Musician’s Dilemma

May 11, 2008

I went to see the Dirty Projectors on Friday night. charleston and spoombung have already given rock-solid accounts of how magnificent it was, and I’d have to agree. I’d go to absurd lengths to see this band at the moment – although, having said that, I haven’t seized the opportunity to see them play with Battles at the Astoria later this week, mainly because it’ll be rammed solid with people, and I prefer spacious venues that are about 2/3 empty.

Co-incidentally, or perhaps not, the Dome in Tufnell Park was about 2/3 empty on Friday night. Which is probably bad news for the promoter, and if the Dirty Projectors were on some kind of percentage deal it was probably bad for them, too, and of course they’d probably rather be playing to a packed house – but for me it was perfect. No idiots blocking your line of vision or screaming at each other or accidentally pouring their pint of Kronenbourg in your bag. In fact, the only major irritant of the evening were the second band on the bill, a French group called Cheveu.

I’ve since been to their MySpace page, and actually they don’t sound that bad at all. But in context they were just profoundly annoying. The night was running late; 95% of the people there had paid their £8 to see the Dirty Projectors, but Cheveu, having failed to have a soundcheck, didn’t just quickly sort out a linecheck and get going. They faffed about – loudly – for about 25 minutes, trying to achieve a perfect mix in their monitors; all the time the clock was ticking, people were looking at their watches and wondering if the gig would actually finish before the last tube left. Then they left the stage in order to make their grand entrance – which no-one really gave a shit about – with the guitarist wearing a large pair of amusing red spectacles. Nice touch. That’s a bit like Frank Sidebottom wearing a pink tie, but at least Frank has a few levels of irony operating.

Anyway, their singer bellowed loudly into three microphones over bog standard bar-chords and Casio beats, thrashing about like a misunderstood genius. While the Dirty Projectors were playing, he also thrashed about at the front like a misunderstood genius, trying to attract attention to himself. He was actually an easily understood twat. So there you go. Gig review over, and mainly about the band I particularly disliked.

*

I emptied my shed today. It yielded up some interesting contents, including half an old sofa, a broken watering can, my grandad’s cut-glass brandy decanter, two small teddy bears that had almost completely perished, 700 Spearmint CDs, 360 Host 7″s, 1200 Free French CDs, 300 Gag 7″s, 50 Keatons LPs and a hoe. Along with those were huge numbers of cardboard boxes that once contained items of musical technology that have either already broken, or are certainly well outside their warranty period. Surveying the pile of junk in our overgrown communal back garden was like a depressing overview of my failure to make a living as a musician.

(But to tell you the truth, I quite like that. If playing in bands is about anything, it’s about glorious, unadulterated failure, the kind of appalling, argument-filled, cash-haemorrhaging f#ckups that made those odd moments of triumph seem like gold-plated heavenly intervention.)

There are few things as funny, in retrospect, as colossal piles of your own unsold CDs and vinyl. You had such hopes, at one point. You actually thought “hey, if I press up 2,000 copies instead of 1,000, the per-unit price is slashed massively – that’s got to be a good idea.” Of course, it was a terrible idea, because you only sold 142 of the bastards. Those spider-strewn boxes you see on the right, behind that tree, are a beautiful symbol of youthful optimism. My former boss and Spearmint’s former manager, Nick Hobbs, used to be very into the idea of having a large stock of ones own back catalogue. It was his opinion that these records would, once you had achieved fame, start to sell steadily, generating you a regular income. To him, these CDs resembled a potential cash mountain. To me, today, they resemble a considerable burden and present a considerable storage problem.

So do I sling them in a skip? Or keep them? Maybe I should keep some of them… but how many? Is it likely that anyone will ever want to buy them? Or in 3 years time, will the CD – or indeed music as a whole – be viewed with the same amusement and scorn that we currently have for the 8-track cartridge, top-loading washing machines or powdered egg? Please provide answers below. I’m supposed to speak at a music conference in Brighton on Friday, and I’m thinking of using this simultaneously depressing and amusing scenario as my over-arching theme.

Tank: What do you call your parents?

April 27, 2003

My parents have a christian name each: Pamela and David. I know this because I’ve heard people address them as such, and they’ve reacted with “yes?” or “that’s me”.

When I was 9 or 10 years old, changes were afoot. We moved house, I changed schools, I started to tentatively explore the exciting possibilities of swearing, and began to think of the prettier girls in my class as more than just arbiters of exceptionally neat handwriting. Suddenly I felt that it was no longer appropriate to call my mother “mummy”. It sounded wrong, like a precursor to informing her that I had soiled my bed linen, and it labelled me as an infant - at a time when I was showing great promise in coming to grips with the intricacies of Venn diagrams. Similarly, I could no longer refer to my father as “daddy”. I had no idea that young offenders had appropriated the word and were making it sound vicious and terrifying, that in borstal close acquaintances of the “daddy” would command immediate respect and have unrestricted access to switchblades and knuckledusters; all I knew was that I, a polite young boy who had never so much as been put in detention, made the same word sound as if I urgently required a double-scoop of ice-cream, or to be pushed higher on the swings.

