My band

In one of my last pieces, I promised to "keep you posted" but, in practice, what this generally means is me wandering happily from one preoccupation to another while trying to keep the intitial subject just about in view. (More than one student, while I'm teaching them, has shaken their head in exasperation.)

So. Hyde Park last year. All day, people had been referring to something called Stevie Wonder; something that sounded like a cross between an explosion, a subset of one’s memories and the Chrysler Building. When he came out, though, he seemed a little scattered. The whole thing had an odd stop/start rhythm: you danced to the things you loved then stood around, resentfully, while his family did a turn. You clapped your own response to what he was playing, your own memory of it, as much as you did the songs. He kept breaking the fourth wall – laughing and clearing his throat and speaking in what sounded like half-koans; odd little non-sequiturs – but then he looked around him, lost, and retreated back into the safety of what he thinks we think that Stevie Wonder is. He doesn’t always seem to know whether he’s sick of this or delights in it. Man kann sich totsiegen: “you can triumph yourself to death”. In other words, he seemed, sometimes, to be lost in the thing that we were all there to celebrate. He was great, but the whole experience left me feeling a little out of sorts. In the end, I was rude to a tuk tuk driver. Ostensibly this was because he tried to charge me £80 to travel from Hyde Park to Oxford Circus. But it was more than that. Partly, it was all of the above, although, to be fair, my wife and I did dance a lot. It was the crowd, too; their lassitude. But mostly, I think, I wanted (just like I always want when I'm at a gig) to swap places with him.

Did I, though? Do I really? I'm still not sure. I've been writing songs since I was eight. The first one was supposed to sound like Joni Mitchell. Mitchell’s chords step slyly away from you even as you can feel the tune accommodate itself to them. Her voice journeys from sweetness to deliberate coarseness; if the chords are a kind of question then the voice is their explanation. My tune, meanwhile, sounds like it’s walking very carefully upstairs. It waits for a while then plods back down again.

Still, it serves. Winsome, yes, and self-pitying but at least it's genuinely so. After I'd written it, I couldn't seem to stop. I’ve never recorded anything, not properly, but I still write songs. It’s still satisfying; necessary, even. It’s something that my hands do of their own accord and often it feels less like a form of expression than like carpentry. But then something shakes loose; it leaps free of you – seems already to be there, even as you’re trying to work out what it is.

Impossible to describe. At the age of eight or nine, I already had a heightened sense of all of this; of the fact that what music was was almost indistinguishable from what it did. I remember sitting, cross-legged, in the school’s assembly hall. We were listening to the school orchestra, and it isn’t entirely reliable, this memory, because what I remember hearing can’t possibly be the thing I think I heard: something both seamless and powerful. Partly, though, it’s still possible to verify my own reaction. Even now, when I listen to the main theme from Lawrence of Arabia, I can feel a muted but legitimate echo of what I felt. I still follow the tune, its sinuousness, with my head. It’s the same with “Gloomy Sunday”. We’ll get to Elvis Costello but suffice to say that I once saw him do this song, an old Billie Holliday number, on Saturday morning television. The chords are like a more legible version of Mitchell’s. They move in a slow procession; they hang there, like smoke, or else, like smoke, they craft a sullen halo around the voice. They speak more effectively – in a more accessible language – than the lyrics do. I want to say that I was dumbstruck but that isn’t true. It was more that I felt enlightened. It was a whole new subject; a whole new palate. And if there were suddenly all of these new colours – all of these beiges and browns and umbers - I was eager to plunge into them.

And then? The following is from Bright Thing, a novel that's still trying to find a home. All that you need to know is that "he" is me.

He was doing it every chance he could. He’d learned the basic chords: G, C and D, then A and E and then, after a little while, his fingers had begun to mould an F. You have to push down, hard, and it hurts at first. It’s only an overmastering desire that keeps you there. The difficulty’s in determining what that desire is. I’m tempted to say that he felt more himself but, actually, it was more often the opposite. It was a way of escaping everything: his father and mother and the ...sense of anxious misery that seemed to prowl the rooms. Part of the attraction was that he was expressed not by a voice, still adenoidal, or his awkward body, but by a thing whose structure was invariable. It protected him. It was him – his voice and hands – but it also wasn’t. It enclosed him for as long as it took to sing. He would send his voice, uncertainly, up at the ceiling but the song’s chords were already as determined as a building or a road. Secure (happy, in fact, insofar as he ever understood what that was supposed to mean), he was able to throw himself into it. He used to do this literally. He used to dance sideways with his head. Or forwards, up and down in time to an imaginary drum. There was a lot of imagining. He felt different. Absorbed. Absolved. The thrashing of a chord, his throat tightening around a note that felt, right then, as tangible as anything he’d ever felt, were as close as he could come to knowing who he was. 

