, and getting together in a room to make loud sounds worked out pretty well too. There was no cake, but there was a free space in a kind of bunker underneath the Wigmore Hall. To access the rehearsal space, one had to head down the steps to the WH restaurant. At the foot of the stairs one carried on past the restaurant, along an exposed passage, through a locked doorway, and then through another locked doorway on the left. Once inside another short passageway, a further door greeted us, leading to the small, rectangular room that was a fully-equipped rehearsal space for a band. It had no toilets, refreshments, or plumbing of any sort. It did, though, have a dehumidifier, and a climate that rendered this equipment essential. There was a crude hole in the wall, letting in the fragrant Bloomsbury air. Something (quite a lot, actually) about this space made me feel as though we shouldn’t be using it. For instance, all the gear in there (amps, PA, drum kit, mic stands etc.) belonged to another band, and we were rocking out beneath the hallowed Wigmore Hall, a venue famous for chamber recitals and quiet, tasteful classical music. Me beating the crap out of a drum kit to pop songs with bass and guitar pumping out over me in such close proximity to one of the holiest sites of Western Art Music made me nervous. I’d felt sure we’d be found out and told to leave, even though we’d got keys from an architect mate of the band who worked for the City of Westminster whose other friends used the place several times a week. It would be like all those times at music college that I’d been moved on from one practice room or rehearsal space to another, and asked to play my drums somewhere else or a lot more quietly.

We set up, got the band sounding at least a bit like the recordings we hoped to emulate, and worked on a handful of songs. It was nearly midnight when we finished, which felt nice – we must have been working hard, as we’d been in there since 8 pm. Gavin had kindly driven me to the rehearsal, and he equally kindly drove me back to his house where I’d left my car. I loaded it, and drove home. As I approached the house in the car, I had the strong and unwelcome feeling that I had left a key in the lock of the house, on the inside. With most locking systems, this would mean that the door could not be locked from the outside – a handy caution against absent-minded types leaving, for instance, a key inserted on the inside of the door. We were not so fortunate, though, and had a locking system that allowed a person to 1) leave a key in the lock, 2) close and lock the door (done by lifting the handle ‘til it clicked), and 3) no longer be able to open the door from the side on which there was no key inserted in the lock. I unloaded the car, piled up my cases by the door, and, with the merest whiff of optimism, tried the lock. Nothing. O goody.

It was 1.30 in the morning, and it seemed unlikely that Liz would respond well to being woken by a phone call from a stupid, tired man withering on our shared doorstep. But I called her anyway. The phone rang and rang. Hoping against hope that this was because she was ‘simply’ asleep and had not left the phone downstairs, I tried again. Same result. Becoming more confident that I not only could, but possibly actually should, wake my wife (even understanding that this almost certainly meant also waking the baby since we all shared a bed at present), I tried the landline. Again nothing. I tried the cell phone once more, mentally rehearsing humble apologies (and hoping these wouldn’t sound too pathetic or indignant). The temperature outside the car when I’d left it just down the road had been -2 degrees Celsius, which is very cold for an Englishman, especially one without a coat. It was 1.30 am and I needed to be up again at 5.30 for work (I could push it to 6.00). Discretion being the better part of valour (and cowardice being the easier part of persistence), I retired with my cases and thin hoody to the car, turned the engine on for a couple of minutes to warm up a little, and laid down on the back seat to sleep.

As I laid there awake, thinking about how the privacy glass would hopefully protect me from prowling lunatics looking for sleeping husbands to stab on back seats in quiet closes in silent suburbs, I remembered that Liz had a thing about me sleeping in the car – she hated it. I think she feared I would be attacked, which was possibly why I was thinking about it now. I don’t think I was genuinely worried, but thinking about how worried I maybe should be was having much the same effect as being for-real worried. Liz had even let me sleep in her bed in her apartment once, before we moved in together, after a big argument the outcome of which had been that I should go home without delay. When I said that I could not immediately go home as I was a little drunk so would need to sleep in the car, she immediately U-turned and let me stay. But waking the baby at 2 in the morning? I should stay in the car. Fleetingly it seemed ironic that my wife who was so opposed to me doing what I was, against my will, doing less than 100 yards form her, was unwilling or unable to pick up her phone. But there wasn’t really any irony. I was a victim of my own stupidity. I was so tired. And felt very sorry for myself.

