Music Club

I wrote the following eight years ago:

"Nile Rodgers has a system that he calls 'DHM'. This, disappointingly, only means 'deep hidden meaning' but I like what it means in practice. Producers, he says, as well as performers and listeners, have to attend to what a song really is. What is it about? Are the band doing it justice? Does the melody do it justice? Would it sound better – brighter; funkier – if it was played higher up the neck? If you want to listen to something, in other words, you have to really listen to it. I keep thinking of Flaubert. (I'm sorry. This is the way my mind works.) He said,

'People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.'

This is what I feel about music. It isn't there to help along your dinner party. It doesn't exist just so that you can drizzle it, like olive oil, over your life. Many of my most memorable nights have been because of music. I've been to some amazing gigs, but I don't mean that: I mean nights spent in people's houses. I used to have a tiny deck from Woolworths – it looked like a Dansette – and my flatmate and I would take turns playing songs for each other. Often, we'd talk (shout, rather) over the bits that we most wanted the other to hear but that was part of it, too. In the end, the talking became a kind of ritual. The evening wouldn't have felt complete without it.

Which brings me to Music Club. It's very male of my friends and I, I suppose, to have formalised what is essentially just a night spent listening to music on each other's phones; to have structured not only individual evenings but also the year itself, so that, just after Christmas, we all go to the pub and decide which of the songs our 'archivist' has recorded should go on a CD. (Fascinating to see a word go from a joke to a job description.) It's difficult to convey just how satisfying all of this is. The meal before we start; the talk of 'setting a precedent' if one of us, say, plays two tracks by the same artist; the Ivor Cutler track at the end; even words like 'archivist' and 'club' – it all lends things an air of importance that, actually, I think is right and proper. Because, you see, we love this stuff. The music, I mean. Everybody listens and the only rule is that you have to really like what you play or, if not, be pretty sure that someone else might like it."

Eight years on, and this is all still true. This month, in fact, was our tenth anniversary – our fortieth night – and it's become as much a part of our social calendar as Christmas, say, or the end of term. So what's kept us together? Partly, it's the willingness to take a track apart in the same way that someone else might isolate the parts of a car's engine. We're harsh, it's true. I once said: "The only good thing about that track is that I never have to listen to it again." Marika Papagika, an artist whose record I presented to the group as proudly as if I'd given birth to it, is still dismissively called "that woman" by the other three, and you have to imagine their faces here: the way that they all look like I wafted something terrible under their nose. But this is all to the good. In aesthetics, I maintain, you have to love hard and you have to hate hard. If you're capable, as we are, of walking out of a room because you hate a track, then you are equally capable of what I think of as the Big Feeling: the moment when a track, or just its beat - maybe even its orchestration or the quality of a voice - can have you leaning forward. Music, for us, is a shared drug. Apart from alcohol, it's the only drug. And you can often see how powerful or not each hit is by the way people are shifting in their chair.

The others? This is what I wrote eight years ago:

"Chas is something in insurance. I use this phrase deliberately because I don't know what he does. I like to think that he's very important: that, if you make a huge, definitive mistake, you have to go to Chas; that he's sitting in an office with a trap-door. Chas is very fond of Americana; of anything, pretty much, with dirty guitars. But he likes Tricky, too, and Joe Jackson and the jazzier, more experimental end of rap. Rich, meanwhile, has a background in advertising. He plays songs in the same way that you might play a winning hand at cards. He says: "Right"; sometimes he even rubs his hands together. He displays, late in the evening, a laudable desire to weird us out. It's difficult to summarise what he does and doesn't like but he does do a lovely line in jazz. Funk, too.

Which leaves Peter. Peter is an editor and travel writer. It shows, I think: he'll play anything from Zambian rock to Swedish funk. He also has a weakness for a certain type of female voice. Something tough but vulnerable; something, he says, that "reminds me of the women in Thomas Hardy". He also has a knack for what I think of as popular experimentalism. When I play something strange, the other three have been known to react like I've broken wind. Peter can play pretty much anything and we'll end up nodding our heads and laughing."

Which is all still true. But what seems truer to me now is the way that all our tastes have merged. Or perhaps not merged. It's more that they've entwined themselves around each other. I can still send people out of the room by playing William Burroughs or Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman's "Lunar Rhapsody". Richard (bizarrely) hates the B-52s. But, on a good night (and they're all good nights), you no longer know where the soul is going to come from, nor the Americana nor the punk nor the jazz nor the rap singer whose backing sounds like jazz, but jazz played backwards. It feels, sometimes, like the best days of writing feel when the material seems to be choosing itself. Certainly, it very often feels as though each track is being generated out of the track before. Mostly, these days, I don't drink. But the feeling is often the same: that of being carried aloft. Clive James once said about Tom Stoppard that,

"...not only did I find that [his writing] tasted like champagne – I found that in drinking it I felt like a jockey. Jockeys drink champagne as an everyday tipple, since it goes to the head without thickening the waist. Travesties to me seemed not an exotic indulgence, but the stuff of life."

Which is very similar to how I feel about Music Club. Is the music esoteric? Yup. Obscure? Sometimes. Almost unlistenable? It has been known. But it is, for me, and for my fellow Clubees, the stuff of life. Not just the music, but the accompanying circumstances. Mostly, we do it in a shed. A well-appointed shed, I hasten to add, with a decent sound system, and it always feels like home. There's none of the queasy play-acting that you can get at dinner parties. Which brings me to the most important reason of all: the people who I share it with, all of whom can literally make me laugh until I cry. With all of whom, moreover, I feel so comfortable that I've sailed beyond relaxed behaviour into... the opposite? Not quite. Its natural corollary, I almost think. I have genuinely lost my temper at some perceived faux pas. (Too many banjos, usually.) They've had to tiptoe out of my house while I lay asleep in an armchair. I've been near to tears. I've fallen out of an armchair. I've played a lot of tracks that I've known they will all hate. And they're still here. God bless 'em. This is for them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux_whsihlM0