Go The Fuck Home And Stay There

Welcome to 2020, the end times. The death of all we have taken as a gibbon* these last hundred years or so. First came the floods, then came the plague. Those of us who have spent our lives being called socially distant, step forward: our time has come.

I am not here to condemn the fucking idiots who visited their families for mothers’ day on Sunday, those who had one last hurrah at the pub on Friday night, and those who are still congregating in large groups without a care in the world. I get it, I mean you’re wrong and you’ll probably kill your own mothers, but I get it. (Update, while writing this you’ve made sure none of us can go anywhere at all, thanks pricks). Nor the conspiracy theorists who are not convinced all this is to stop people dying. If the extreme measures (brought in as a result of the aforementioned fucking idiots) fail to stop after the pandemic dies down and become a tool of oppression I shall join you on the barricades brothers. Until then, I will relish the opportunity to stay home, watch Netflix and not have to feel guilty for not wanting to go and visit my nearest and dearest.

Once this is all over – if we’re not all on the barricades fighting to be let out again – we’ll have to cope with yet another economic crisis. But, if you follow the money up, who actually suffers if we just turn off the monetary system until all this blows over. Cancel rent and mortgage payments, and yes, the immediate beneficiaries will feel the burn, but cancel their payments, and the next tier and the next and everything freezes in situ as it were and nothing gets worse? Right? Cancel the debt, Fight Club style. Where does the literal buck stop and what happens if it doesn’t get there? Money is an abstract concept, no matter what anybody tells you. I’ve only got an A level in economics, and it was over twenty years ago so my argument is almost certainly flawed. But my (admittedly wildly socialist) mind thinks that if you just press pause on the financial system for a bit then this all ends far less painfully than it does otherwise. The laws of economics are not like the laws of physics, you can bend them.

I’ve always advocated Universal Basic Income and opening up empty town centre buildings for the homeless. Were such a system already in place, then the lockdown would be much easier to implement. Everybody has a warm home with clean running water and everybody has enough to eat. Everything after that counts as a luxury and you need to work to afford it. That’s it, that’s the system, not mind-blowing is it? Nobody dies unnecessarily.

Entertainers could pursue their careers without the constant fear of eviction. Musicians and comedians etc. live day to day, self-employed on gig fees that haven’t increased since I started out in this business nearly thirty years ago. Working class kids could pursue whatever career they want without fear of ending up broke and dead. And right now we wouldn’t have to politely watch the endless live-streamed gigs of our former favourite artists before tipping them via the virtual paypal hat.

Obviously I will be accepting tips for this magnificent performance

The virtual pub is the best thing to come out of this, and I shall be implementing it as soon as possible (friends, message me, we will make groups). Multiscreen calling on your messenger system of choice via laptop or phone. It has many advantages:

1) Your evening can’t be ruined by some weirdo nobody else actually knows barging in and banging on about something none of you care about.

2) You can all listen to whatever music you like, separately. Use headphones and avoid spillover.

3) The bar is much cheaper and nobody has to wait to get served. Also you won’t get saddled with the expensive round.

4) If somebody gets too boring you can pretend your connection has dropped out, rather than having to go for a pretend piss to get away from them.

5) You no longer have to go outside to smoke/vape (unless you don’t like the stink in your house) and even if you do, you can take the rest of the “table” with you.

6) You no longer have to put up with the smell of your smoking/vaping friends when they come back to the table.

7) You can turn up in your jim-jams, no shirt, no shoes, no problem.

8) It is much easier to leave and go to a different “pub” with another group of friends.

If you’ve made it all the way to the end then thanks for reading this disjointed mess. Please stay safe, don’t spread it about and if you need reading material then please consider one of my books and don’t be like the Facebook woman who has boycotted Amazon for principled reasons and thus will not buy my books from there.**

* Still my absolute favourite eggcorn of all time.

*It’s the only self-publishing platform I can afford, most of the profits go to me, and their self-publishing program is one of the few actually good things that Amazon do. It also works out much better for me (and other Amazon authors) if you go exclusive – for the Kindle Unlimited benefits. Amazon may be destroying a lot of businesses but principles will only get you so far, and all big companies are dicks (see Waterstones). If you can’t buy it anywhere else it should be a no-brainer. Don’t be a dick.

The Mysterious Allure Of The Cover Band

I’ve taken another fictional dive into the murky world of cover bands with my new book, Weekend Rockstars 2: The Ballad Of Fat Labrador, which comes out today. Why do I continue to write about this strange niche group? The slightly less embarrassing alternative to Civil War re-enactment societies? (It’s a fair comparison, they’re both pretending to be something they’re not, and go all wistful if you mention New Model Army). Honestly, it’s because – however uncool they may seem, however tragic and mid-life crisis related – I love them, and not just because they have paid for a substantial chunk of my mortgage over the years.

Even in covers bands you get to have embarrassing

photos of you spread over the internet

I have spent most of my musical career playing in covers bands – much to the horror of many of my much cooler friends. But while they kept their integrity (by endlessly travelling from one end of the country to the other for no money and apathetic audiences) I had a good time and got paid with minimal effort.

This link takes you to a Facebook video that won't embed

 This whole thing would look much neater if it did

Sorry if you don't like Facebook videos

There’s no footage of my very early cover bands that isn’t on a VHS tape somebody else owns

But the rhythm section from my first band are in this clip of Jealousy and the Cat

doing Ozzy Osborne songs in Westward Ho! last year

If you listen very carefully you’ll notice I don’t remember the riff

that leads in to the chorus until the very last verse

I won’t deny that anybody who plays pop music has wanted to be a star at some point. Maybe only fleetingly, but they have. Who wouldn’t want to be up on a stage with thousands of adoring fans hanging on your every word? That’s certainly why Alice and Becky, from The Ballad Of Fat Labrador, got into it – however much they deny it.

But

If you actually intend to make a career of it, be Beyonce, have the moves like Jagger, shake it like a Stevens, it turns out you have to make sacrifices. To start with you have to work really hard, practice all the time until you can sing/play/dance better than anybody else you know – at the very least.

Then you’ve got to get out there, play every gig you can hustle up – even if it clashes with your mum’s birthday/the birth of your first child/your step-daughter’s 18th (sorry Rudi) – without false modesty. You are good, and if you don’t know it, you won’t make it (you have to believe it even if you’re terrible).

But even then, unless you already live in a city with a thriving music scene, you now have to either move to somewhere you can’t afford to live – because you’re a musician and you don’t have the commitment for the kind of career that pays enough for actual rent – or spend all your meagre earnings on travel. Sorry, AND spend all your meagre earnings on travel, because you can’t make a name for yourself only playing in walking distance of whichever mate’s sofa you’re kipping on this week.

Here’s me playing bass with the wonderful Carnivala!

We were an original band and often got to play large, well-equipped stages like this one

(sometimes they had actual audiences in front, but you can’t have everything)

Please note this is a cover version we’re doing and that’s not our fiddle player or drummer

All those gags about rotating line-ups had to come from somewhere

So that’s: working hard, working unsociable hours, driving long distance in the middle of the night/sleeping in a van, living somewhere awful, and having no money.

And then you still need luck, timing, and the stars to align in your favour when the blood gods smile upon you for that one big break.

The one big break that still doesn’t guarantee you a career.

You are very, very unlikely to make it, and the attempt to do so will probably break you.

And what if you can’t write catchy songs/don’t have a mate who writes catchy songs/aren’t really interested in songwriting?

You could try and be a sideman, or a session guy, or Bez, but all of the above still applies – especially the moving to almost-certainly-London part. If anything the competition is even harder, and the guys who have been doing it for the last fifty years are still doing it best and getting all the good gigs.

Carnivala! again, in a sweaty Torquay pub on a Sunday afternoon

Playing to the other bands on the bill and the staff

And fuck me if we aren’t doing another cover here

I was sure we wrote our own songs

But you like singing, you like playing, you don’t see the point in doing it at home on your own (you didn’t spend all that money on fuzz pedals just to upset your cat) and you have no interest in fame, fortune and an early death from sexual misadventure.

And crucially, you don’t want to do the thing you love for a living and turn it into a job.

A job you might hate every bit as much as any other.

But you may, like Alice from The Ballad Of Fat Labrador, be utterly entranced by the sound you can only get from an overdriven electric guitar in a room full of people:

“There is nothing she loves so much as the electric guitar, so magical; not its lesser sibling, the cutesy twinkling acoustic. Alice is no manic pixie dream girl picking out delicate versions of disco classics. Accept no substitute for the unstoppable electro-magnetic force of an unleashed electric guitar.
Driving home tonight angry, a little faster than she meant to, she felt the same thing: that power under your right foot as you squeeze the accelerator. The speed-freakery of it all, it’s the same feeling she gets wringing an endless distorted singing note from the neck of her guitar. Loud music, fast cars, they’re the same thing. It’s about control. It might be the same feeling that drives people to be serial killers.”

It is addictive, and more eco-friendly than all the driving and murdering that the alternatives present.

But you don’t have to be Charles Manson, you don’t even have to be a Beatle. There is no need to do all that work, there is another way.

You can play other people’s songs, get paid and get to sleep in your own bed (in the rural paradise you love) every night.

And you don’t have to do it every night if you don’t want to.

Join a cover band, there is no shame in it, no matter what the hipster pricks tell you. You get to make big exciting noises and have the mad rush of a room full of people singing along without having to fight your way through the ‘being-a-rock-star’ gauntlet first. The entry bar is amazingly low. All you have to do is be able to play an instrument to a basic (very basic in some real life cases I have witnessed) and be able to carry a tune (again, I’ve seen, walked out of, and in some cases actually been paid surprisingly good money to play with those who genuinely can’t).

I keep saying cover bands get happy crowds

but you’re just as likely to end up on the back of a truck in the pouring rain

singing to nobody but your step-daughter and your dog as in any other band

As illustrated by this clip from 2003 at a charity gig for ‘exposure’

The lure of getting paid AND getting an engaged audience very quickly swayed me in my teens and while I did play a lot of very worthy original music to a lot of very empty rooms, I also played a lot of cheese to a lot of very happy crowds.

Don’t get me wrong, I have played original music on stages in front of hordes of adoring fans. It’s just that they were fans of the headline act and impatient for us to fuck off out of the way.

For those like George, the hero of my first novel, Weekend Rockstars, who don’t even pick up an instrument until they are in their forties, the idea of ‘making it’ in a rock band is out of the question. But they should not be denied their endorphin rush, any more than those who don’t feel like paying a hundred quid a ticket and driving hundreds of miles to see a band should be denied the joy of a night out singing along to live music they love. Cover bands fill a need on both sides and are a very good thing and this is the hill I shall die on.

Me playing bass with the Spaced Invaders back in 2010

to a room full of drunken, dancing idiots

That massive grin on my face isn’t faked

I was having a very good time

Weekend Rockstars 2: The Ballad Of Fat Labrador is available as an ebook or paperback now

Click here to get it

And you can catch up on the story so far by downloading the first Weekend Rockstars for FREE

when you sign up to my mailing list for the next week

Click here to sign up

The Best Books About Rock And Roll That I Didn't Write - A List

Having written two books about being in bands, I have now read an awful lot of books about bands (research, research, research). Most of them are biographies but there are a handful of fictional ones, almost exclusively about people who dream of being rock and roll stars before going on to do so in exciting, original, world-bestriding bands that crash out spectacularly.

My Weekend Rockstars series is not about that. The first book is about a middle-aged bloke who joins one of those dreadful bands that turn up on a Saturday night down the Dog and Duck at the same time as your main course and start playing Mustang Sally.
(And you can download it for FREE for a limited time only when you sign up to my mailing list)

In the second he drags his teenage daughter into it after her rock and roll dreams crash out spectacularly.

(Available to preorder now for February 14th when it comes out)

Only they’re not really about the band, they’re about love, sex, friendship, family, death, grief and how there’s nothing like a midlife crisis and a band to amplify the tensions between them.

If that sounds a bit bleak (and it’s not, it’s actually 'a really fun romp, with a gallery of great comic characters' according to Fiona Leitch (writer of the extremely funny Dead In Venice)) then maybe you’d like to try some of these other fictional books about bands that aren’t really about bands.

Daisy Jones and the Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid 

It’s really difficult to explain what’s so good about this book without spoiling the end. I can tell you it’s a great twist on the fake documentary genre. I can tell you that if you know anything about Fleetwood Mac and the making of Rumours then you’ll love it. And I can tell you that if you love all the madness and debauchery of big ‘70s rock music you’ll love it.