Things had to change. But some unknown force prevented me from making that leap towards maturity that would lead me to call my dad dad. Or my mum mum. It sounded wrong and I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the uttering of these mono-syllabic three letter words would suddenly bring to my parents’ attention the fact that I would shortly begin to grow pubic hair. I couldn’t have that, I had to make sure that they would never, ever know. So in characteristically cavalier fashion I decided to postpone this coming of age while I consulted my peers. I began to observe more closely how they were coping by inviting myself round to their houses and cheerfully meeting and greeting more mums and dads than was strictly necessary. During rainy afternoons indoors spent listening to Adam Ant, playing Ker-Plunk and swigging flat cola, my hosts would inevitably feel the need to whiningly holler to their mother or father – and as I heard them do so I felt a twinge of jealousy; at home I was unable to call out to my own parents and would have to make the journey downstairs or into the next room in order to ask a question, or to simply dispense hard facts. No doubt surprised by my grace, charm and newly found reserves of energy, my parents must nevertheless have been puzzled by the intense gaze that I would adopt to address them, in order to make absolutely clear which of them I was talking to.

While doing this important research into the dynamics of other families I remember visiting my friend Ed, and my jaw dropping as I heard his older sisters Katie and Sarah refer to their parents as “John” and “Angela”. This suggested a totally inappropriate level of intimacy. The kind of people I was on first name terms with at that time were those I would either tussle playfully with in the street, or earnestly engage in discussion of the relative merits of Kola Kubes and Sherbert Lemons. My parents fell in neither category. Since then I’ve come across people who find this overfamiliar chumminess perfectly normal. Phil called his parents Paul and Barb(ara) from the age of two. His mother claims that this started as soon as he noticed that there was more than one mummy and daddy in the world, and he felt the need to differentiate. Perhaps his own emotional hurdle came when he encountered a different Paul later in life, and had to resist the overwhelming temptation not to ask him for pocket money or get into the back of his car. Still later I met a trendy Christian couple called Mike and Mary, who insisted on their children using their first names and would chide them thoroughly if they ever deviated. But they were both in a disappointingly bland rock band called “The Royal Rendezvous”, which might explain that particular brand of quirkiness.

But it wasn’t just the forward thinking, luxuriously-bearded and austerely-sandalled parents who were being addressed in this way. Jim’s older sister started calling her mum “Sandra” because they weren’t getting on, rather than wanting to project a bogus picture of cosy co-habitation. Patrick claimed that he just always loathed the sound of the word “dad”, and was presumably enchanted by the possibility of using the far more mellifluous word “Ken”. Without exception, these children would go back to using “mum” and “dad” as soon as they were in need of food, information, shelter, or more often, cash. But I still had nothing to revert to when I was in need, no special term of endearment, and even by my teenage years was still in the unenviable position of being unable to attract my mother’s attention from the other side of the street without resorting to shouting “oi” or “coo-ee” or “you, who nursed me through infancy.” I wish in retrospect that she had noticed my discomfort and actually told me what to say, instead of leaving me to grapple with the problem. Although I remember John’s parents firmly leading him him back down the terrifying path of “mummy” and daddy” as they considered the use of “mum” and “dad” too common. He should have been thankful that they stopped short of “mater” and “pater”, terms I have only ever heard jokingly uttered in a plummy accent, but suspect must actually be used by some children. Probably before loudly complaining that nanny is late running their bath.

Another disconcerting scenario I came across would be that of the mother referring to her husband as “dad” and the father replying to “mum”. I worried terribly about the confusion this could cause in the minds of any young children within earshot. They must have had considerable trouble working out exactly who their brothers were, why one of them seemed to be a lot older than the others, why he was allowed to smoke - and exactly what his relationship was with the older woman in the house, who seemed to be their sister? Or perhaps not? And who exactly were their parents?

By the time I went to university I was still wrestling with these issues. I found myself floundering during phone calls as I asked my mother if I could speak to “him, please” or asking my father if his wife was at home. I noticed crises in other people’s lives presenting them with similar problems to mine. Joanna had been addressing her boiler-suited pig farmer father as “dad” for years, when suddenly she was forced to switch to the affectionate but more distant “pops” when he embarrassingly mishandled his midlife crisis by buying a leather jacket and a Volvo 480 before holidaying alone in Florida. A ginger haired Mancunian friend of a friend called Tom became a heroin and jelly addict, and then decided in his drug addled state to start using the radical and slightly surreal “Bid” and “Bod”. Constant rowing in Rob’s home led to whispered discussions between the siblings about whether “moneybags” or “the war office” were in the more dangerous mood. And as Andrew became entrenched in the world of student left wing politics and increasingly resentful of his middle class upbringing, he would be overheard on the phone sarcastically drawling the words “Doctor”, “Sir” or “Emperor” at his father, or on a particularly bad day, “Your Excellency”.

Now I’m into my 30s and I’m still not sure how to resolve this. Christmas and birthday cards pose a particular challenge, and I try to conceal the problem by using gentle humour and greetings such as “to my dearest relative” or “warmest personal regards from me, to you.” All around me people have moved on to having cute, knowing sobriquets that they can write on the envelope, “Prim and Proper”. “Top Dog & Top Cat.” “Marge & Fee”. “Fa & Nant”. “Mother Trout & Father Trout”. “Monkey & Sea Dog.” The idea of giving my parents nicknames gives me sweaty palms. I hear my friend Graham referring to “Horse” and I know he means his dad. Maurice – Horace – Horace the Horse – Horse. The same way I used to refer to Martin Cutler as Sausage. Martin – Cutler – Cutlet – Lamb – Pork – Sausage. But a nickname for my mum? Maybe I should call and just ask her what she would prefer to be called. But what if my dad answers the phone?