HOW DOES IT FEEL?
A Life of Musical Misadventures
MARK KERMODE
Runnin around round round... ?
For everyone with whom I have ever played a tune:
Thank you. And sorry.
CONTENTS
Many people have recurrent nightmares. Some dream of sinking in quicksand. Others are consumed by visions of being unable to escape from an endlessly elongating corridor or of waking up naked on the underground or accidentally wearing pyjamas to a party.
I have a recurrent nightmare, and it goes like this:
I am standing on the stage of the Royal Festival Hall in London. As I look out, I can see that the auditorium is packed, right up to the very top of the teetering tiered balconies. Behind me, the BBC Concert Orchestra are playing the opening bars of a particularly complicated piece of music, rushing inexorably towards the moment when the solo instrument the chromatic harmonica will leap into life and take the tune.
I look down at my hands and realise that I am holding a harmonica. It is big and cold and heavy. I raise it to my mouth, knowing that everyone is expecting me to play the jaunty lead line from this familiar tune, with its distinctive opening ascending phrase, and fiddly semi-tonal twiddles and doodles. But I cant play it. I know I cant, because Ive already tried, and I just cant do it. I feel the unforgiving metal of the harp against my lips, my mouth parched and dry. I see the faces of the audience, staring and expectant. I see the conductor raising his baton and pointing it towards me. And I feel myself starting to choke...
Thats my recurrent nightmare, with all its commonplace fears of public exposure and humiliation. The only difference between my recurrent nightmare and yours (hopefully) is that mine isnt in fact a dream but a memory. This actually happened, in real life. In the real Royal Festival Hall. With the real BBC Concert Orchestra. The audience were also real. They were there in the packed auditorium. And there were thousands more of them at home, listening to the concert as it was broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
I often ask myself, How the hell did I get into this terrible predicament? The answer is always the same; someone asked me if I could do something and, rather than admitting that I couldnt, I said Sure! After all, how hard can it be? I am particularly guilty of this when it comes to anything musical, despite the fact that I have known from an early age just how hard it is to play an instrument any instrument.
As a child, I took piano lessons for several years, during which time I spectacularly failed to learn to read music. My father had long been a fan of the jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, and my sister Annie had impressed him mightily by becoming adept at playing the ragtime blues of Scott Joplin. I enjoyed listening to my dads old 78s (he had a fairly extensive collection of jazz rarities) but I was never able to replicate their fleet-fingered forms. Indeed, my development as a music student was so staggeringly arrested that my piano teacher refused to put me in for any grade exams, knowing full well that I would just crash and burn if put to the test. Ive been playing the piano for the best part of fifty years now, and I still dont have a single keyboard qualification to my name. Many primary school children hold more musical honours than I do.
In secondary school, I took French horn lessons, largely because my parents had been told that there was a shortage (local, rather than national) of French horn players, and so Id make it into the school orchestra no matter how inept I proved. Somehow, I bluffed my way through the Grade 3 exam which in those days was an entry-level accomplishment that essentially involved being placed in a room with a range of musical instruments and asked to identify which one was the French horn. Seriously, back then a donkey could scrape through the Grade 3 exam.
Sadly, that was as far as I got. Against the better judgement of my music teacher, the school submitted me to take the Grade 4 exam at which point everything went south. I remember very little about the test itself, other than the horror of seeing the examiner wince as I fluffed and farted my way through a couple of horribly unprepared prepared pieces. When it came to the sight-reading section, I started on the wrong note and never regained my foothold. At the end, I rather forlornly asked the examiner if I could take another run at it. To which he replied (sternly, but correctly), Well, that wouldnt be sight reading, would it?
When the inevitable Fail slip arrived in the post, I flushed it down the loo and resolved never to take another music exam or, indeed, any further musical training. Fired by the arrogance of youth, I convinced myself that the musical establishment was just too damned conservative for my anarchic musical talents. What need did I have of formal training or certification? Hell, I had taught myself to play the thunderous Also sprach Zarathustra theme from Stanley Kubricks 2001 , on the piano. By ear! I didnt need sheet music I just needed to play.
How hard could it be?
Since then, Ive spent a lifetime playing musical instruments with a wanton disregard for training or talent. The results have often been far from pretty. Over the years I have played guitar, piano, drums, bagpipes, accordion, French horn, double bass, ukulele, banjo, harmonica, penny whistle, tambourine and (most recently) theremin. To paraphrase John Lennon (or was it Paul McCartney?), I may not be any good at any of these instruments, but if you put me in a room with a euphonium and give me a couple of hours, Ill get you a tune out of it. Just about. Most importantly, I made a decision early on not to be scared of any musical instrument to give it a go, and to hell with the consequences.
On occasion, this has got me into trouble, like the time I agreed to play the theme from Local Hero on the bagpipes from the beach at Pennan in Aberdeenshire, and then found myself having to do it in front of BBC television cameras. But more often than not, Ive got away with it, through a mixture of luck, goodwill and sheer barefaced cheek. Ive played the theremin onstage in some of the most revered music halls of the UK and done enough theatrical arm-waving to distract audiences from noticing that I couldnt hit a single note. Ive played banjo in a theatre production where I had to Sellotape the strings to the neck so all anyone could hear was the rhythmic sound of music hall strumming. I once played a trumpet on a recording in which I had to play the piece one note at a time and leave it to the engineer to knit it all together in the edit. Every time, I got away with it.
Which brings me to the Royal Festival Hall. Heres what happened:
Back in 2011, Simon Mayo and I were in the tenth year of our BBC Radio 5Live show, Kermode and Mayos Film Review . Someone decided that it would be fun to do a live show from Salford with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra which had recently taken up residence in MediaCity. The theme of the show would be favourite film tunes, with conductor Robert Ziegler leading the audience through a guided tour of the orchestra in-between playing hits from the movies. I had first met Robert some years earlier, when I introduced an outdoor screening of Alfred Hitchcocks early silent classic The Lodger for which Robert was conducting Joby Talbots newly composed score.
Robert is that rarest of things someone who can play music and talk about it with equal ease. Like the composerarranger Neil Brand, he has a way of demystifying his profession, of making everyone feel included in what is, by nature, a fairly exclusive club. Professional concert musicians can be scary creatures; like brain surgeons or astronauts, they do something which most of us can only dream of doing. Yet Robert exudes the kind of enthusiasm for his work which makes everyone feel included and that includes clueless chancers like me.
