Sex and Drugs and Village Halls

It’s free to subscribe to this substack if only because it’s currently just this post, and I wouldn’t pay to see this post. I am grateful for your attention, is all.

Anyway, this substack is about a book that I’m writing, which I’m hoping you might buy, at some point in the future. This is just a long blurb for a thing that might be, one day.

What is this book, you ask. Well, it has a working title, about 35k of first draft, and is growing. I am in the chair behind the desk, pretty much all day, writing with a Kaweko fountain pen in a Leuchtturm note book, a big A4 one.

Publishers want a twenty word description: ‘Obscure Eighties pop/reggae/noise band are reunited by Death to Play One Last Gig at the bass player’s Wedding.’

It’s come as a bit of a surprise. I didn’t really see myself writing another book after ‘One Fine Day.’ A non-fiction book, if it’s any good, involves travel to far flung places to meet people, and actual research in libraries full of paper. That seems impossible, for now and for the foreseeable future.

In autumn 2023, a producer friend asked me if I had any music ideas to pitch for the Essay slot on Radio Three, and I sort of almost nearly did, a bit. I’d been banged up in a studio in Presteigne called ‘The Old Drill Hall’, recording an audiobook with a friend who is an engineer, musician and producer, who has been a pro muso most of his working life, without any huge success, but with the ability to pay a mortgage. I know of at least one other similar studio set up in Presteigne, run by a guy who has also only ever worked as a musician, in pit bands, in orchestras, in folk trios, running community choirs, teaching, and so forth. There are loads of musos of this calibre round every corner, here, in your village, town and neighbourhood. They are both legion, and on at the British Legion a month next Wednesday. If you asked me to put a function band together in a fortnight, for charity, say, I could do that for you – drums, bass, guitars, keys, horns, a set list, the lot. I could find you a singer who sort of won an Oscar, nearly, in a way. I could still probably knock together an OK string quartet given another week.

I thought about these players, who once, in the eighties maybe, got a hundred quid a head a night for playing in pubs to bored punters, and who now, forty years later, get maybe three hundred quid for playing to the bored punters grandkids who are on their phones anyway, but they’re better off because they’ve sacked the band and learned how to use looping pedals; or are just miming to their laptops.

Rock and Roll is turning out to be as mortal as anything, but even in its death throes still offers an almost living to many - people who keep their voices exercised, their hands moisturised, their guitars strung, their reeds broken in and ready to blow. Open Mic nights are stiff with these refugees from Rock’s Silver Age. This is why most fair sized towns have music shops. They’re not waiting in case ELP rock up and suddenly want a triple necked bass. They are waiting for you and me, brothers and sisters, lying in wait with an almost new Eddie Van Halen for £499.99, even though you’ve already got a collection of eight guitars, and can’t really shred.

I thought it would be an interesting bit for Radio Three, and I duly pitched it to my producer friend, who loved it. Sex and Drugs and Village Halls, I called it. Loads of sex and drugs, but no money, success, or fame of any kind, except in your home town, if you’re unlucky.

This is true of almost any artistic endeavour, I guess. Writers are a pound a bowl, painters are BOGOF. Future archeologists will struggle to understand why such a high tech society had so many hand thrown pots. Anyhoo, whatevs, Radio Three hated it.

When Radio Three turned it down, I had already been booked to give a talk about the idea, at the Presteigne Festival in May. It went down well, I think. Some old pals had come to hear me go on, two of them friends and fellow band members since 1977.

Staring into the eyes of these olde timers, I saw there, not existential despair, not an honest assesment of their situation, not the horror that one might expect in a bunch of old pals born before Elvis joined the Army, coming towards the end of their innings, but the eyes of ex-teenagers, unchanged, twinkling with naughtiness, tuning up, and ready to go on when called.

I had a story; a setting at least.

A few weeks later, I was visited by the writer Richard Beard. We talked about how we might make it into a film, starring Bill Nighy. (People tell me that such a film has in fact been made, which I had imagined was probably the case).

Then, as my health deteriorated further, and fairly quickly, I realised what I must do.

I must write the novel from which the putative fillum is adapted. I must write it quite quickly. It must be about pop music, love, and death, the three great concerns of my life, in that order.

It must be the first realistic rock and roll novel, where rock and roll = post Elvis popular music of any kind whatsoever, and where realistic = who the fuck can say.

I must change all the names, but none of the facts, however dull.

It must be subtitled, ‘a comedy.’

The music stuff must be central, and right.

I will need helpers to dust off my prose writing. Gurus, Trainers, Critics, Collaborators, know it all gobshites, come one, come all.

Today’s soundtrack. ‘Hallogallo’ by Neu, from 1972. Later, this will make sense.

Today’s writing tip ‘If the prose isn’t there, then you’re reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation, psychological insight and form.’ - Martin Amis