electric guitars and basses and there it was, nestled in the corner, looking at me like a pathetic little puppy begging me to buy it. It cost more money than I had in the bank so I went into the shop and beat the price down to all the money I had and walked away in such a state of shock that I forgot to buy the sheet music I had come for. I took it home like an adopted waif to join the family of instruments I already had, the electric keyboard, the fiddle, the guitar, the recorder I only played at school and the flute I hadn’t touched for years.
I suspected that for most people the banjo seemed a comical instrument, the sort of thing that would be played by a man wearing a red-and-white-striped jacket and a straw boater, singing slightly saucy novelty tunes. To ordinary people it probably even looked comical, its round body like a child’s drawing of a guitar and its metallic brittle tone lacking the warmth and colour of a guitar. It wasn’t like that at all for me. I can’t put it into words, not really. Music has always been a refuge for me. Probably what made me turn to it in the first place was that when I was a child we had a piano in a spare room, an old one that was battered and out of tune. When my parents started shouting at each other, I would go to that back room and play for hours and hours, losing myself in the strange songbooks and piles of sheet music they’d inherited along with the piano from some old aunt. That was what music had always been to me. Somewhere I could escape to, where there weren’t words, where you didn’t have to be clever.
Maybe that was the problem with Amos and me. Amos definitely fell into the clever category. He didn’t respect my intelligence, that was for sure. And I suppose I didn’t respect his musicianship. Amos loved music. He certainly loved listening to it. He could play, after a fashion – he did his grades when he was at school and all that – but it was never natural to him. For him, playing music was always a frustration. He could never translate what he heard in his head. He had a characteristic tense expression when he played, which at first made me laugh and then didn’t. I tried to teach him, in our early days together, manipulating his arms and neck as he crouched over the keyboard, attempting unsuccessfully to get him to loosen up, to let himself go. But I stopped that. Amos had a very developed sense of his own dignity.
I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone, but to me every instrument spoke with its own tone of voice. The banjo may seem shallow and silly to other people but to me it talked of something old and melancholy and neglected. Gradually, in the weeks after I had bought it I took it out of its case and tried to get it to speak with some kind of fluency. But I had never played it in front of anybody, not once. When Danielle asked me, I felt it, deep down, as a challenge.
I couldn’t think where we should play. My own flat was too small and the walls were dangerously thin. I mentioned the problem to Sally and she said we could come round to her house. I protested feebly, mentioning her child, her neighbours, the trouble and noise, her husband, but she absolutely insisted. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour,’ she said. ‘I feel I’m becoming more and more cut off from the world. I’d love to have people around.’
I was a little concerned to hear someone actually pleading with me to have a band rehearsal in their home, but I was too relieved to push the point much further. We decided on Sunday afternoon and then I rang everybody about it. It seemed alarmingly easy.
I arrived at Sally’s home in Stoke Newington ten minutes early but I still wasn’t the first.
‘Hayden’s already here,’ she said, as she opened the door.
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s playing with Lola.’
That wasn’t completely accurate. He was lying back on the sofa in the living room and Lola was clambering up his rangy frame, as
I suspected that for most people the banjo seemed a comical instrument, the sort of thing that would be played by a man wearing a red-and-white-striped jacket and a straw boater, singing slightly saucy novelty tunes. To ordinary people it probably even looked comical, its round body like a child’s drawing of a guitar and its metallic brittle tone lacking the warmth and colour of a guitar. It wasn’t like that at all for me. I can’t put it into words, not really. Music has always been a refuge for me. Probably what made me turn to it in the first place was that when I was a child we had a piano in a spare room, an old one that was battered and out of tune. When my parents started shouting at each other, I would go to that back room and play for hours and hours, losing myself in the strange songbooks and piles of sheet music they’d inherited along with the piano from some old aunt. That was what music had always been to me. Somewhere I could escape to, where there weren’t words, where you didn’t have to be clever.
Maybe that was the problem with Amos and me. Amos definitely fell into the clever category. He didn’t respect my intelligence, that was for sure. And I suppose I didn’t respect his musicianship. Amos loved music. He certainly loved listening to it. He could play, after a fashion – he did his grades when he was at school and all that – but it was never natural to him. For him, playing music was always a frustration. He could never translate what he heard in his head. He had a characteristic tense expression when he played, which at first made me laugh and then didn’t. I tried to teach him, in our early days together, manipulating his arms and neck as he crouched over the keyboard, attempting unsuccessfully to get him to loosen up, to let himself go. But I stopped that. Amos had a very developed sense of his own dignity.
I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone, but to me every instrument spoke with its own tone of voice. The banjo may seem shallow and silly to other people but to me it talked of something old and melancholy and neglected. Gradually, in the weeks after I had bought it I took it out of its case and tried to get it to speak with some kind of fluency. But I had never played it in front of anybody, not once. When Danielle asked me, I felt it, deep down, as a challenge.
I couldn’t think where we should play. My own flat was too small and the walls were dangerously thin. I mentioned the problem to Sally and she said we could come round to her house. I protested feebly, mentioning her child, her neighbours, the trouble and noise, her husband, but she absolutely insisted. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour,’ she said. ‘I feel I’m becoming more and more cut off from the world. I’d love to have people around.’
I was a little concerned to hear someone actually pleading with me to have a band rehearsal in their home, but I was too relieved to push the point much further. We decided on Sunday afternoon and then I rang everybody about it. It seemed alarmingly easy.
I arrived at Sally’s home in Stoke Newington ten minutes early but I still wasn’t the first.
‘Hayden’s already here,’ she said, as she opened the door.
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s playing with Lola.’
That wasn’t completely accurate. He was lying back on the sofa in the living room and Lola was clambering up his rangy frame, as
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