It’s a cold Sunday morning and I’m walking down an alley alongside the Tube tracks, fingers laced round a coffee from the place next to the station. Three quarters of the way down I stop at an anonymous blue door in a brick archway and knock. There is no answer. I push at the door. Nothing happens.
One of my favourite parts of being in a band is the rigorously enforced idleness: even if you’re a dawn-greeting, workaholic musician, the guy in charge of unlocking the rehearsal rooms is never going to turn up before 11am. I am permitted to consider myself ambitious for arriving at 10.45.
I’m about to walk back to the studio office when I hear faint muttering from the other side of the door.
“Hello?” I say.
“Hang on,” says the voice. “What? Oh no.”
It turns out the fiddle player is already inside, but he can’t figure out how to work the lock. After two minutes of what sounds like fingernails scraping against wood, the door suddenly opens.
“Did you sleep here?” I say.
“No, the guy just let me in,” he says. “But he didn’t show me how to get out.”
“Is it just us?” I say.
“So far,” he says. I think: when did I become such a go-getter?
One by one the rest of the band drift in. Our stuff is still set up from the night before, so it’s a simple matter of tuning up and playing in our coats until the room gets warm.
We are here to rehearse for the initial leg of our first tour in almost three years: Bury, Newcastle, Settle, Bristol, Exmouth, Dorchester. There is a lot to learn – our new album adds 12 more tunes to a large repertoire of songs I cannot remember how to play. If you include the songs I never knew how to play, it must amount to almost 100.
We pick something easy for the first song of the day, although it is not easy for me.
“Before we start,” I say. “Can you just remind me how it starts? And also, how it ends?”
As the song gets under way, I quickly realise there was something I forgot to ask about: the middle. I lose my way about eight bars in and never recover. I have a recurring nightmare in which I find myself sitting an exam for a course I have never attended. Actually it’s more of a traumatic memory than a nightmare, but it still wakes me up three or four times a year, and this stupid song reminds me of it.
When it’s over I don’t look up to see if anyone else is looking at me.
“I think we should probably do that again,” says the guitar player.
Surprisingly, the second time through the song starts to materialise under my fingers; by the end I feel pretty confident. This happens again and again throughout the morning.
After just a few hours my playing has improved to the point where I feel able to laugh at the mistakes of others.
There is a knock at the studio door. The fiddle player is closest; once again, he struggles with the interior latch mechanism. When the door opens I see my wife standing on the other side of it. I cannot imagine what she’s doing there, but then I remember: I asked her to come.
“Hello!” she says, brightly, as the guitar player’s wife follows her inside. “We’ve come for some music!”
She has not come for any music. She has come because I asked her to drop off the car so I could ferry my stuff home that evening. She refused, but since then she’s been for a walk with the guitar player’s wife, which has evidently left her in a generous mood.
She sits on a fake leather sofa facing me, arms folded, wearing an expectant expression.
We launch into the next song on the list. My face reddens as I stare fixedly at the point where the ceiling meets the wall. I find it much easier to play in front of strangers than I do my wife. I think: I wish I was in Bury.
Ten minutes later the tables have turned. My wife’s smile is frozen; she doesn’t know how to escape. Fortunately for her, lunch is declared after two songs. She hands me the car keys.
“I left it slung across the middle of the alley,” she says. “I hope that’s OK.”
“I’ll move it,” I say, following her out.
One of my other recurring nightmares involves parking in this very alley, full of tight angles, reversing vans and busy bodywork establishments. But it’s a quiet afternoon, and as I gently scrape the wing mirror along a concrete pillar, I think: this is the least of my problems.