Told as an interview transcript with members of the band, their families and various hangers on, the narrative’s delivery method sounds like it could be a bit dry, but you very quickly get drawn in, start to wonder if anybody is actually telling the truth and realise it is absolutely the only way the story could be told.

Soul music - Terry Pratchett

This is the best book about being in a band ever written - because it’s by Terry Pratchett. (See this post for why he was so important to me.)

Any Discworld book with Death in is great, add Susan Sto-Helit, Albert and the Death of Rats and it is even better, throw in CMOT Dibbler as Colonel Tom Parker and it’s gold (or glod).

The puns are par excellence (Cliff, on a mission from Glod, he looks a bit elvish, etc. etc.) and The Band With Rocks In are almost certainly the greatest band to never exist. It was the first Pratchett book I ever read and as such is probably the most important book in my life and I will not hear a word said against it.

Here’s some of the Band With Rocks In’s songs in case you’re not yet all in.

1) "There's a Great Deal of Shaking Happening"

2) "Give Me That Music With Rocks In"

3) "Pathway to Paradise"

4) "Born to Rune"

I mean, come on. I feel no need to give an actual review as if you haven’t read it we probably can’t be friends.

Call me maybe - Stephie Chapman

There is a very small genre of books (which I am proud to belong to), the bass-player centred rom-com, of which this tiny gem is a part.

In a wonderfully believable bit of coincidence, Cassie ends up messaging her teenage crush - Bass player Jessie Franklin of short-lived (fictional) 90s boy band Franko (who aren’t Hanson, definitely not Hanson, not even similar). He’s now just a regular session musician in California and almost nobody remembers who he used to be.

They meet up and embark on a fantasy transatlantic love affair which gets all the twists and turns and ups and downs you want in a rom-com thanks to his family/former bandmates.

It’s a story with so much heart, and such likeable, relatable characters that I instantly fell in love with it and recommend it to anybody who has ever had a teenage celebrity crush. It has given me hope that Tiffany (off of the 80s) will one day know that I exist.

Reprobation - Catherine Fearns

On the surface this is a gritty crime thriller about a gay scouse detective who teams up with a nun to solve a series of grisly murders. That should be enough to get anybody hooked in to this excellent trilogy (at present, I’m hoping for more). But…

Mikko Kristensen, singer and lead guitarist of Death Metal Band Total Depravity (and font of all Satanic knowledge, obvs) steals the show, (and is eclipsed by his drummer, Knut, in the third part of the series, Sound, though that might just be because Knut reminds me of all the drummers I have ever known). Music - and particularly metal music - is a central theme to the story, and Fearns describes the unbridled joy of a fuck-off-loud concert in the most perfect way I have ever read.

I realise this is not really a book about bands, but it does feature a band and has one of the most beautifully grotesque openings of any book I’ve ever read.

Also, GEVA have recorded an EP based on it that I only just discovered and I really, really like.

Espedair Street - Iain Banks

This bit of Banks (expect maudlin, expect self-deprecation, expect funny, be pleased there’s no incest for once) follows the old familiar rags-to-riches-to-crazy-recluse formula. But it’s by Iain Banks, so it’s beautiful and complicated and leaves you with a vague sense of unease.

In all honesty, I read it in my early 20s and it stayed with me, so my recollection of the details is sketchy at best. In doing my minimal research for this blog post I am disturbed to find that Daniel Weir, the old, washed-up rock star protagonist is only 31. 11 years younger than I am now. It’s kind of funny, so I include it in the Bass Player based Romcom genre currently only occupied by Stephie Chapman and myself.

The Thrill Of It All - Joseph O’Connor

It’s the usual weird outsider kids meet, form a band, get unexpectedly big, take too many drugs and all fall out with each other story. Pretty much all of which happen because the narrator fancies a girl upon which the whole plot hinges. Most of the books on this list fit that mould - even the Pratchett one - and that’s okay, because it’s what you want when you buy a book about a band.

Joseph O’Connor, however, manages to tinge it with more poignancy than most, ignoring the glamour and painting the realities of sleeping in vans, squatting in old industrial units and having to sell that one perfect guitar to carry on living over the usual depravity, debauchery and reckless spending.

