My bass amp weighs more than the entire new pedestrian experience and nobody has offered me a lift.
LONDON, England (Seeker News) – I woke up with a bass amp on my conscience, which is where it lives, because my back lost that argument years ago.
The amp is called the Duchess. She is older than my band, my flat and most of my opinions, and she has never once been carried anywhere without complaint. Today she had to be carried to rehearsal, then possibly to Oxford Street, then home again, and I resent every step in advance.
Morning: Tea, Toast and a Planning Meeting With Myself
Tea first, then the phone. The headline everyone is sharing is that Oxford Street has gone traffic-free, nearly a kilometre of it, from Orchard Street to Great Portland Street. No cars, no buses, no bicycles. Just people, drifting about in the open air like a school trip that has lost its teacher.
The mayor called it “a momentous day for London, a momentous day for Oxford Street”. I have had momentous days. One involved a van, a flight of stairs and a snare drum that rolled into a canal. I do not recall anyone closing a road for it.
I am not against the idea. I am merely a person who has spent thirty years loading equipment into vehicles that were not allowed to stop, and I would like it noted that nobody ever pedestrianised a street for a bassist.
Late Morning: Rehearsal at Gasket Lane
The band is called the Gutter Surveyors. We rehearse at Gasket Lane Rehearsal Rooms, a basement that smells of damp carpet, old cymbals and a faint note of regret. Room Four has a sign on the door that says “No Heckling the Drummer”, which is a rule Dervla wrote herself and enforces with a stick.
Clive, our guitarist, arrived in a suit. Clive is an actuary on weekdays and a rebel from approximately six in the evening. He asked whether we could “run the set at gig volume but with the door closed”, which is the most British sentence ever spoken by a man holding a Telecaster.
- Song one: a fast one about the 38 bus, which runs late and is therefore authentic.
- Song two: a slow one about a landlord, which I wrote in four minutes.
- Song three: unnamed, mostly feedback, widely described as “brave”.
- Song four: the one Clive wrote, which is a love song and is not allowed at our gigs.
Lunchtime: The Council of Doubt
Over a cheese roll Dervla read out the other side of the story. According to ITV London’s report on the plan, the street handles around half a million visitors a day, and the changes are a first phase, temporary so that real-time data can shape the permanent design. Westminster City Council’s deputy leader warned of “a danger that we will have all of the downsides and too little upside”.
That is a fine sentence. I would like it as a lyric. “All of the downsides and too little upside” is the story of every rehearsal room I have ever paid for by the hour.
The same report said there will be two new public squares, more than 100 seats and over 50 new trees by the end of spring. I told the band that in my youth the only place you found a tree on Oxford Street was a plastic one in a shop window, and a man called Eddie sold us a half-price fuzz pedal there once, unbelievably, from behind it.
Afternoon: Vinyl and the Holy Lights
I walked the long way round to Dust Jacket Records, which is a shop with a bell on the door and a man called Gareth behind the till who has not smiled since the compact disc. I flicked through the seven-inch singles for forty minutes and bought nothing, which in vinyl terms is a sort of meditation.
Gareth had also read the Oxford Street news. He pointed out that the Christmas lights there, a tradition since 1959, are Harry Potter-themed this year. This is the first time I have found myself genuinely in sympathy with a candle in a window. We have argued about everything in punk for fifty years, but I suspect not even the Gutter Surveyors would start a feud over a lightbulb shaped like a lightning bolt.
I did, privately, work out that the lights will now hang above a street with no vehicles. A whole kilometre of people looking upwards. I give it a week before somebody sets up a busking pitch directly underneath, plays three chords and calls it a movement.
Evening: A Note on Money
Tonight there is a small gig, in a back room, for a fee of “exposure and a bag of crisps”. I am not complaining. I am simply noting that the promoter has announced that there will be a payment structure in the new year, and I have heard this sort of promise before from people with excellent coats.
It reminded me of a piece I saw on farm.fm about capitalism forgetting payday and rural voters noticing. I read the headline aloud on the bus and a woman nodded at me with great seriousness. It is the whole business model of every band in this city, in one sentence, and it works in a field as well as a basement.
I read the London headlines most nights at The London Prat, which keeps up with the capital far better than I keep up with my rent, and I added some more London news to my evening reading while the kettle boiled. The glow of the screen was the only light in the flat that was not a fuse box.
Night: Carrying the Duchess Home
We did not play Oxford Street. I decided the Duchess had suffered enough. Instead I did what any serious bassist does after a day of debating the pedestrian future of London and carried a sixteen-kilo amp up four flights while a neighbour I have never met watched in silence from behind a door chain.
Before bed I wrote a few lines of a new song called “Orchard Street Nil Cars”, in which the chorus is simply a list of things that cannot be driven past a shop. It is the best thing I have written this year, and it is mostly nouns.
If you fancy more of my daily notes, you will find more of my daily notes at The London Prat, where London gets the deadpan treatment it deserves. And if you want a lesson in how English spoken on the street works, spend ten minutes with some Cockney rhyming slang, which is the only genuine folk music this city has left that does not need an amp.
Goodnight, Duchess. Goodnight, Oxford Street. Goodnight, Clive, who is not allowed to sing the love song.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/