A mandolin

For several years in the early 2000s, myself and a small group of friends would meet for a pre-Christmas booze-up in Soho – a joyous pub crawl that would start in the basement bar of Black’s at around 11 a.m. and finish in the basement bar of Black’s around five hours later. Having gone nowhere. We’d start the crawl with good intentions but the thing about the basement bar of Black’s at the time is that, despite it being part of a member’s club, it’s actually the cosiest little hostelry in the middle of London – a convivial spot with long trestle tables and a hatch-like bar. It’s like that little bit of a Breughel painting where a group of merry peasants seem to be having more fun than everyone else.

It’s not there any more, obviously, because entrepreneurs don’t seem to be able to make money out of nice things.

However, the biggest danger of the yearly revels is not incipient cirrhosis of the liver, but that it invariably ends with a trip to Denmark Street on the north-east fringe of Soho. This is the world epicentre of guitar shops: Regent Sounds, Hank’s Guitars, Macari’s, Rhodes Music, Rose-Morris and many more, most of which I’ve been familiar with from ads in the back of Melody Maker since the seventies. I know very few people who’ve ever picked up a guitar who can enter these shops without losing their minds and, quite frequently, their wallets – they’re like an Aladdin’s cave of potential rock stardom.

Every guitar is a dream of another life. How many Sunday supplement articles have you seen where the backdrop of someone’s living room has a guitar hung neatly on the wall like a religious icon? The walls of these shops are where this idea comes from, but it’s not just the odd guitar, it’s literally thousands – you can’t see the walls. Some of the shops are four storeys high. Maybe twenty shops, at an average of three storeys, with perhaps 150 guitars per floor – that’s 9,000 guitars! 9,000 dreams. How can you not buy one of them?

I’ve fallen for its charms many times but one year I’m in the ‘classic’ department of one of these shops when I spot a guitar with only four strings. I ask about it: it’s a tenor guitar, tuned like a tenor banjo or a viola, and made by the very reputable American firm Martin’s in 1945. It’s an antique. I get it down and try to play it. Some people think that instruments get better with age because the wood has somehow absorbed every note it’s ever heard, and this may be true because it sounds absolutely beautiful. I mess around on it for a few minutes but I don’t know how to form any chords for this kind of tuning, C G D A, and put it back.

The next morning I go down for breakfast and see it lying on the kitchen table. Apparently, I bought it.

I pick it up, I look up some basic chords on the internet, and start painstakingly working out the songs I normally play to myself on a six string – mostly seventies with a lot of punk and new wave: The Sex Pistols, The Clash, XTC, The Members. They sound instantly different with this new tuning – the chords are the same but the voicing is different. It’s a eureka moment. One of the things all wannabe musicians want is to be able to make their ‘own’ versions of existing brilliant songs.

There’s something ‘folky’ about the sound and I’m reminded of The Ducie, the Irish pub behind the university, and the excitement of the trad tunes they used to play. I look them up and they’re all written for the fiddle – it’s a similar tuning to the tenor guitar, but half an octave higher. If I want to play the fiddle tunes I’ll have to learn the fiddle, or . . . get a mandolin, which I learn has the same tuning as a fiddle.

It’s amazing how many times in your life as a middle-class dilettante musician you discover you ‘need’ another instrument. I ‘need’ to buy a mandolin, and so I do. I bring it home, I work out how to play some of the songs, I twiddle about with some of the fiddle tunes, and . . . I think I’ve got something.

I tell a friend about it and he introduces me to Troy Donockley. Troy is a multi-instrumentalist, he plays guitars, the bouzouki, and various whistles, but he’s mostly recognized for being a virtuoso on the uilleann pipes, a mellifluous kind of bagpipe on which the air bag is pumped up with the elbow rather than blown into – uilleann being Gaelic for ‘of the elbow’. That’s him you can hear on the soundtrack of Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. He’s been in a lot of folk bands, he’s done sessions with almost every folk artist of note, and he lives . . . IN POCKLINGTON.

WHAT?

Yes, I know, that’s exactly what I thought.

We arrange to meet, in Pocklington, and we get on like a house on fire that firemen are mistakenly spraying with petrol rather than water. He’s got the same dream of a cosy pub with a seventies jukebox and a pool table, in fact he’s got one . . . IN HIS HOUSE.

WHAT?

I know.

It’s an instant and incredibly close friendship and we form a band on the spot – The Bad Shepherds. We play punk songs on folk instruments – not as a gag, but because we like how it sounds – and we interlace them with jigs and reels which have all the energy of pogo dancing. A lot of folk and punk songs are very similar, they’re often protest songs, or songs about real life. They’re not as self-centred as most pop music and are mainly about he or she rather than I or me.

We co-opt the Mancunian Andy Dinan, the first UK-based player to win the All Ireland Fiddle Championship, and it turns out . . . HE USED TO PLAY AT THE DUCIE.

NO WAY.

Yes way. (In fact, I already told you that in a previous chapter – I hope you aren’t just ‘skimming’?)