Robbie Goulding owes more than a passing nod to Danny Weir from Espedair Street - but that’s no bad thing, neither are the multiple perspectives and album reviews/press cuttings that may in turn have inspired some of Daisy Jones and the Six’s style.

Ultimately, like being in a real band, it’s about friendships and the terrible things that can happen when you drop them into the high pressure world of rock and roll.

The Rock and Roll diaries - Jamie Scallion

Everything I said about The Thrill Of It All applies to these tiny bursts of teenage joy. Scallion, however, takes it in the other direction. Rather than the grubby realities of a band on the road these joyous celebrations of being a kid with a guitar give you the sudden rise, the unexpected record contract, getting the girl, writing the songs and being the fucking king of the world.

They’re not big books, they’re not complicated books, and they’re not realistic books (actually I don’t know, I’ve never been in a band that made it, this could be exactly what happens). But they are utterly joyful and I read all four in a row at great speed with a massive grin on my face because they made me feel like the 13 year old kid desperately writing awful love songs to the pretty girl in the year above me at school on my dad’s guitar I once was.

Written as blog entries, twitter feeds and the diaries of the title, it’s a format that suits itself to stories of bands - especially sulky, uncommunicative teenage bands.

Scallion also wrote and recorded the songs (with a bit of help from real band, The Script) as well, enjoy.

http://www.therocknrolldiaries.com/

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

Oh come on, you’ve read this, or you’ve seen the movie at least. It’s not about a band, I know that. But it does have some of the best being-in-a-band jokes you’ll ever hear. Not least the constant name changes of Barry’s band (to rival The Whom/&U/Surreptitious Fabric from Soul Music) from Barrytown, to Sonic Deathmonkey right up to Barry Jive and the Uptown Five - or were those gags just in the movie? I forget...

Anyway, I couldn’t leave it out.

The Dirt - Mötley Crüe

But Dave, I hear you cry, Mötley Crüe aren’t a fictional band, they’re real, you love them, you have all their albums and will play Dr Feelgood or Livewire at any point without any encouragement.

And yes, that’s true, but given everything they detail having done in this book, I don’t believe they recall any of it, and thus I’m calling it fiction about a real band - like KISS save Santa.

(I haven’t read it, I just watched the movie, sue me.)


Honourable mention needs to be made to John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, and Caitlin Moran’s How To Build A Girl, although I think those two gave fictional names to real bands (in order to avoid legal action).

And you can find Caitlin’s How To Be Famous, and The Rock ‘N’ The Roll, ‘N’ That... by Steven J. Gill on my to read pile - I can’t recommend them yet, but they’ve got bands in and purport to be funny. Will report back - keep your eye on my Goodreads account for more.

Weekend Rockstars 2: The Ballad Of Fat Labrador is available to preorder now from amazon and you can catch up on the story so far by downloading the first Weekend Rockstars for free (for a limited time only) when you sign up to my mailing list (feel free to unsubscribe later if you don’t like it).

Protest and Survive

I, like most people I know now, am sick of talking about politics. In fact, I won’t do it in person any more, it’s too dreadful these days. I have fallen out with friends, family and followers too many times in the last three years and don’t want to lose anybody else.

Having said that, there are still things that need to be said (from the safety of my laptop, if you engage me in person on these issues I can and will hide in a fridge).

You lost, get over it. Words that were doubtless said to Martin Luther King, Emmeline Pankhurst, Alfred the Great and Jesus. And words that many of us have heard over and over again in the last few years. Time to take them to heart and get over it.

There's a certain element in British society at the moment who enjoy a military metaphor, so here's mine. After losing, you should get over it like the British Expeditionary Force did after the battles of Mons and Charleroi in 1914, or their comprehensive trouncing at Dunkirk in 1940. Regroup, re-strategise and get your shit together.

Brexit is going to happen, whether the ‘Stop Brexit’ man outside parliament likes it or not. The plus side of the massive Tory majority is that it should at least happen with a deal now, rather than the disastrous no-deal crashout that was beginning to look so likely.

So those of us against it need to organise (still) to mitigate the effects. Those of us who voted for it need to help. Whether or not you believe that the short-term (and we’re talking years, possibly decades, not just a month or two) pain of the break justifies the possible long-term benefits of leaving Europe it cannot be denied that those short-term problems are going to happen. So everybody needs to help.