I felt certain I’d fall asleep soon, but each time I nearly nodded off I noticed that my feet were increasingly cold. The car was also not quite wide enough to lie down in (I had, owing to Liz’s paranoia or mine – I couldn’t tell) opted not to sleep, reclined, on the front seat, and so was squashed in the back, semi-stretched, between the two back doors. I had taken the headrest from one of the passenger backseats and was using it as a pillow (very clever, I thought, feeling exactly like I was surviving in the wild, despite the fact I was just a middle class fool asleep on the street of a north London suburb). But it was too big, too small, had all the wrong angles, and was a massive hindrance to my attempts at peaceful slumber. Then my arms were cold, then my legs, back and whole upper body. I thought that if I could just nod off, then I would at least lose consciousness before freezing to death. The melodrama unfolding in my imagination was alarming and kept me awake, but I was, I reassured myself, very tired. After two hours of not dropping off at all and just getting more and more cold, I walked in trepidation back to the house, to try again to wake Liz in the hope that she would not be righteously pissed off at me for getting her up and (I feared) waking the baby, and goodness knows what else. I rang Liz from the front door step, she came downstairs quickly and was very sympathetic. She could see I was miserable, shivering and pathetic, and she was even fine about it the next morning. I have an amazingly tolerant wife.

A few days later, on a Sunday morning, I woke up on the sofa in the living room. This always surprises and disappoints me in equal measure, since I intend every night to sleep upstairs with Liz in our bed. Groggy and a bit annoyed, but not wanting to get into bed and wake up my wife at 7-whatever-it-was, I went to the kitchen and made some coffee. While it was brewing I decided to make myself useful by taking the recycling out to the big blue-lidded bin in the front garden. But I couldn’t unlock the front door. I was briefly stumped – had someone changed the locks while Liz and I slept? Or – more likely – had I left my keys in the door on the outside? Realizing the almost-certainty of the latter being the case (I rummaged in trousers and jackets and bags, and couldn’t see my keys anywhere inside the house…), I weighed my options for getting to the other side of the door. Going via the back garden would be muddy and would – sans keys – mean jumping the back gate and walking past four neighbours’ houses. In a dressing gown and muddy slippers (I was determined not to have to get changed). The only other viable choice was to attempt to climb through a window. Bracing myself for a pile of broken glass, a visit from the neighbours or Liz, or a Winnie-the-Pooh-style getting-stuck incident with onlookers and rations of honey as I attempted to squeeze my frame out of an aperture really only intend to admit light and air, I managed with relative ease to exit the building without being molested by any of the local dogs or (that I could see) falling prey to the gaze of judgmental curtain-twitching elder residents of the close. My keys were indeed in the lock, so I just let myself right back into the house, grateful (to whom, I could not say) that no one else had taken this opportunity to avail themselves of the free access to my family and all our worldly possessions. Liz remained asleep and none-the-wiser. She didn’t need to know about this one. I took out the recycling.

With renewed determination not to leave any keys in any of our locks at any time, so as to avoid (not) sleeping in the car and making all our stuff available to Enfield’s gangs of opportunist thieves (assuming there were any such things), with Liz I took a welcome break from the madness of London and flew to the US to spend a week with her family on Long Island. I came home a week earlier than my girls to begin work on the Chelmsford pantomime. My flight came in on time, I made the first rehearsal, and was good to go with time to spare. I even managed a second breakfast before we had to play any music.

