So here I sit, silently, the background hum of my laptop fan kicking into gear, doing battle with the morning heat. Music rides the breeze over a neighbour’s wall. Sleep-deprived and drifting, I enjoy all the well-told symptoms of being a brand-new dad.
The Odd Folk... I close my eyes and picture my time in The Band, but it was brief. Not the years themselves; they totalled 7 and counting, but the memories. They came in snippets and shards. No particular gigs or anecdotes, no chronological rhyme or reason, just served to me without request. A bit like the Bee Gees track that had now started playing next door.
“Left or right” The Singer cries out from the front seat, “Left, like the sat-nav’s been telling you for the past 2 minutes” I call back, competing with the engine noise of his old Renault 4. I duck my head, looking out of it’s little-letterbox windows. There’s only about half a foot visibility between the top of the hedgerows and the start of the Renault’s roof, but it’s enough to see the beauty of the countryside around us; hills bowing to rivers, riding under golden clouds. As my Granny would say ‘it’s a picture painted with a magic brush’. It was also just enough to see tonight’s venue; a quaint little village hall roughly two minutes to our left. It’s a joy being in this band, I smile to myself as The Singer heaves the wheel hard to the right. We get lost a lot.
I pour the coffee. The music’s stopped now but someone’s singing the hook instead. ‘More Than a Woman to me’.
His head throws back and his eyes close when he laughs, and he never laughs more than when we’re in Antwerp. The Piano Player. We’re at our good friend’s family home and it’s sort of become our home from home too. We’re in the upstairs bathroom and he’s propping himself up with some plaster casts of our host’s legs she made when she was 20. I think I’m crying because I can hardly focus. The laughing goes on, and on, until we find ourselves parked up in a wooded area outside of Cologne. I think it’s a house concert because there aren’t any houses nearby. Now The Drummer’s laughing too, this isn’t a good sign, yep; the brake pedal has fallen off and we’re lost again. We laugh a lot.
I’m struggling now, the sun hits it’s peak and me and the black dog crawl to the shade, the white one perseveres. Too hot for thoughts.
We argue a lot. I’ll leave it at that.
We travel a lot and sometimes that’s the real tie that keeps us ticking. We see places between the bold ones on the map; the one’s that you may catch a glimpse of as you travel through. A pub with a fairly ambiguous name like ‘The Bowl of Something’ or ’The Royal Bits’. And a town centre that just directs you to bigger town’s centre’s. We actually stop at these places. And sometimes we have so much fun we come back the following year.
I come round just in time to drag the white dog into the shade; a move she wouldn’t have made on her own despite almost dying in the heat. And I wonder why all these moments only come to me in fragments? Possibly because of the coffee, heat and lack of sleep, but mostly because at times I feel like a fly-on-the-wall in this band. I witness bizarre situations unfolding before me and smile. Of course I’d always step in before things got really bad - as has been the case a few times in the past - but things going slightly South seems part and parcel of being The Odd Folk. Maybe I’m less a fly-on-the-wall and more a worker-ant-in-the-wings? I definitely don’t crave the spotlight and plaudits in the same way The Piano Player and Singer might, but I don’t suppose I’d be The Bass Player if I did!
“Roll up! Roll up!” the Ring Master cries! ... That’s right, we joined the circus once. Only for about 45 minutes and completely unintentionally, but a few misread emails later we were being ushered into the centre ring of a bustling Big-Top. It’s surprisingly difficult to concentrate on your chord changes whilst a man in a leotard directs you to play the ‘dramatic bits’ with his left hand, and swallows swords from his right. Other oddities include the gig in Matlock where a bold red line was painted 3 feet from the edge of the stage. We never found out why, but the elderly couple who organised the event looked on at us with unadulterated terror whenever we got within a few steps of it. Occasionally they’ll ask for a little ‘something extra’ too, these obscure gigs; “Could you possibly parade around the pagoda, playing only the chorus of a Toploader song Jeremy heard during his travels of Asia” ... “errrrm, I suppose we could”. And we do. And we never agree to - nor get asked to - again. We performed a song called ‘Earth Angel’ by Marvin Berry once. I still don’t know any of the lyrics other than ‘Earth Angel’ because that’s all The Piano Player sang, in varying melodies, over and over again. “It’s fine” The Singer said, while The Piano Player struggled to remember any of the verse lyrics during a rehearsal, “They won’t be listening anyway once they’re all up and dancing.” But they weren’t all up and dancing; just the two of them, the married couple during their first dance, as we reinvented their favourite song.
“It’s a bit bitty” my partner says, reading through. It really is. But that’s how it feels in this band. Bits of activity over the course of a year. Bits of songs that are never penned to completion. Bits of memories during an entire gig. I’m thinking this as I look up and smile towards The Guitar Player, dropping sweet-note after sweet-note, turn my head towards our stand-in guitarist, the aforementioned’s cousin and an expert with the tremolo, “It sounds great” I shout out to our back-up guitarist; his head swaying with each solo. “It’s funny how often we change guitarist” I joke with our new guitarist, although I haven’t met him yet.
But it’s frustrating. I sometimes feel that if we took the same zeal for finding new players and put it to writing new songs then we’d stop the see-saw of brilliant adventures / imminent disbanding and just stick sitting on the brilliant adventures. But maybe that’s not the goal? It would surely take more than a bi-yearly practice.
And we don’t practice a lot.
We swim a lot. That - along with the fact that we’re all childhood friends and two of the band members are related - is what binds us. We’ve swam in mountain-top lakes, plunged naked into icy rivers, dived off bridges and waded through mud just to reach that bit of sweet-water. We once bathed in an extinct water-filled volcano on our way to Lott Festival. The trio travelling from South-West Cornwall to South-West Germany and back again, just for the swim. And of course the magical 3-day event that will perpetually hold it’s place amongst The Band’s special memories. We like Lott, a fair bit.
I’m inside now, and truth be told it’s a different day. Sorry if that shatters the flow. But on this day things have turned a corner, The Band now owns a sound system and the Piano Player’s bought his own leads. We’ve invested in kit that will see us through for many years, a favour to our future selves and a statement of intent. And we’re learning too; we’ve stopped chasing the silly gigs that leave us bewildered and deflated but pick the ones that keep us light. We’ve given up replacing guitarists and given the role to The Accordion Player. We won’t repeat our biggest mistakes but will continue to make the necessary ones. We’re becoming efficient, logistical, almost teetering on professional, and we have fun. Are we soon to drop the ‘Odd’ and just become ‘The Folk’? No that won’t rub - we scarcely play ‘folk music’ these days - perhaps ‘The Mostly Professional and Polite Gentleman Who Trial as Many Musical Styles as They Do Musicians? Yes, that’s got some truth to it; we are getting things together, penning new songs, plotting our trajectory onto the path of proper-professionalism... but then again, we do still get lost a lot.