The government should step in and help those suffering from poverty, homelessness and the proliferation of mental illness in this country. But they’re not going to, and a huge majority of less than a third of the electorate (first past the post really does have to go) have voted in favour of that. On the bright side, Boris Johnson rarely keeps to his word, so he might turn out to be a socialist in disguise before revoking Article 50.

If we are going to have to rely on old-fashioned Victorian Philanthropy to make sure people don’t die, then it’s time to get to work. I know this sounds dramatic, but actual people have already died as a direct result of austerity policies, and this looks likely to get worse. Donate to Shelter and the Trussell Trust, volunteer, organise, get out there. You may think the mega-wealthy should be doing it instead of you but they probably won't.

And keep protesting - not for more referendums, not for fresh elections, but on issues, for change, for the future. Because the people in charge are ignoring the single greatest issue facing humanity - climate change. The USA has a denier in charge, and we have just voted in a party with a firm policy of post-horse door bolting on the environment

BUT

If it weren’t for Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion and the Green Party they wouldn’t even be thinking about it. Protest works. If it weren’t for the Pride marches of the last 50 years would David Cameron have legalised Gay Marriage? If Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King had just accepted they were in the minority would Chi Onwurah, Dawn Butler and Diane Abbot be sitting in parliament? If Jesus had just stopped after the first Rabbi told him that he lost and should get over it would I have had to spend my formative years singing ‘Cross Over The Road My Friend’?

I’ve spoken to people on the supposedly compassionate side who think we need the collateral deaths that will surely happen to go ahead so people sit up and listen. I fundamentally disagree, when your government lets you down, don’t create unnecessary martyrs, rally together and do what your government won’t. This is the kind of thing that slides you along the sliding scale of socialism a little closer to Stalin and a little further from Jesus. (If you don’t think Jesus was a socialist you’re an idiot. He divided up the loaves and fishes to feed everyone, he was cool with the tax-collectors and totally fucked over the money-lenders. Also, he didn’t expect anybody but himself to die for his cause - a policy that failed spectacularly, but still.)

So let’s get our shit together, organise, help each other, get to the end of this awful project and make sure we all survive it. We lost, let’s get over it together.

Protest and Survive, and if all else fails, I'll see you on the barricades.

*I know I’ve gone on about Jesus a lot here, but I am still an atheist, you can appreciate the message without the magic-beard-in-the-sky parts. Also, it's very nearly his birthday.

Exciting news for Artful Badgers fans

I have news.

Good news.

About the book that people are calling 'not finished yet is it Dave?'

It’s been a blissful ten years since George put down his bass, left the Artful Badgers and vowed never to play in public again. But when tragedy strikes his best friend he’ll do anything to help. Unfortunately that means going back out on the road, and this time he’s taking his daughter with him.

Alice has realised she wants more from her best friend Becky than she is prepared to give and the band they have spent so long building up may not survive the fallout. Luckily her dad has the perfect plan to take her mind off of it.

It might feel more like a support group than a band, but if George can’t keep it under control then it could destroy his best friend’s life, his daughter’s happiness and what’s left of his own sanity.

Join George, Alice, Tim and a whole host of familiar faces as George is dragged back into a world to which he hoped he’d never have to return.

Weekend Rockstars 2: The Ballad of Fat Labrador will be released into the world on the 14th of February 2020 and is now available for pre-order.

BUT

If you can’t wait that long, there’s a preview of the first chapter at the end of the new edition of Weekend Rockstars that I’ve just put out, with a new cover and everything.

AND

It’s only 99p on Kindle at the moment

OR

4.99 for the paperback (it’s the cheapest I’m allowed to sell it, sorry, I tried for less)

AND THAT’S NOT ALL!

If you subscribe to my newsletter you can download that preview chapter of The Ballad Of Fat Labrador for the princely sum of

ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL!

Hang on though Dave, I already read about this in your latest (frankly brilliant and funny) newsletter, why should I have to pay when all these brand new subscribers are getting free stuff?

You should have read it properly, there was a free download link in that newsletter, stop skimming you bellend.