All was going swimmingly with the pantomime. The band was gelling well; the sound man was efficient and nice and assured us that we sounded incredible; the producer was very happy with the band, and repeatedly told us so in person and through the MD; the musical director was on top form, and very easy to work with, musically and personally; I was managing to supervise dissertation students in London, assess and feed back on work from students in Boston, teach in Kilburn, and arrange cover for the lessons I couldn’t make because the teaching timetable had been concocted long after I’d accepted the job drumming for Cinderella. Even parking for shows was easier this year – Chelmsford City Council had installed pay-by-phone facilities in their car parks, which meant I had only to spend about twenty seconds poking at an app on my smartphone, instead of ensuring – as I had had to the previous year – that there was sufficient small change in my pockets to feed the meter (this involved having to find time to buy something small and unnecessary from a newsagents every day before heading from teaching to panto, handing over a tenner to buy a pack of gum). I much preferred the new way.

A week into the run I left the house as normal, and even before the door had closed (but too late to stop it), I realised I had, like a total idiot moron, gone and left the key in the front door AGAIN. The traffic on the way to Kilburn was bad, which afforded me the opportunity to do some research on the subject of locks, keys, breaking into one’s own home, etc. It seemed possible (not entirely probable, but I convinced myself) that I would be able to get into the house using some galvanized wire, a torch, and about five minutes. Proudly purchasing my burglary kit from the convenient hardware store a few doors down the road from the college, I spent the rest of the day feeling excited and smug. I played the panto, drove home, shaped some of the galvanized wire, and spent half an hour in sub-zero temperatures poking and prodding at my letter box, hurting myself and never once managing to pull the handle. Gutted, but also somewhat comforted by my inevitable ineptitude, I called a locksmith. He sent a guy ‘round, and the chap checked my ID to see that I lived here, whipped out a massive pair of pliers, snapped the lock off and out of the door, replaced it, charged hundreds of pounds, and left me with two new keys to my home (along with the detritus of now-useless keys that Liz and I had distributed among friends and family for use in the case of emergency). I needed a glass of wine. I drank three. The following morning I drove to London Heathrow to meet my wife and infant daughter from Terminal 3. Even before I had a chance to tell Liz I’d had the locks changed, Esme gave me a massive, unfettered joyful smile. Made my day.

Then I nearly had a heart attack when it turned out that the show’s production schedule was exactly as printed, rather than as I had imagined when I’d skim-read it and accepted the job months earlier. Every weekday there was a performance at 10.30 AM and another at 2.30 PM; I had scheduled my teaching around my misreading of the schedule – I’d believed that there were 2.30 and 6.30 shows. To say that this caused havoc at college would be an overstatement, but only slightly. I had to rearrange classes, find teachers, cancel lessons, and make humble apologies to all and sundry; and when I turned up, after a 12-hour work-day and a two-hour drive, to the tail end of the staff Christmas party because I basically had to, I was greeted by my boss with sarcastic remarks about not having time to teach, but finding ample time to get drunk. I had one glass of wine, and drove home to a restless, jetlagged baby, a breastfeeding wife, and very little sleep, to do most of this all over again the next morning.

SouthgateCafé

I am sitting in a café in Southgate. I’ve come here to get on with some work – I have a couple of interviews to write up for a forthcoming book, and figure that the distractions here will be fewer than those assailing my consciousness at home. I ordered chocolate-and-lime loaf cake, and a large latté. The cake is all right – I’d give it a 7 if they asked. Maybe a 6. I intended buying a sandwich, rather than my habitual pound-of-sugar, but the only appealing sarnie is more than £4. At fewer calories and a lower mass than the slice of cake, the price differential seems unreasonably inverted, so I opt for the cake. I then ponder, for the briefest of moments, that this is apparently why poorer people are in general likely to be more obese than their wealthier counterparts. I suspect, as I sit with my latte and laptop to write for a book on the sociology of music education, that I may be in a socio-economic bracket affording me a relatively low risk of becoming unhealthily overweight. So I wolf the cake, reluctantly using the unnecessary fork (lest – presumably – the waitress thinks ill of me?), and gulp at the too-big mug of coffee, taking the opportunity to stare, less covertly than I imagine, at my fellow patrons.

