Editors have discovered the quiet song, which is more than anyone has managed on the 8.15 into town.
MANCHESTER, England – The keyboard stand gets a seat on the bus before I do, and I spend the whole of Oxford Road holding a flask, a folder of scales and a tote bag containing nine kazoos.
Nobody on a bus ever asks about the kazoos. They look at them the way you look at a stranger’s tattoo, with respect and no follow-up questions. I teach adults, and adults learning an instrument need a lot of small, silly equipment before they are brave enough to need the large, serious kind.
Early: A Flask, A Pole and a Rodeo
I am standing because the seats are taken by people who have done nothing to deserve them. The driver takes every roundabout like a man who has been told there is a prize. My coffee has a lid, but the lid is a rumour.
It was in this position that I remembered a headline I had saved for later, a farm.fm report about ranch rodeo events adding a calf chase while carrying coffee. I have not read the whole thing, because I was busy carrying coffee, but the title alone is the most accurate description of public transport in the north-west that I have ever seen. Real ranchers sweep the medals. I would like it noted that I arrived with a full flask and two thirds of a cappuccino on my coat.
Mid-Morning: Colin and the Scale of C
My first pupil of the day is Colin, a retired signalman who has decided at long last to learn the clarinet. He plays with the focus of a man who has spent forty years making sure two things do not hit each other.
We do C major. We do it again. By the sixth time the scale has stopped being a scale and become a hostage situation. Colin pauses at the top and says, quite seriously, “Is it meant to sound like it’s apologising?”
It is, as it happens. Beginners’ clarinets always sound like they are asking permission to be in the room. I tell him that this is not a flaw. I tell him that every professional once sounded like a goose being told bad news by a vicar.
Lunch: The Quiet Album
I eat a sandwich in the stairwell and read about Editors, who released their eighth studio album, Surface, Echo and Sound, on a Friday at the end of October. The band sat down with John Kennedy for a track-by-track playback, and the Radio X write-up of that playback is the best thing I have read all week.
Frontman Tom Smith describes the opening title track as “very stripped-back and pretty fragile.” He says that the band have a habit of making even their quiet songs big and dramatic, but this time they felt “less afraid to be small.” Justin Lockey, the lead guitarist, talks about going back to basics, and the band talk about leaving imperfections in rather than polishing them out.
A band with a long career has stopped hiding the wobble. Colin has been practising that for three weeks and was only ever doing it by accident.
A separate interview with the band, in an English-language piece from Il Foglio, says the record was made with real drums, bass, acoustic guitars and a mandolin, after three albums leaning towards the electronic. Tom Smith wrote a lot of it at home in Gloucestershire, with the rest of the band staying in the house. This strikes me as either the best way to make an album or the plot of a very polite horror film.
I copy the “less afraid to be small” line onto a sticky note and put it on my keyboard stand. It is going to save me about four hundred explanations.
Afternoon: The Wind Band in the School Hall
On Wednesdays I run a community wind band in a rented school hall that smells of floor polish and unresolved dinners. There are eleven players, two music stands that work, and a drum kit assembled from lost property. The cymbal has a name tag. It says “Mr Pettigrew.” Nobody has seen Mr Pettigrew since the autumn term.
Today we rehearse a piece that begins quietly. This is a problem because the band’s idea of quiet is a lorry reversing. I raise my hand, which in the world of conducting means “less,” and the trombones raise theirs, which in the world of trombones means “more.”
Then I read them the line from the album, in full voice, from the sticky note. “Less afraid to be small.” There is a silence. Dolores on the flute says, “Was that a threat?” Then they play the opening at the volume of a held breath, and for four bars the hall sounds like a real band in a real room. On bar five a tuba drops a folder. We carry on. The imperfection stays in. I am told this is now policy.
Evening: Seventeen Gigs and None of Them in Manchester
I get home, take off my coat and discover the cappuccino has set into a sort of beige lacquer. Over tea I open Time Out’s list of the best gigs in London this month, which has seventeen entries, among them Kelela in Brixton, Black Country, New Road at the London Coliseum and the Avalanches at the Roundhouse. It also mentions Jessie J at St Paul’s Cathedral, which is a sentence I never expected to type.
I do not live in London. I live in a city with its own gigs and its own weather, and both are underrated. But a list like that makes me feel like someone reading a restaurant menu through a window. I make a note to get down there in the spring, when trains are cheaper and my coat is clean.
It is also a reminder of why I keep writing about all this. My editors at The London Prat have a handy way of reminding me that a diary only works if the small things are told as seriously as the large ones. I have been reading up on how the British Onion tradition does exactly that, and the UK checklist for telling humour from real news is a good bedtime read for anyone who wishes to be sure which of the two they are in.
Last job of the day is to wash the kazoos. All nine. In the sink. Colin would be proud of the discipline, and the bus would be baffled by the whole business. I put the kettle on and leave the sticky note where it is.
You can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat, if you can stand them.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/