Thank you for your time, and patience, please pre-order the book - it’s only 99p if you do and I can’t be held responsible for the enormous price hikes I will almost certainly apply as soon as it’s actually available.

How can we be lovers if we can't be friends? Are men broken?

This weekend was carnival time in my terrifying little corner of Devon. A time when our primeval fear of the cold and dark leads us to set fire to things and throw them at each other. I knew this because my google calendar set off my ancient primeval fear of the cold and dark by beeping a midnight reminder as I was dropping off to sleep. Why did I need my phone to tell me this when the whole town was full of it and local excitement stalked me across social media?

I didn’t. At least I don’t anymore. (I also haven’t figured out how to turn off reminders so it doesn’t wake me up every other night, don’t @ me).

Carnival weekend was on my calendar to make sure the band didn’t book any gigs so I could enjoy it (or play at it, as I have for the last god-knows-how-many years). So it was a bitter-sweet, heart-stoppingly loud beep it gave, reminding me that for the first time in my (admittedly very poor) memory, I am not an actual member of a band anymore. My current band did its last gig last weekend.

I’ve got gigs booked, I still dep for more bands than I can actually remember and do the odd solo show (hence all the google calendaring) but it’s not the same. It may be because my recently expired band was made up of people I have been friends with for over thirty years. As an adult I have very few fully-functional friendships, and those I do have tend to be the result of bands I used to be in.

I have a feeling that adult men in the 21st century are poorly equipped to maintain proper, healthy relationships with people we are neither related to nor having regular sex with. I have an even stronger feeling it might just be me.

As men, we don’t talk about important things. According to stereotype, women meet up and talk about everything: sex, books, death, genital hygiene, the whole gamut of the human experience; while men talk about cars and football. In reality, I doubt any of this is true, particularly since I have no interest in cars or football.

As a result of this non-communication and brushing important things under the carpet I fell out with a very good friend over what turned out to be a misunderstanding. For most of this year we did not speak, until we finally did, whereupon it turned out we had both taken offence where none was intended. I’m not going into details, but it highlighted just how little we men talk about things. At least nobody died. I spent a lot of time being surprised at how ill equipped I am to deal with a broken friendship as an adult.

These two were not the best role-models for male relationships to grow up to

And then the unthinkable happened. I am not terribly sociable or communicative at work and up until this year I have never missed anybody from any job ever after they left unless their replacement was a useless bag of shit-spanners that made my life harder. (That’s nearly always the case, but not where I work now. We never replace anyone, just make somebody else’s job harder). But nevertheless, a chap I’ve worked closely with for the last decade unexpectedly quit and it took me weeks to work out that that was what I was unhappy about. It should have been obvious, but like I say, I’m not the best at maintaining functional friendships - or recognising them.

All of this brought my mum’s offhand, ‘if we knew what we know now when you were little I’d have had you tested for autism,’ back to my mind. I went down a googly wormhole and quickly diagnosed myself as functionally autistic with a side-order of ADHD. This was clearly bollocks. Last time I self-diagnosed myself I was convinced I would die within the year, but it turned out I just wasn’t getting enough sleep. I can’t diagnose myself as anything, but I did recognise a lot of symptoms.

So what do I do with that? I’m 42 years old, have a job, a couple of lucrative side-careers, thirteen years of happy marriage, two well-adjusted step-kids that are partially my fault and a lifetime of coping mechanisms that keep me in check. What good would an adult diagnosis get me?

That’s an actual question by the way, I struggle to see what good it would do me to put yet more pressure on the NHS trying to find out why I freak out utterly at some fairly odd triggers. It could just be flashbacks. I’m more worried about the undiagnosed arthritis I can feel in my wrists as I type this blog, but I’m not going to the doctors about that either.

Men eh?

I saw the root of the problem while watching World War Z. Brad Pitt’s character is going off somewhere and leaving the women folk without a man. So he tells a prepubescent boy to look after them. I’m paraphrasing but basically it was, ‘Look after the ladies for me small boy I just met, for you are male.’

I’m sure we men just need more rights to maybe be better, so I am going to become a mens’ rights activist and fight for the following rights:

The right to wear a dress
The right to cry in public
The right to talk about why we’re sad
The right not to let it all build up until we kill ourselves
The right to play with dolls
The right not to be feel guilty every time a girl pays a bill
The right to not like football, cars and fighting
The right to do housework without expecting a fucking medal
The right to like the Phantom Menace and Jar Jar Binks.

