Friends with the band
To play music or be played by it
Not the last time I tried forming a band was in Year 8. My best, then close, then former friends turned down my invitation so I had to settle for a wary clutch of maths class acquaintances, two in total, suggestible and/or similarly deluded to me. Roles were assigned not based on current musical instrument ability but more like ranks handed out when playing army. At least I, like all the great songwriters, knew my way around a keyboard. (This way goes lower, that way goes higher.) I just wasn’t the fastest; any tempo past andante and I’d start going clang clung cling like a horse playing the piano.
How fast, though, the transition from a kid who hears music to an adolescent who listens to and then wants to make it. Although that’s not quite right. Making music didn’t matter as much being in a band, as making it. Not that the music was purely theoretical. I strung together the chords and lyrics for a ballad about unrequited love, this from a 12-year-old who was yet to do any requiting let alone being un-. (Then again, “Art is man’s teacher,” wrote Guy Davenport, “but art is art’s teacher.”) My lyrics for another song rhymed - and let’s see if I can type this out with fingers curled from embarrassment - “The world keeps turning” and “The world keeps burning.” As for our band name, my all-thumbs guitarist and jittery drummer for some unfathomable reason never got on with the one I proposed: ‘Troubled Waters.’1We were seven weeks in to trying to agree on another band name when I called it quits.
A band name’s not nothing. Some are so catchy the music can never live up to it. (Do you remember anything beyond the rhythmic name of Har Mar Superstar?) And I always thought ‘Arctic Monkeys’ had the combinatory zaniness of a name decided by throwing darts at two lists (and thought that in some arcane way the name’s weakness was an early hairline crack in any future cementing of true musical greatness.) Over the years I’ve collected the following band names for how catchy or naff they are, their shock value or cringe-potency. All seem to have been chosen for their lilt and bounce when being shouted after the words “And now who you’ve all been waiting for, it’s:” or, “We are:”
So: “We are:
Nuremberg Plea Deal!”
The Dick Moves!”
The Dead-Enviers!”
Charly and the Funk Factory!”
Menstruating vegetarians who work out a lot!”
Cognitive Kill Switch!”
Bi Erasure!” [a covers band]
MFA Writing Prompt!”
Domestic violins!”
Danny McBride and the Cannon Fodder!”
A Real Red Flag!”
The Insuffragettes!”
Dental Records!”
Allahu Akbar!”
Before you tag yourself, guess which ones aren’t real. A made-up band name is easy to generate, just find a four-word headline about a disaster or some silly-season news item: ‘Nashville Waffle House Shooting’, ‘The Nationwide Geriatric Orgy’. (Failing that, use a Labour Party conference speech.) All band names sound made up because that’s what they are. A rapper from Florida called Flo Rida? A band called The Band? Anal Beard?
I wonder whether fixating on names was the downfall of my own D.O.A bands. It smacks of a shell-before-the-egg focus on surfaces. Adolescence is the only time when surfaces should matter so much, because without talent and the dedication to bolster it (or a genius for surfaces) it won’t be enough for success, unless you have the luck that your particular lack of substance can make someone money.
Other bands are in it for nothing but the money. Not big superstar money, but the regular work that can be got by horizon-lowered workaday musicians, tribute acts, bands, for instance, that play wedding parties.
At a friend’s wedding in Switzerland, I was seated at the same kind of ramshackle miscellaneous grouping as in my ‘Troubled Waters’ days. To my left was a man who spoke French, German, Italian but “No English.” To my right was a stocky man with a mild underbite who, in a gladdening Yorkshire accent, offered me a pinch of snuff. He tapped out a brown-sugar pile onto the back of a devil-horned hand. Groom’s side? Bride’s? No, he was the lead guitarist of the wedding band.
Don’t let that dim your view. Jangling through a set-list of demographically-appropriate numbers, he and his band proved to be Hendrix/Prince-level virtuosos. For ‘I bet you look good on the dance floor’ the bassist put his arms through the lead guitarist’s to play his guitar while the lead put his arms behind his back to play bass. The wowed crowd kept ferrying the band drinks. Our man from Hull pressed his guitar frets not with fingers but the side of his beer bottle. The sound vibrations made the beer foam down his fingers and strings.
This exhibition started to slow the crowd; the last dancers eddied around the standees. We were no longer listening so much as watching. Our applause got pockier. The band clambered the side of the hall to hang simianly from the rafters while playing upside down. It was, not in a good way, an astonishing performance.
You can tolerate bad band banter since it’s shorter and less frequent than the songs, usually. But the lead guitar had gone from shaking his head at song requests to scorning them out loud, meaning on hot mike. And when a young woman climbed the stage to cup his ear he halted the set for many minutes to share with the crowd his take on her request for pop Latin hit ‘Despacito’.
The lecture took in the song’s ubiquity, its Ricky-Martinness, its cliché chord progression. To prove his point, the lead started playing ‘Despacito’ then on the first verse sang instead Maroon 5’s ‘She will be loved’. Fewer people laughed the next time he started playing ‘Despacito’ but then sang the first verse of ‘Don’t Stop Believing’. He said sorry and now for the real thing then started singing ‘Come on Eileen’.
The woman who’d made the request, climbing back on stage, would not be put off: she was the Maid of Honour, not to mention the bride’s sister. The lead didn’t know this or maybe he did and wasn’t cowed. As she left the stage, looking behind her to heckle him back, he half gave in, announcing, “Now for Despa-fooking-cito”. Between his mike and its wire he jammed into position his phone, on which he’d pulled up a karaoke version of the song. Either its ticker of lyrics ran too fast for him or he meant to smudge its Spanish into sarcastic numanumanums.
Why get all muso at a wedding party, where you yourself are the covers band? What are you, in a Nick Hornby novel? Maybe playing music for money for so long had started to eat away at this snuff-hocker. (Maybe he’d just had too much snuff.) So much did he offend the sister of the bride - and the bride too - that he and his bandmates were stranded by the wedding coach to find their own way down the Alpine valley at a slippery 3am.
Instead of forming a band, with all its pitiful hopes and bitterness, you can always sing for free with a bunch other volunteers: you can join a choir. I’d never thought of doing so till one January summer in the southern hemisphere.
A friend and I were sitting in a church made of whitewashed wood, with glass-slatted windows turned horizontal to let in the most air through the lace curtains. We were near the back, not reluctantly, more in respect of having had manners enough to accept the invitation to Mass at least this once while recognising we were just guests, audience. Near the front of the surprisingly lofty church, at the midpoint of its cross, readied a choir.
Till then the ones I’d known had comprised teachers, fellow pupils and me at primary school, caterwauling the same hymn in our unseparated voices. Things didn’t improve by secondary school when we’d sing off photocopied lyric sheets the supposed hit song from some sinister old musical, the teacher repeatedly, exasperatedly playing its opening chords. I sat in church politely in wait, hoping the novelty of the scene would speed up the service.
The choir began their Polynesian hymn, a polyphonic one. I couldn’t tell if they sang in multipart harmony or counterpoint. I can’t be the first to analogise the resonant frequency of physical materials that makes them hum with the way singing voices at a juncture of certain harmonies make your eyes brim. At that very sort of juncture a breeze billowed the lace curtains inwards, as if they’d been flung open by the entrance of the tropically floppy butterfly which crossed the nave then flew out a crack in the rafters on the other side. What can I say, sometimes God and John Woo have the same aesthetic.
Monk historian Venerable Bede describes in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People the arrival of Christians at the court of pagan King Edwin. Discussing religion with him one of them says (in Leo Sherley-Price’s translation):
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. Therefore, if this new lore brings anything more certain and more wise, it is worthy of that that we follow it.
Known as ‘The Parable of the Sparrow’, Bede’s story is about life and its wintry bookends, the dark and cold mystery without, and the lore and wisdom Christianity might bring us in our brief time within life’s warm mead-hall.
In Christianity doves symbolise the Holy Spirit while sparrows are what can’t fall without the Holy Father knowing about it; what to make of a butterfly? The one that crossed the church just at the right chord, just as a sepia-afroed woman in the pews gasped the local multipurpose declaration of awe/surprise, “Eeesa!”, which happens to be, conveniently for my background, the Arabic for ‘Jesus’, well there was something pretty Holy Spiritual about it.
But it also reminded me of when I’d first read about The Parable of the Sparrow, in English class, in the intro to a set text (Heaney? William Golding?) which rejigged its metaphor. The hall is finite life, surrounded by cold and darkness, but the sparrow’s flight is what it’s like to experience art like music: ephemeral, trivial (it’s not some flashy phoenix but a sparrow) transient— but re-enactable.
Don’t assume that every choir is a sparrow’s flight, is more spiritual than a band. Mixed voice choirs are not harmonious groups. They have plenty of their own rivalries and impatience and out-of-place prima donnas. And that’s the church choirs. The ‘community’ choirs—Jesus; I remember in one a man kept second-and-wrongly guessing the conductor, naming which song he thought her opening chord was from, and only ever giving his guesses to her and nobody else. When of one song she warned, glibly, almost to herself, that, “Most people won’t be able to sing this note,” the second-guesser muttered, “Well I can.” When she said after a song that someone was flat, he said to himself, “Not me.”
What was all his ego in aid of? Sea shanties, a Christmas pop song medley? (The blame for pop choirs’ cringier contributions to the culture I lay on the trailer for David Fincher’s The Social Network—a Radiohead song sung by a choir?! And I blame them in turn for pop songs given acoustic or a cappella covers to go on ads, which I wrote about in my post on Book Acknowledgements.) I guess some people really love the sound of their own (signing) voice, love to throw in Christina Aguilera trills and grace-notes and vocal runs: karaoke singers within a thirty-person-strong choir. But why join a choir for vanity?
Not least because that misses what harmony can feel like, being in harmony, to experience the cliché ‘thrilling harmony’ in its first power. Because it is thrilling. Singing in perfect harmony tips unexpected tears from you like a knocked glass of water. Unexpected because you hadn’t been tenderised into a sad place beforehand, hence the opposite of how sentimental art jerks your tears.
The core of this feeling is that you’re responsible for your own singing and yet, when you and everyone else does it well, it sounds and feels like you’re being played, like an instrument: a juxtaposition - or a harmony - of control and being controlled. The opposite then of being in a band, where, theoretically, at your best, you’re the ones who’ve written your own music and perform it for others to listen to live or on a recording (making choir singing closer to being a DJ).
You’d have thought being in a band would be more artful than singing in a choir. A choir is the equivalent of an animate brass section or a track on a music producer’s mixing desk. The conductor directs the music but didn’t write it (often the songs have forgotten their authors or never needed to keep any). The conductor instrumentalises the choir. Really they’re self-instrumentalised. They follow the music, use their voices in a disinterested way, in service of someone else’s art, but which art can only be expressed through them. The singing isn’t about beauty, it instantiates beauty, like eating an apple instantiates the taste of an apple, instantiates the non-functional, intrinsic value of the music’s art. Even more so than with a band, the music moves through you, and moves you most in a choir. It’s art at its most impersonal— which is art at its most artful.
I was just a kid to be fair. But years later watching The Office and hearing David Brent give the name of his own old band, ‘Foregone Conclusion’, I felt a retrospective chill for having been so callow, like someone walking on my cradle.