It all sounded like him, is what I’m trying to say. The connection isn’t linear: it’s not that one form of anxiety was expressed, exactly, by the other. It’s as though… Oh, I don’t know. The song provided something that felt like him, but a him that was able to make sense of itself; that was solid and confident and, ultimately, unafraid. He was amplified, tenfold. 

It was addictive, all of that. I wrote many songs, and I still do, and, yes, I still want to get the band back together. I will never not want to get the band back together. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good. I couldn’t play. Often, I couldn’t sing. In my head, though, our next iteration always sounds fantastic. I play songs on the piano or a guitar and I can hear the horns, blaring away in unison. But, of course, there aren't any horns. It's all in my head, the past just as much as the future is. (All of our past iterations sound fantastic too.) There's a quote from André Aciman that perfectly sums this up:

“…the life we’re still owed and cannot live transcends and outlasts everything, because it is part yearned for, part remembered, and part imagined, and it cannot die and it cannot go away because it never, ever really was.”

It's a past made more vivid by the fact that it never happened. I often wonder if I should do anything with the songs but I think, on balance, that I shouldn't. I've spent over twenty years, now, working at my poetry and prose. It's been satisfying, I like to think, because, after all these years, I sound like myself. Of course, "sound" is a tricky concept; we're not talking about the ears. Perhaps "feel" might be better. Still, it's been some sort of steady progress and, quite apart from my strained voice and the approximate nature of my guitar playing, to go back to the songs would feel like starting again from scratch. Back in the '80s I'd never got beyond what Robert Louis Stevenson describes as being a "sedulous ape". There were soul songs; rockabilly songs; Madness and Buddy Holly songs. I would have told you that, like Elvis Costello, I was trying to sound eclectic. But Elvis had earned the right to be eclectic. He had been shrewd: in the beginning, he had harnessed his songs to punk's spiralling energy and he had produced something… explicable. I, on the other hand, in the era of the New Romantics, was spending all day in my bedroom, listening to Phil Spector. In my defence, I was trying to really listen – to soak it up and to assimilate it – but that didn’t count for much when we were performing a song that sounded like “Be My Baby” with a bass and a tinny guitar.

And, of course, you can't be in a band alone. With a bass and drums behind you, you can feel like you're strapped to the nose of an ascending plane. But whose plane is it? And do you really have control over where it's going? It can feel like an adventure; there you are, all forging ahead together. It's an exciting time. But, in the words of W.H. Auden: "...what does it period? What does it osse?" That last word means "to attempt, venture or dare", which feels accurate about what you all think you're doing, but the tone of the question seems to provide the answer: you never know. Or else: nothing. Sound and fury yes, sometimes, but nothing pretty much constantly.

No, in the end, I prefer (I tell myself that I prefer) to make my own mistakes. I prefer to whittle away at a sentence knowing that you won't see it until I'm satisfied with it. I get as many chances as I can to get it right. (Or as right as it will ever be.) Moreover, it feels... more substantial? More worthy? I don't, on principle, like to think that "Staying Alive", say, is any less important than Tender is the Night but something inside me does. I think of literature as being, partly, a jeu d'esprit. But more (much more) as a light that separates us from the dark. That defines the dark, in a way that no other art form can. It's a privilege, I often feel, to be able to try to live up to it. And if you fail? Samuel Beckett's is my mantra: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

And yet. After we split, we got back together for a couple of last Hurrahs at the Dublin Castle. People danced; they cheered; somebody offered to manage us. There was one song, called "Louise May", that didn't, really, sound like anybody else. But I had lost heart by then. I left. Glenn, the bass player, is a sound engineer, Mark, our first drummer, plays jazz now and composes film music, and Lisa, our second drummer, died way too young. Me, I'm a writer. (And a teacher.) But often, when I've written a song, my first thought is how Glenn or Mark or Lisa are going to respond to it. At a gig – at the Stevie Wonder gig, say, or the last time I saw Chic – the audience will respond in a way that we couldn't have hoped for in a million years. Shaking my head, leaning towards the stage, I'll say,

"God. Listen to that crowd."

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. His second novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September.