Of course the irony is we do have all these rights already.

Because we’re men.

But some other, bigger boys are trying to stop us utilising them.

How Eddie and (Dead) Jesus Taught Me How To Be In A Band

Being a reliable dep bassist/guitarist I regularly play with a lot of different people in a lot of different bands. I have done for longer than I care to admit, yet it still amazes me how often I come across people who cannot play nicely with others. I don’t mean the usual muso problems (that I spent most of my first novel, Weekend Rockstars, making jokes about) like ego clashes, everybody trying to be louder than everyone else, or stealing the drummer’s girlfriend. I’m talking about the basics, like starting at the same time, being in the same key and playing at the same speed.

This is not my band

My first band - which isn’t the one I tell people was my first band - was a Christian rock group formed at a church youth club in 1989. It was made up of the precocious little prick that was twelve year old me, two girls who could just about hold a tune, a friend who could play drums, another friend who claimed to be able to play keyboards but in truth could only play 'Silent Night' on his nan’s accordion, and another friend who had no discernible musical talent: we gave him a bass - obviously.

I am not naming names - you all know who you are.

Our first few rehearsals consisted of my trying to teach them an epic 15 minute prog interpretation of the book of Genesis I had written called 'In The Beginning' - of which there are thankfully no surviving records - while hammering the importance of the guitar solos into them by playing a borrowed guitar as loud as possible through a ghetto blaster. The girls had no idea where to come in and it was becoming obvious 'Silent Night' didn’t really fit.

Luckily for me, the church youth club leader was a grizzled old muso called Eddie (who was approximately 3 years younger than I am now). He had played all over Wales with Dave Edmunds (who none of us had ever heard of) and Welsh Fargo (which was a pun we didn’t get). It was he who loaned me the guitar I was playing - I have not given it back as it’s still my go to number one guitar. Without him, my life would have been markedly different and I miss him every day the same way I missed his funeral in the deep snows of a freezing December a decade ago.

30 years on long term loan, it's changed a bit

He very quickly took us under his wing and made us spend the next four rehearsals playing a three chord, 4/4, 40 bpm dirge in C major called 'Thank You Jesus'. He made us listen to each other, count, watch for the changes and play for the song. There were no guitar solos and excitement was very much discouraged.

I highly recommend you don't listen to the above link - which is the song we did

The one below, however, is proof that Christian music can actually be awesome, even for us heathens

But it made us better, something clicked, and even the non-musicians could learn it quickly. We were playing a whole song, start to finish, without any fuck-ups. I learned that my ambition far outstripped their talent (a thing I have had to live with every day of my musical career, I’m still enough of a prick to never doubt my own ability) and to lower my expectations. Sometimes simple is better: fewer chords, less fret-wanking and slow the fuck down.

Since then I have come across a million different people who never had an Eddie, never learned how to work with others. From those who blindly follow the song note for note, beat by beat, with no space for improvisation - not even the kind necessitated by having to wait for a forgetful singer to come back in or an equipment malfunction - to those unable to keep the same time as the rest of the band (it’s surprising how many of those are drummers). Along with the no-compromise ‘just play the fecking note Dougal!’ dictators and ‘ah that’ll do’ bumblers who are happy to carry on playing minor chords that should be majors.

(Again, I can’t stress enough that if you are chuckling in recognition you will definitely enjoy my book - Weekend Rockstars.)

All these little problems can be ironed out with a willingness to listen to and learn from each other. Musicians are fragile of ego, and naturally given to melodrama, so in practice any slight criticism tends to lead to a flounce and the end of the band. But it wouldn’t if everybody had the memory of a middle-aged welshman with a fondness for lying about his achievements knocking them down to size.

Less than a year later, I had philosophised myself out of my Christian upbringing and - in a splendid accidental metaphor - left that church youth group to play in a punk band called Dead Jesus. I suppose I should probably say 'Thank You Jesus' for lowering my proggy expectations to shouty three-chord wonders with no guitar solos, but it was Eddie that fixed it, even if Jesus told him to.

That's me there - about the same time as Dead Jesus was happening

A cocky little shit if I ever saw one