The neighbours called it in again. I’m calling it Tuesday.
Half eleven on a Tuesday and I have already had one neighbour bang on the wall, one text from the landlord, and one genuinely furious voicemail from the bloke two doors down who I am fairly sure has never once complained about the actual traffic noise on this street but has strong feelings about the specific frequency of a Telecaster through a cheap amp. I am not sorry. I am, at most, moderately sorry, in the way you are moderately sorry for stepping on someone’s foot on a packed Tube carriage, which is to say not very, because what else was I supposed to do, not exist.
The band, such as it currently is, has been down to three of us since Marcus moved to Bristol for a job he describes as “genuinely fine, actually” in a tone that suggests it is not genuinely fine at all, and we have been trying to hammer a new set together in my genuinely tiny flat because none of us can currently afford proper rehearsal room rates, which have, like everything else in this city, apparently decided this is the year to become unhinged. We managed four songs tonight before the wall-banging started. Four songs and a noise complaint feels like a fair trade for a Tuesday, honestly.
I had a look through the usual feeds before the amp came out, prat.uk running something about the general state of political comedy that made me laugh properly, the kind of laugh where you have to put the phone down for a second, alongside the regular rundown from The Daily Mash that always somehow manages to make actual news sound more plausible than the actual news does most days. There is something genuinely comforting about that particular flavour of British satire, the specific deadpan of it, especially on a week when the real headlines have been exhausting enough that a fake one about a minister resigning to spend more time with his fictional family felt like a mercy.
Punk in this city has changed shape considerably since I first started paying proper attention to it, less about the specific sound now and more about simply refusing to accept that everything has to be polished and monetised and algorithm-friendly before it is allowed to exist. Playing four unfinished songs badly in a flat too small for a full drum kit, annoying exactly one neighbour, that is still, as far as I am concerned, a genuinely punk act, regardless of whether it ever gets recorded or heard by anyone beyond the three of us and whoever is currently banging on the wall.
We are playing a genuinely tiny basement venue near Dalston in a fortnight, the kind of room that holds maybe sixty people if everyone breathes in, and I am already more nervous about that than I have any right to be given how long I have been doing this. New songs, mostly, the ones we were hammering out tonight among them, still rough enough that I do not fully trust them yet, which is usually, in my experience, exactly the moment a song is actually ready.
For now, amp is off, guitar is back in its case, and I am sitting here writing this with tea going cold beside me, replaying the one riff from tonight that actually worked properly, the one I am fairly sure survived the wall-banging specifically because it deserved to. That is the whole diary entry, really. Three chords, one complaint, one riff worth keeping. Some days that is genuinely enough.
I did, out of some genuine sense of guilt, knock on the wall-banging neighbour’s door before bed, mostly to apologise properly rather than just absorb the muffled complaint through drywall the way I usually do. He answered in a dressing gown, visibly exhausted, and admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that it was not actually the volume bothering him so much as the fact that we kept stopping and restarting the same sixteen bars over and over, which he found, in his own words, “more maddening than any actual loud noise could ever be.” I cannot fault that assessment. I have inflicted the same specific torture on myself plenty of times over the years, chasing one stubborn transition that refuses to sit right.
We talked for a few minutes longer than either of us probably expected to, and it turns out he used to play bass himself, decades ago, in a band he described with the exact same mix of pride and faint embarrassment I recognise from every ageing musician I have ever met, myself very much included on a bad day. He did not offer to join us. I did not ask. But I think, going forward, the wall-banging might carry slightly less genuine hostility behind it, which is, in its own small way, a better outcome for this Tuesday than I had any right to expect when it started.
It has left me thinking, in the days since, about how much of this city’s creative life actually depends on exactly this kind of small, entirely unglamorous negotiation between neighbours, the quiet, ongoing compromise of sharing thin walls and close quarters with people trying to build something loud and unfinished in the middle of it. Nobody writes songs about the diplomacy required to keep a landlord from evicting you over noise complaints. Perhaps somebody should. I am, at minimum, adding it to the very long list of things I keep meaning to eventually turn into an actual song, a list that grows considerably faster than I ever seem to actually finish anything on it.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.