I’m sitting against a side wall of the curiously triangular premises. At 2 o’clock from me there are two girls talking conspiratorially and decisively – I assume that one of their boyfriends has taken a unilateral holiday or decided to spend the weekend in the pub shouting at a television, so they’re planning his fate. Ninety degrees to my left is a man called Alan, to whom I was introduced once during a brief familial religious experiment at the local Anglican church a few weeks before we had our baby daughter christened. He sits with a white Americano and a copy of the Bible, occasionally opening the latter at random and then glancing around with a look that achieves piety and confusion at the same time. I’ve seen him in here before, and he never removes his anorak. There’s a couple to my right by the window, drinking and chatting efficiently so as to be done before the baby sleeping in the push chair between them wakes up. The two older women outside must be smokers or mad. It’s noisy, chilly and windy – the allure of al fresco conversation in London eludes me. I understand it in Barcelona, Nice and Zurich, but shouting at a friend over traffic at a busy roundabout is surely the eccentric preserve of a peculiarly British aspiration to be slightly (yet, inevitably unsuccessfully) Mediterranean. It’s tokenistic and ridiculous, like the way we’ve begun in recent years in the UK to use more olive oil. We still eat too many pies, and it still mostly rains. My waitress is eating her lunch at the table the other side of Alan, and her mum has popped in for a chat. The happiest people here are the retired couple by the door. They’re from the generation that still dresses up to leave the house (I note that, for some reason, I wore a blazer today). David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” comes over the PA, chased by Frank Sinatra.

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs

I hate having to do my accounts. And I despise myself annually for my reticence to do my civil duty and pay for the government that protects and enables (and angers and frightens) me. I always leave my accounts to the last minute, despite working well to other deadlines (learning songs for gigs and recordings, submitting abstracts for conferences, finishing papers for publication, catching flights, arriving on time to teach classes, etc.). I’ve always paid an accountant to prepare and submit my tax return for me, because I figured they’d save me more money than they cost me in fees and frustration. The first year I was self-employed I used a small accountancy firm in Wales recommended to me by my then boss, who swore by them. The following year I found a less extortionate group with which to work, called Tax Watchdog (TWD, for short), and have used them ever since. I tend to send them some clumsy and fudged accounting records by their September or October deadline (it fluctuates), but I decided this year to make use of the extended TWD submission deadline of 1st December. And I didn’t make it. I was supervising dissertations and giving research methods lectures in London, teaching and assessing online for Boston University, and playing drums for a pantomime in Chelmsford twice a day. So completing a massively boring spreadsheet on top of this was too much. I managed to compile just over half my expenses before the deadline, but fell asleep creating the income spreadsheet.

Promptly, on 2nd December, my accountants sent me a peculiar email, saying that, in view of the late date, they “might not” be able to process my accounts in time. Well, I could have told them that! I called their office in an attempt to ascertain more precisely how improbable they suspected completion of my accounts in time for the UK tax return submission deadline of 31st January to be. After too much time and much repetition by me, Paxman-style, of the same question, the gentleman on the other end of the line conceded that, beyond mere likelihood, the company would not be able to complete my tax return in time. So, I was on my own. This would save me the £250-odd that the accountants charged in fees. Trying to fill in my own tax return might instead cost me my soul or my sanity, but I felt I was fast losing a grip on these anyway, so there was really no reason not to continue as I had no alternative but to do. But there was also no immediate hurry.

Playing drums for the pantomime was such an intense experience that I decided to wait a month for the show to finish before attempting anything so mentally and emotionally disruptive as completing my tax return. I chose to embark on this new adventure on 6th January because it was the first Monday back at work for everyone after the New Year. With a sense of something akin to motivation to get on with it, when I found the right page and was ready to dive in… I was unable to register. I got as far as I could, and was told I’d need to wait to for a Tax Code to be sent in the post in the next seven days. This was frustrating – and somewhat ironic, since this was the online service – but to console myself amidst the dwindling air of excitement surrounding my planned foray into financial competence, I poured a large glass of port (my brother and his partner’s Christmas present to me), and relaxed into marking undergraduate dissertations instead.

I waited patiently for the promised Code to arrive in the post, which it didn’t. While at work on 23rd January, before committing myself to what I suspected would be an arduous and humiliating process of uncomfortable telephonic exchange with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, I called my wife, who, conveniently at home, obligingly double-checked the mail. There was, she assured me, nothing from HMRC. I made the phone call. After being cut off automatically only once for misinterpreting the (one can only assume) deliberately misleading menu options, I was greeted by excerpts from six pieces of West Coast funk music on rotation. The first piece was all right, but by the second one I was only aware of how I just get disproportionately pissed off by the awful sound quality when I’m on hold. Virgin Media, in a silly and transparent attempt to improve the experience of waiting in line while they still refused to hire enough staff to answer the call-load in a reasonable time-frame, started a thing a few years back where they ask valued customers to select a genre for the hold music to which they will, forthwith, subject you without mercy. The arrogance flaunted in this ridiculous gesture is as grating as the flagrant (surely faux-) misapprehension of customer priorities. I really couldn’t give monkey’s arse what genre of music you play me while I’m holding. It all sounds crap! None of it has any bass, it’s all crackly, and – they surely can’t not have grasped this – people do not call the Virgin Customer Services helpline to listen to a selection of music in the least-personally-offensive style pre-selected from the Virgin back-catalogue. We call as a very last resort, with reluctance and desperation, to speak to a human being about a problem with another of the services for which we continue to pay the company amply. I would prefer total silence to this patronizing BS. If I want to listen to music, guess what: I’ll select something awesome from the library of thousands of albums I own on CD, vinyl, minidisc, tape or iTunes. I might even stream something or try the radio if I’m feeling adventurous. I will listen to my chosen music through decent speakers or headphones at a time and in a place of my choosing, NOT when I need someone to fix the goddam broadband so that I can carry on with my work! (My subsequent tactic of putting Virgin on hold when I finally got through to someone didn’t pay off especially well either; when I told them I had a list of other things to do before I could speak with them, so would appreciate them waiting until it was their turn in the queue, and left some music playing for them in the background, they hung up.)

So it didn’t bother me that HMRC had a less-than-wonderful selection of music, although it did frustrate me that the pieces were brutally clipped, rather than faded out (the AA – Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous – used, once upon a time, to do a subtler, if still somewhat jarring, cross-fade from pastiche Coldplay into almost-Oasis, and back again via a rock waltz). Anyway, after only about 45 minutes on hold I was put through to someone who told me she was unable to help me directly. Instead she gave me the number of another department that she was pretty sure would be able to assist (her tone strongly implied that she was neither willing nor able simply to transfer my call). To her credit, she did tell me which menu-numbers to select in order to get me through to an appropriate person with all possible haste. I followed her advice, and a man picked up within a few short minutes. He helped me pretty quickly, and put my mind at rest: No, I didn’t need to panic that I hadn’t yet received the Tax Code that I needed to begin filing my tax return on line; Yes, it was the HMRC’s fault that I hadn’t yet received the number in the post; Yes, they had my postal address recorded correctly; Plus, I would be given an extension on my tax return deadline, to 15th February. This was all surprisingly good news, and delivered with some courtesy. Not the outcome I had cynically expected, but I never mind. I was so surprised, I was able to spend the next 90 minutes feverishly writing and distributing to colleagues the draft call-for-papers for an upcoming conference, and to send with it an encouraging, buoyant email too boot. All was rather well.

The next day I was working in a café, trying to mark some students’ essays but failing miserably and instead working on a paper I had been meaning to write for ages, deleting photos, checking Facebook and planning for an upcoming band rehearsal. It was then that I received a truly mystifying and simultaneously alarming email from HMRC. The email (addressed to “Mr Smith”, but I would gallantly overlook this, since at least they had got the gender right – something they’d failed to manage with my brother for about 20 years) said that HMRC would be glad to grant me an extension of the deadline for submitting my tax return. Contrary to what I had been told the previous day on the phone, however, the extension would be until 2nd February – this was only 13 days earlier, so I would not quibble, and, anyway, they held all the cards. Also, 2nd February was, by coincidence, a day off for me, so I would just ignore my family all day and do my tax return and try not to drink. Fine, easy. The last line of HMRC’s email, though, was truly extraordinary. It read “you must still pay any tax you owe before 31st January in order to avoid a fine”. I sent the following response, by return:

Dear anonymous desk jockey

Is this a joke?! 

How could I (or anyone else) pay the tax I owe prior to completing my tax return (the whole point of which is find out how much tax I owe)? 

If it is a joke, I apologise for not finding it terribly amusing at this stressful time. 

If it is not a joke, I require an explanation - at your earliest convenience - of how I may proceed with the necessary time travel, at the minimal possible cost. 

Thank you for your help,

Dr Gareth Dylan Smith.

HMRC took only another four hours to respond (and they did call address me as “Dr” this time), advising me to check their website for information on how to file my tax return online. I had already tried this: it said to fill in the details and then wait up to seven days for a tax code to arrive in the post…

Cinderella

It’s a real privilege to play drums, for the second year running, for the Chelmsford city pantomime. This year’s production is Cinderella. It is one of those rare occasions on which I am hired for a substantial fee, but am required only to do two things: turn up on time, and play drums all day. Since the age of 15, when I resolved to stop being late to things (at the time, principally my girlfriend’s house – she and her mother had a running joke that I would always be thirty minutes late for anything), the first one of these has been no problem; it was further drilled into me at music college, by the Head of Woodwind, Brass and Percussion, Richard Adams, who instilled in all under his care a rigorous sense of punctuality. I have since tended to make quite a thing out of being on time. I’ll often get worked up in the process of getting out of the house early enough to be punctual, but in many situations – especially those involving musicians and theatres – the effort is always rewarded by me not getting fired, me being hired again, and the day not being ruined for all several-dozen others working on the production (plus the audience of a few hundred) because the drummer couldn’t be bothered to plan ahead. The second thing – playing drums all day – makes me very happy, and also comes easily. I have been playing drum kit since I was twelve years old, and have played in countless rehearsals and concerts over the years with brass bands, wind bands, marching bands, orchestras, hip-hop groups, jazz ensembles, dance troupes, musical theatre productions, punk bands, stoner rock bands, and all manner of progressive rock, heavy metal, folk, psycho-ceilidh and indie bands, along with numerous singer/song-writers. Before and alongside playing drums I played clarinet in concert bands, wind quintets and clarinet choirs. I have been reading music since I began playing recorder at age seven. So the musical theatre gig is a breeze.

I love my drums – the way they look when I take them out of their cases and set them up, the way that they sound when I hit them, and the fact that I have to configure them differently for every musical theatre show on which I work. I love the feeling of constant movement when I play. I love the dance from drum to drum required in a fill, the bounce on the hi-hat in an unstoppable pop groove, and the effort required to play with energy and intensity for several minutes at a go. I love having a click-track to follow, and embedding its metronomic punctuation of time into my own pulsating, embodied rhythm. I love the freedom of no click-track, and the reliance on the mutual musicality of my fellow band members. I love the swish and tinkle of brushes on a cymbal, and the gorgeous, glittery glow of the mark tree (chimes) as it sparkles up and down evoking magic. I love the thump and crash of Rocking Out. The toms thrill me as they resound with stroke after stroke, culminating in the cavernous boom of the floor tom. I love the sound and feeling of a miked-up bass drum, its emphasized warm “dthoohm” making me grin from ear to ear. I love the feeling of being the music, that when I don’t play there is no sound, and that when I do play suddenly the air is alive, pulsating, irresistible!

