After we'd watched The Blues Brothers, Thing Two wanted to know why I hadn't put the band back together. It's odd how much of an impact it's made on the girls, this band, given all that remains as concrete evidence of its existence is a photo of us all at my 21st birthday party (not playing, just standing together) and one very poor cassette, made on our state-of-the-art four-track, with five badly-mixed songs on it, four of them covers. I seem to recall we had to layer up the tracks to get it all on, and this recording-in-relays over the top might be one reason why it's so loose, when we used to think we played so tight. Or maybe we really were that crap -there's every likelihood. Nowadays, pop-star is apparently the number one career ambition for children of ten, jointly equal with sports-star. But by the time we knocked together our band, we were all living our Bright Young Things Oxbridge life, and had career ambitions to become high flying suits.
One main reason we can't get the band back together is me.
At the time, I was going out with A the guitarist. At one point I thought I might marry him. I loved his guitar playing; and his sisters; and his house with the power shower and the American fridge with ice-dispenser and the hall so lofty they had a 15 foot Christmas tree every December; and their maison de maitre in a bastide town in the Dordogne. After we left uni, we came to live up round here, oddly enough. And I realised that when you took away all our friends, and all the cool stuff there was to do, and it was just the two of us, going to work and coming home, I loved all those other things but I didn't really love him. At the time, I'm sure I must have uttered the immortal "it's not you, it's me" line, being too nice to point out that his dislike of sex would render me extremely unlikely to stick it for the next 50 years. I started going out with someone I met at the gym.
I moved to London (partly to escape the meathead gym boyfriend and his ability to accept he was chucked) and lived in my cousin's flat, near C the sax player. He'd spent too much time acting like a rock star, failed his exams and got sent down. He came and temped for a while at the place I worked, as I tried interminably to build a database of about 2,000 records that I could create in about an hour on my phone nowadays. He was back living with his parents - a wiser choice than it might first sound, as they had a massive old house overlooking Blackheath, and were always away travelling so we had the run of it most of the time. We spent our evenings loafing outside the pub on the heath, smoking weed and listening to CDs on his dad's Walkman, one earpiece each. Just mates.
J the drummer, another linguist like me, had just come back from his year abroad. His brother, working for a funky new-style US investment firm in the very immediate aftermath of Big Bang, had a house on the other side of the heath, so J would often also appear at weekends to join in with the smokes. His brother was convinced that hotel Gideon Bibles made for better papers than Rizlas, so I knew from the age of 21 I was going to burn in hell. That probably explains a lot.
L the other (better) singer had dropped away before her finals. Partly the volume of work on her hard, hard course, partly she was so much cooler and trendier than the rest of us and had better things to do.
M the keyboard player we never liked all that much anyway. He was a pretty shit keyboard player (although he had some really nice kit) and we even considered at one point calling the band One Too Many in his honour. He hung in doggedly, believing we were his mates and thinking we were the cool people. To our secret derision, he used to call A's room, where we practised, "The Factory". After we left, we never gave him another thought.
So that left J the bass player. He had a brain the size of planet and was doing a PhD. He started coming down weekends, I had a spare room in my flat. The first ever Comic Relief we got trollied on cheap beer and the heating was broken, so I ended up in bed with him. Lovely guy. Never really fancied him and still didn't - and his intellect might have been massive but he had a cock the size of an acorn. Which makes it hard to explain why we ended being married for seven years. Band reunions would have been awkward, after all that.
Where are we now? Well none of us ended up in jail, or frying chickens (or making plain white toast, for that matter).
A the guitarist still lives in the town he moved to when we graduated, working for the same company, although that's not as boring as it sounds: after all this time he has reached a stratospheric level of management and it's one of the biggest companies in the world. He lives with another man.
C the sax player, the one who didn't do the Oxbridge thing in the end, works in a groovy job in the music industry. His smart, funny, vibrant, extremely successful parents just this summer had a little mini break together at the Dignitas Clinic and didn't come back.
J has lived in places you only hear about on the news, working for the World Food Programme. He's not married, which is surprising as he's an all round lovely guy. I'd have imagined him with a family.
L qualified as a vet. I just Googled her and she's back in Cambridge training up the baby vets and publishing obscure learned papers. I wonder if she's still funky?
M is a Reader in the chemistry department at a good university in the north. His CV lists 152 publications, all of them incomprehensible. I went for a coffee with him a few years ago, when I was working up there. He had already lost most of his hair, and still hadn't sorted out his protruding teeth. His stammer, however, had improved a lot. He's not married.
J the bass player and I had an amicable, civilised divorce - rather like our marriage. When he met someone else afterwards, and became a bit bitter and angry and shouted down the phone about some money in a shared account, I wondered whether a bit more shouting and throwing things around might have been one of the key missing ingredients. A relationship needs a bit of passion to keep it alive, I think. Although the sex was always rubbish, even after my extensive tutoring. He's a professor, has his own top-ranking department, an acknowledged world expert who has written the seminal textbook in his pet subject. His second wife must be irked that his PhD thesis is dedicated to me. I used to bitch about her for freeloading her way into a house/car/lifestyle that I'd paid for (you can't get much on a university salary) but now I hear she's going blind and I feel sad for any mum who won't see her children growing up.
Which leaves me. Sometime singer, sometime manager. Living in Smallville, a working mum of two. A Suit, of all things. Although I do have a house with a powershower, an American fridge that makes ice, and space for a 15 foot Christmas tree in the hall.
We're none of us quite so rock'n'roll these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment