I am in a lifeboat station on the south coast, standing beneath the stern of a Shannon class rescue vessel, wearing a borrowed fisherman’s jumper and holding a banjo. There are lights on me, and I am very much at sea.
My band has recorded a Christmas song to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and we are here to make the music video. As usual, the shoot consists of a group of young people ordering a group of old people to do mildly humiliating things while filming them, like a care home scandal drama set to music.
Beyond the lights there’s a small crowd of RNLI volunteers, their families and friends. They are dressed in festive knitwear with Christmas lights strung above their heads, even though it’s November. The effect is a little dislocating, but that is not why I am at sea.
It is traditional for Christmas songs to be recorded in high summer, in sweltering studios, by musicians wearing shorts. This song had an even earlier start: I’ve got emails discussing the arrangement stretching back to February, and rough recordings on my phone from March. At some point a rival version emerged – with a completely different melody – which we all thought was a vast improvement until we heard the two side by side after a three-week break and decided the original was better.
We were still tinkering with the song in late August – by which point I’d heard it several hundred times – but the banjo part I recorded some time in April survived largely intact, and that is why I am at sea: it was so long ago that I can’t remember how to play it.
I should emphasise that I don’t really need to know how to play it, because we’re miming to a backing track. I just need to look as if I know how to play it. But this raises another problem: I can’t act. The only way for me to perform a convincing impression of someone playing a song is to know how that song goes. And I don’t. I sidle up to the guitar player, who is positioned just ahead of me.
“Can you just turn slightly so I can see your fingers when you’re playing?” I say.
“I think they want me facing this way,” he says.
“Then can you show me what you’re doing in the second verse?”
“OK, everyone!” says the director. “Stand by to go again.”
The crew have already filmed a static wide shot covering the whole band and the lifeboat behind us. Presently they are focusing on individual members as we repeatedly pretend to play through the song. Eventually they will get to me.
There is a break while they adjust the lights. I step towards our trumpet player, who is positioned to my right.
“At the end of the first chorus,” I say, “is it A-flat or the F-minor?”
“I don’t even come in until halfway through,” she says.
We do another take. I watch as the cameraman crowds the fiddle player, who recreates the bow strokes of his part perfectly, even with a lens in his face. Meanwhile, I sound as if I’m playing the version of the song we abandoned six months ago: the notes clash horribly with the recorded playback.
I try to remind myself that it doesn’t matter. It’s more important, I think, that when the camera finds me I’m not wearing an expression of panicked exasperation, which would be at odds with the emotional undercurrent of a Christmas song about lifeboats. I practise a look of quiet confidence, and lose my way entirely.
At the start of the next run-through I close my eyes and try to feel my way into the song. When I open them it becomes clear it’s my turn. The camera is coming at me from across the room at an angle, closing in on my right hand. As I play a series of wrong notes in time to the music, the camera pans up to my face – the face of a man trying to prise a stripped screw from a door frame with a chisel.
Then, suddenly, it’s over. The director says cut, the assembled crowd applauds, and people around me start eating cupcakes. I think: you have missed your chance to get this right.
It is only when I see the final cut of the video later that I realise how misplaced my fears were. I appear only fleetingly, there are almost no shots where you can see both my hands at the same time, and my pained expression could easily be taken for resolve. Really, I should’ve been more worried about my hair.
In any case, I feel rescued.