Owing to recent adventures in academia and the constant challenges that present themselves (and that I create for myself) in my teaching jobs, plus the wonderful, exhausting and tireless joy of fatherhood (our daughter is six months old), alongside the ever-increasing rent, taxes, obligations, responsibility, and accountability that I face in every other part of my life, I sink in to my old friend drumming with a pleasure akin to arriving home after a knackering and stressful day in the office, sitting down, disappearing into the sofa, and being gloriously overcome by sweet, enveloping sleep; despite knowing the world is still out there and that there will be another hard day tomorrow, I am home, and recharging. I am comfortable. I feel as “at one” with the world as when I’m enjoying a large glass of Malbec on an evening in with my wife, or when I got out of the car last November on US Highway 1 to watch and feel the sun set over the Pacific. I am in the zone. I am untouchable. I am drumming

When I am hired as a drummer there are no meetings, there’s no bullshit, no unaccountable pressure, and no micromanagement. Just reading, watching, listening, and drumming. The mutual weaving of time in groove with the bassist and pianist when these musicians move together is like a hug. This is empathy and mutual generosity. Like driving fast along a road you know well. Like going out in a favourite jacket. I feel confident and happy. Drumming is me. I am drumming. I am certain of this. Drumming makes me feel fantastic. And my drumming makes others feel good.

This is definitely not one of the most important things in the world, or to the world. I feel, as I said, privileged to be a drummer. And on a gig like this one, where the theatre’s sound guy has carpeted the band pit, where I get paid to set up, rehearse, wait around, as well as to perform, when I’m earning more money for drumming for four hours day than I ever do for planning, teaching and assessing for ten hours a day, when the only two things I am required to actually do are to drive to Chelmsford and back and to play the drums, I feel very, very fortunate. It sucks that my wife and daughter are in another country; but the break will be good for us all, as it’ll be amazing to be back together.

I don’t deserve this. Some people tell me I’ve earned it, but I haven’t really. I am extraordinarily lucky. I have worked hard, yes. I have worked a seven-day week for as long as I can remember, and have routinely put in 12- to 18-hour days for almost a decade. But so have plenty of people who mine coal or diamonds, or who clean toilets or work in fast food restaurants. My parents bought me drums and let me play them, and they didn’t shit on my dreams of being a musician – although we all had very little idea of what that would mean. I had great teachers, coaches and friends. I just wanted to play drums. When I get to play drums, when my drums sound as good as I recall – and often better, when I am in the groove, when I a drummer, I am happy, I am me.

That being said, I also need my writing, teaching, thinking, and my family and friends. Currently I’m working at being a feminist cultural psychologist. I need another cup of tea.  You can find out about the panto here.  

Diesel Powered Nuns

One of the guitar bands in which I was proud to play drums while at secondary school was the Diesel Powered Nuns (formerly known as the Dooberie Hounds – when we’d performed in this incarnation our bass player had Tipp-Ex-ed paw prints all over the fret board of his guitar). The name of band was suggested to or bestowed upon us (this was never clear to me) by a musical colleague in our year at King’s Manor School, Stephen Reynolds, who'd borrowed the name from a Monty Python sketch. Stephen and I had been friends since primary school, as the only two kids in the class who were seriously interested in chess and imaginary goldfish (these latter enjoyed the salubrious surroundings of their enclosure beneath Stephen’s electronic keyboard, and were called, respectively, Norman, Trevor and Socrates). We had, whilst still at primary school, established the Gareth and Stephen Tea-time Club (GSTTC), which would convene whenever our parents would allow us to visit one another after school. I forget precisely what we did, but I do remember that I was appointed the club’s official artist by my friend, and that we guarded the Club’s affairs with great secrecy and kept all proceedings in a peculiarly-configured cardboard box that one could only open with a high degree of patience. My principal recollection from the convocations of the GSTTC was the afternoon at Stephen’s home when simultaneously taught me, invented the rules for, and was resoundingly defeated at Suicide Chess. As one might suspect, the game was based on the premise that, rather than guard one’s King and use the pawns and others cunningly to defend oneself and attack the opponent, the aim was in fact to place one’s pieces in the path of certain and unavoidable death or capture. Details of precisely how I won or what were the rules of engagement have been lost in the mists of time.

