John Twonil returns from the toilet.
‘Mppphhhhhffrggghahahahaha!’ he chortles, bringing up the phone thing again. He is bloody immature for somebody his age. Short Tony and Big Andy join in once more. So are they. Even Mrs Short Tony, who you think would have some sort of gender solidarity.
‘You are wasting your breath,’ I inform them. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’
Honestly, they are all living in the dinosaur age. It is the post-sexist twenty-first century now, and if I want to carry round a pink phone then I am perfectly at liberty to do so. The world has moved on, and I am proud to say that I have moved with it. There is a bit more laughter at my expense. I smile it off and place my order. The banter of the locker room is part and parcel of sport, and bowls is no exception; to be teased and wound up (albeit immaturely and unfunnily) means that you have genuinely arrived.
There were three fine English boys
I go for a run.
Run, run, run!
Across the road, right at the tiny bus shelter, past the secluded bungalow that neither the silver-haired man nor Pat, his wife, have ever returned to. He was probably a time-waster, bored, with nothing else to do during the day. Across the lane that leads up to the church and towards the village shop and the back lanes.
Many people who knew me of old might find this unlikely. I was never a particularly fitness-conscious person, and even now I wonder whether I am doing the right thing or whether I am just encouraging myself to drop dead. Against other males of my age, my height and weight do place me comfortably into the norm group; unfortunately it is the ‘Norm from Cheers’ group, and I have been advised quite forcibly that I should do something about this.
That is the LTLP and her all-encompassing medical knowledge for you. But I have to concede her point. I’m not a natural dieter. And whilst bowls and snooker are sociable pastimes, you cannot really count snooker as exercise. If a further honing of my athletic physique makes the love between us ever stronger then the odd run is a price well worth paying.
Psychologically, running is nothing like bowls. With bowls, once you get into the Zone, your focus is entirely on the pack of woods ahead – the game, and what you must do. But I have come to find that running sets your mind free once you have got your legs and lungs working. It’s great quality time to reflect and to lose yourself in the world.
I love music. I love music really a lot, much more so even than John Miles in the song ‘Music’, where he takes pains to emphasise that was his first love and will be his last. For as long as I remember it has enthralled me, apart from a few years in the 1980s when Miner Willy on the ZX Spectrum said more about the anxieties and aspirations of teenage life than Limahl.
‘Highway Star’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. Things that touch me in the way that other art has never been able to. Film, paintings, mime – they are all very nice as media, but are as ping pong and horse dressage are to bowls: you’d watch them if they were on the telly, but could never become truly emotionally involved. Whereas there is nothing like a good song.
The first ever song that truly spoke to me was ‘We Are the Champions’ by Queen. I had heard pop songs before, of course, Bob Dylan’s and Steeleye Span’s and Leonard Cohen’s – but they were my mum and dad’s music. ‘We Are the Champions’ was mine. It came on the radio and it was the most brilliant thing that I had ever heard. When you are a six-year-old boy, it is extremely cool to be a Champion. It is the best. For a six-year-old boy, the song says everything about what you want your life to be: it is noisy, it is rousing, it involves punching the air a lot and it involves being better than everybody else, who are all losers compared to you. ‘We Are the Champions’ is the ‘Teenage Kicks’ of being six. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, then a final chorus with mindbogglingly aspirational lead guitar soaring high above it, to end on that oddly and yet brilliantly unresolved bass note.
I do not listen to ‘We Are the Champions’ any more. I have immense respect for Freddie and Brian still, but I have a policy of not listening to music that might ever conceivably be played over the tannoy at any sports arena on the occasion of a goal or point being scored. This discounts much of Queen’s later repertoire, as well as ‘Simply the Best’ and the woman that constantly and repeatedly sings that she is Ready to Go. I find this policy protects you from much pain, and if it has meant that ‘We Are the Champions’ has disappeared from my personal playlist then that is sad from a personal history point of view, but a price well worth paying.
Listening is one thing, playing is another. I love playing music. I love the butterflies beforehand; I love the embarrassed blink when you realise that it is about time to start. I love the looks on people’s faces as you hit the first couple of chords and they realise that you are going to be brilliant; I love seeing drunks dancing as they lose any awareness of your presence as a musician and just start getting into the groove. I love the power of being behind a mic stand and holding an excruciatingly amplified guitar that sings and hums and squeals even though you’re muting all the strings because it’s so powerful. I just love the noise that playing music makes. I love it.
I cannot imagine a time when I will not be playing music. Apart from the present day, when I don’t have a band or anywhere to play.
Speak to any musician and they are likely to tell you that they started small. My personal musical journey began like so many others – in a garage band. Dave’s dad’s garage.
Teenage bands are the most important thing in the development of popular music. Everybody should be in a band when they are a teenager, whether they want to be a successful musician or just a nicely well-rounded character. It doesn’t even have to be a very good band, although I like to think that ours was better than most. It teaches you discipline and interpersonal skills, unlocks the man or woman within and provides a way in to understanding and exploring the fundamentals of intellectual creativity, arts and literature.
This, I think, is what we were attempting when we formed Wïldebeeste.
I had a cheap white Hohner electric guitar and a small practice amplifier. Dave played the bass, four strings of utter cool through one single enormous bigger-than-Adam’s-toilet speaker. The low notes resounded around the concrete and breeze-block like earthquakes. His younger friend Iain was a drummer, with all his own gear: drums, cymbals, sticks. Even back then I knew that this would be the start of something big.
Wïldebeeste had a limited repertoire, solely performing works by Pink Floyd. This was the single band that each of us knew some songs by. There was a limited audience locally for a teenage band that solely performed works by Pink Floyd, and – what’s more – one that solely performed them without a keyboard player to include the bits that might make them sound a bit like Pink Floyd. But Dave had a birthday party planned for his eighteenth, so we were able to gain our one and only public booking, from his mum.
When we were not getting bookings from his mum, we stuck to practising hard in our garage studio, which we had customised by taping an eiderdown against the door to create a modern noise-free rehearsal facility.
Growing in confidence, we incorporated ‘Walking on the Moon’, a song that didn’t need a keyboard player but that retained the slow tempo required to let us consider which chord to play well in advance. Meanwhile we were starting to write and eventually added two original songs. One was by Dave the Bass Player himself and was a simple straight-from-the-heart statement that he didn’t like motor racing. It was called ‘I Don’t