It’s like that film Sliding Doors which keeps swapping between two different storylines on the basis of whichever tube train Gwyneth Paltrow gets on, except in my version I get to live both lives.

Troy is a couple of years younger than me and was brought up in Cumbria but we share an extraordinary range of references: we can both sing every Gram Parsons song, we know the lyrics to every cheesy seventies and eighties number one from Ray Stevens’s ‘The Streak’ to Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, and he’s a Laurel & Hardy fan. In fact he’s a bigger fan than I am, he knows every single word of every single episode.

Troy is also an excellent sleight-of-hand magician and looks like a trainee wizard who might have escaped from Middle-Earth, while Andy looks like a bricklayer who’s just been in a fight. The three of us make an interesting dynamic.

We tour relentlessly for seven years, and though I say it myself we’re a bloody good live act. The punk songs we play take on a more plaintive air with the folk treatment. The punters often comment: ‘It’s the first time I’ve really heard the lyrics and understood what the songs are about.’ JC Carroll from The Members joins us on the Avalon stage at Glastonbury, playing accordion, and says he prefers our version of his song ‘Sound of the Suburbs’. ‘We only played it fast because we were desperate to impress the girls,’ he says. But we puncture that mood with the jigs and reels, which are more punk than punk. It’s a neat trick.

I never quite make international rock god – even though we tour Australia a couple of times and play festivals in Belgium and the Netherlands – but I thoroughly enjoy these years of touring, playing everywhere from scuzzy rock pubs to massive festivals. We’re crammed into one van like in ‘Bad News Tour’ and go through a succession of bass players, percussionists and road crew, each of whom we develop nicknames for: The Oompah Loompah, Balou the Bear, The Hawk, The Throat Puncher, The Trumpeter (so called for his relentless farting rather than his musical prowess).

‘I’ll stay until you find out I’m a cunt,’ says one of the bass players. It takes us three years to find out, but he was right. It’s a funny thing, touring. Turns out ‘Bad News Tour’ was more accurate than I thought when I was writing it.

But mostly what I learn is that a real band is a spark between people, like in a double act. The sum is better than the parts. It’s an expression of a connection, and the person I connect with is Troy. There are moments on stage when we’re playing intricate parts that build together into something that’s on a different plane. It’s the sort of thing that can infect an audience and you build a kind of communion with several hundred people that can become slightly overwhelming, that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. This is very different to my teenage dreams of rock stardom, which centred more on strutting and adulation, and it’s ten times more fulfilling.

Troy and I love to get to the festivals a day early and ‘wobble about’ as we call it, watching all the bands and consuming ‘malty drinks’ – our word for beer. It’s like having a second go at being a teenager. A truly blissful period.

When I see it all coming to an end I’m better prepared, because I’ve done it before. Around the sixth year we stop adding to our catalogue of songs. We’ve made three albums’ worth of material but it feels like the idea has come to an end and we’ve started repeating ourselves. It’s weird that the one thing that always made me jealous of bands when I was a comedian – being able to do your hits rather than constantly coming up with new stuff – turns out to be a turn-off. I can understand why Procol Harum waited until the third encore to play ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. I’m sorry for shouting at them back in York that time.

Troy agrees, and in any case, the band he’s been guesting with for many years, Nightwish – a ‘symphonic metal’ band from Finland who like his uilleann pipes (‘I Want My Tears Back’ is a good introduction) – have asked him to join the band full time.

And I too have another band that’s been going alongside The Bad Shepherds, but it’s a much smaller commitment, and there’s no ‘symphonic’ about it.

After the demise of The Bonzos, Neil, Phill and myself, along with Simon Brint and Rowland Rivron, form The Idiot Bastard Band – a band devoted to the comic song. We have a residency at the Wilmington Arms in Clerkenwell. We do what we call ‘live rehearsals’ – we have a rough idea of what we want to do, and we might have practised separately, but the fun of the evening is in the surprises and the genuine confusion. It’s kind of Dadaist in that we reject logic and reason and put a heavy accent on the nonsensical. But there’s enough musical talent in the band for the music to transcend the idiocy on occasion.

Simon does a brilliant version of George Formby’s ‘Swimmin’ with the Wimmin’’ but in the languid style of Tom Waits; we do the Flanagan and Allen song ‘Nice People’; we cover Jake Thackray, The Flight of the Conchords and They Might Be Giants; and we write new songs too, and have guests like Nigel Planer, Barry Cryer and Paul Whitehouse. It’s a splendidly relaxed evening.

If only we’d stayed at the Wilmington – that’s when it was at its Dadaist best – but ambitions grow and we end up on tour and eventually get a commission from Radio 4 for a series. It’s all a bit too serious for me. I liked it as a hobby. I liked it as a ramshackle off-the-cuff experience. But the radio idea needs scripts, and everything has to be planned and ‘defined’. It’s not the way I want to go, and very apologetically I tell the rest of them that I don’t want to do it, and the project ends. Our producer Steve Doherty says it’s the only time in his life he’s handed back a commission.

Everything comes to an end.