Stephen Reynolds had an elder brother, Matt. As younger siblings so often do, Stephen grew up quicker than many of his peers – his sense of humour and command of the English language were both years ahead of anyone else’s in our class at school. It was Stephen who introduced me to the teenage schoolboy humour of Herbert and the Fried Spaniels, having initially passed off many of their jokes as his own before he gave me a copy of his brother’s C-90 tape of these two year-eleven boys getting drunk and being silly in front of a cassette recorder. I listened and re-listened to the tape, and to this day I recall some of the duo’s puns and gems of wisdom at the least likely and appropriate moments in mature conversation. With a brother old enough to be buying and reading publications from the contemporary music press, I think now that Stephen probably was inspired to take the name of the “Diesel Powered Nuns” from a lesser-known west-country rock outfit of the era calling themselves the Atomic Vicars. I have no proof, however of this derivation.

The Nuns were an excellent high school band, the best that King’s Manor School had to offer. I eventually lost that gig to my rival drummer, Olly, of the Adur Youth Concert Band, when (I think) I appeared to be more interested in my other rock project, the Purple Freuds. I thought at the time that a Freud was simply the pet-name for the little purple key-fob that Chris had attached to his house keys. Chris did say, when suggesting the name for the band, “you know, like Sigmund Freud”, but I did not know, and concurred enthusiastically nonetheless. It was, after all, a damn sight better and less alienating than the name I had previously bestowed up on our group – “The Sons of William Byrd” (we had listened to some Renaissance choral music at school, and I wanted to be sure that my recollection of this fact was evident in the name of the my band). Prior to the Diesel Powered Nuns’ decision that my allegiance to Chris’s band may prove too strong, and that they needed someone who would offer commitment rather than rivalry, for around 18 months I held the drum chairs in both the Diesel Powered Nuns and the Purple Freuds. I was simultaneously working my way up the ranks of the Band of the Brighton Battalion of the Boys’ Brigade – I have rarely felt such a flush of pride as when I played snare drum solos with them on Remembrance Day Parades, marching around Southwick Green.

It was during the heady days of my ménage-à-trois with Adur’s rock ‘n’ roll and marching band fraternities that Matt Walder came up with a fantastic idea. The Diesel Powered Nuns were rehearsing one afternoon at Matt's mother’s home. Our bassist was Matt Fowler, the second guitarist was Alex Aspinall, and Alex’s brother, the lead singer (absent on this occasion), was also called Matt. The first two Matts have been playing in a band together almost ever since. After the Nuns they formed The Birdhouse Project, later becoming simply Birdhouse, one of the best and most creative rock bands I ever heard – that they never were signed to a major record label and their music marketed the world over is a great injustice. I still have a copy of their brilliant LP 16 Bit. On this particular afternoon, Matt’s mother had, out of necessity or trust, abandoned us adolescent musicians to our own devices in her home. On a tea (or it may have been orange squash) break, Matt came up with the inspired suggestion that we would dial random phone numbers beginning with the then Brighton prefix of 594 and play a song down the line to whoever picked up. The rest of us, being willing disciples of the cult of Matt, thought this was pure, unadulterated genius. First we wrote and (very briefly) rehearsed this song:

I come from West Virginia
I sow the cotton fields
I come from West Virginia
Where the Strawberries are so fresh

We performed this as a kind of a south-coast, lower-middle-class, punk-acoustic hoe-down, with every crotchet beat articulated on my newly-acquired cowbell. We called only four or five phone numbers, but I remember our elation when an old lady picked up and listened to our entire rendition. Maybe we’d made her day. Or maybe we hadn’t. After hanging up the receiver, we retired to the kitchen, where Matt manufactured two cheeseburgers for himself, and two for each of the rest of the band. What an awesome day.