Ballard's Glory Cocks

Had a lie in today. I woke up close to midday. That means I’ve already missed half of the day. The rest of the day can only be spent mourning the lost half of the previous part of the day. That or I could spend an hour reading, get up, mince around in my dressing gown, make a cup of tea and do some writing.

I have a stand up gig on Tuesday. I’m sure it will be lots of fun but the whole idea of the evening is to try out new ideas and prove to the audience that you aren’t just some hideous hack intent on spouting the usual shite from your mouth every week. So, what will I say?

Dunno. No, I really don’t know. This isn’t some weakly-imagined comic conceit aimed to kick-start the creative juices to flow into funny rivulets. Noo. Well it clearly is, but it isn’t working, so I might just prattle on for a bit.

I shared a joyous musical occasion with the writer formally known as Circletide, or the writer currently known as Circletide but whose blog was previously known as ‘These Four Walls’ and is now probably called something doubly baffling like ‘Jagged Indistinction’.

These euphemisms; these pseudonyms, good gosh they get tiresome. Thankfully I can’t really see myself accidentally referring to myself in the cyber-person (“hi, Rangy. What’s your name?”)

Anyway, we did take it upon ourselves to get up on a small stage at the Cumberland Arms (the spiritual and occupational home for us both at one time) and play some music.

We decided to go under the oft-discussed name, ‘Ballard’s Glory Box’. It was oft-discussed because we quite liked the sound of it. “Hi, we’re Ballard’s Glory Box.” Sweet. Every name has to sound good when you first get up on stage and announce your presence to a bunch of people who have never heard of you. I often wonder how early gigs by the band/bloke ‘Why?’ would have gone.

“Hi, I’m/we’re Why?”

- What? What did he/they say?

- I think he/they said Y. That’s a cool name/letter.

Anyway, we were understandably a bit nervous. I am not exactly the seasoned performer but I have been on stage enough times to hope that I wouldn’t get too nervous at the prospect of just playing a bit of guitar with my guitar buddy. But we had no formal rehearsal for this gig and had only a day’s notice. We have played guitar together on and off over a period of about four years but never on a stage.

We agreed on three ‘bits’ that we would play but decided that the remainder of the gig would develop naturally – improvised - perhaps taking suggestion from the audience. To be fair, if we’d taken suggestion from the audience we might have put down our guitars and begun talking, but instead we decided to play them down! Ha! Take that ambivalent and socialising group of disparate, uninterested individuals! Eat our melodic and rhythmical pie!

We got quite into it. We tuned our guitars to an open D, rendering us able to just shut our eyes, strum, drum and sing at the same time. I imagine it might have seemed a little odd to the latecomer. Seeing two such fine specimens of overt masculinity singing like girls. I bet we looked well gay.

The singing started quite simply – hummed melodies and open oohs and aaahs, both of us hoping we would accidentally end up harmonising with one another. And at one point my musical colleague whooped and screamed, and I followed suit and made some bizarre yodelling noises. I think at this point we were strumming quite fast and kicking the floor. With our eyes closed.

Talk about making sweet music.

We had forgotten all about the congregated mass in front of us. They were just any room of vaguely attentive people we have bored in the past at parties. Though at least in the past, we had alcohol on our side. The musical abandon could then be put down to involuntary movements of the limbs which could be put down to alcohol. But no, we were sober and we did it!

Triumph!

Well, perhaps not musically, I think we bored the shit out of most people (including, in the final impromptu sonata, ourselves) but that was not really the point. It was a triumph of the spirit. We actually did it. We’ve been talking about doing it for years. Imagined the subsequent advances from the major labels, the tours, the front-page acrimonious disputes in The Wire (followed a couple of years later by the NME), the drugs, the women and the inevitable decline into either musical obscurity and bitterness or failed ambition and the acceptance of a normal life.

So finally we are onto that road of musical enlightenment. For did anything else matter for those few minutes we were on stage?

Did it really take the prospect of me pissing off to India for a few months to precipitate this discovery? Guess so.