2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (27 page)

“Only a couple of lines from ‘
Sur Le Pont d’Avignon
’.”

“I’m not sure if that will be good enough.”

“Mmm. I feared as much.”

Seconds later Brad was speedily shuffling away from me, and a few moments after that the family on a nearby table began to look at each other accusingly. Terrible thing, nerves.

Following an amazing half-hour set from the Irish boys, it was the turn of the French. Michel did four songs, two that were well known and a couple he’d written himself. He was an assured and accomplished performer with a fine voice and easy guitar-picking style. I particularly liked the song he’d written many years ago for his wife Christine. “
T’es Petite,T’es Grande, T’es Belle, Toi
” (You—you’re small, you’re big, you’re beautiful). I looked to see if I could find her face in the audience. I didn’t know what she looked like, but I reckoned I’d be able to spot her as being the only one who was really glowing.

After the jazzy complexity of the Irish boys’ opening set, which had drawn on songs from the Great American Songbook, I was struck by the marked contrast of the ‘French song’. Sophisticated chords and subtle melodies didn’t seem to be in the forefront of the creative minds of the French songwriters. They preferred the strength of a bold transition from minor to major, and then back again. I bet that during their song-writing sessions there weren’t many discussions about whether chord progressions were ‘too obvious’. Obvious was good, obvious was strong, obvious was catchy. And anyway, it was the words that were important. The French song told a story or expressed an opinion. What mattered ‘was that you knew what the song was about. I guess that’s why the British have never really been fans of French songs. We don’t understand them.

Mary closed the first half even though she’d wanted to get out of playing.

“I’ll leave it to you fellas,” she’d said. “You know how to play properly.”

Lacking in confidence though she may have been, her ten-minute set was a big success. She led the whole room in a spirited sing-song, thumping out the chords on the piano whilst Miles shifted onto the nearby drum kit and proved his versatility by banging out an upbeat rhythmic accompaniment. With an almighty rendition of what I recognised as ‘Those Were The Days’ but which almost everyone else knew as a French song, the first half drew to a close. A first half that had been close to perfect.

Brad and I spent the interval outside, around the back of the hall. The light hadn’t completely faded and we finished our frantic last-minute rehearsals as the distant peaks gently surrendered to the advancing darkness. I was suffering from doubts about our choice of songs, but Brad had regained his confidence and was steadfast.

“Let’s stick to what we’re good at,” he said.

I thought for a moment.

“Drinking and watching?” I replied.

“Come on. Don’t be so negative. We’re going to knock ‘em dead.”

“I do hope so.”

Brad and I continued with our musical equivalent of last-minute cramming for an exam until we were called back in by Malcolm and told to stand by the side of the stage.

We obeyed the instructions in silence. As Malcolm moved towards the microphone, we knew that our time on stage was imminent. I don’t know why I felt so uneasy. In my professional career I’d faced larger, noisier and more cynical audiences than this on a fairly regular basis. But all of a sudden, and for the first time, the stakes here seemed high. If Brad and I did well then I would have made a shortcut to acceptance with many in the village, but get it wrong, and then not only would I lose credibility with those I’d already met, but I may well have an uphill struggle with the rest.

“
Mes dames et messieurs
” announced Malcolm, “fe
deuxieme acte de la soiree commencera maintenant avec Tony Hawks et Brad Titman
”

And then my nerves vanished. The sound of my friend being announced by a daft name reminded me just how silly it was to be uptight about this. Yes, it mattered—but by the same token, it didn’t matter either. Probably in the grand scheme of things, nothing really matters, but certainly the fifteen-minute set by Tony Hawks and Brad Titman in a small village in France didn’t merit any further anxiety.

“Let’s enjoy this, Titman!” I whispered to Brad through a suppressed giggle.

Brad turned and nodded and I felt a little like the escape officer addressing a fellow prisoner upon entering the tunnel for our break-out attempt. We had our fake passports, civilian clothing, the tunnel was clear, and all we had to do now was give it our best shot.

We walked onto the stage to a warm round of applause and Brad hit the first chord. E minor. I joined in, and we quickly established a funky rhythm. This caused a ripple of excitement through the audience. A couple of high-pitched whoops wafted up into the rafters of the hall’s high ceiling. I took a deep breath and belted out the first line.

“Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man—no time to talk…”

More whoops and hollers. I caught Brad’s eye and gave him a look, as if to say, “Yup, we’re on our way.”

The old Bee Gees song ‘Stayin’Alive’ had been a little favourite of ours, a song that we’d found surprisingly easy to convert into an arrangement for two guitars and two voices. When we’d first learnt it Brad had worked very hard at the high-pitched harmony line, and as he leaned into the microphone to deliver it to this new French audience I noticed that he was grinning like an excited child.

The Muzak Brothers were back. We were on a performance high. However else the simple dynamic of the performer⁄audience relationship may be confused, abused and perverted by money, managers, agents and ego, the simplicity of it can return in a magical instant. And it was happening right now. The real thrill of the performance comes from a positive exchange of energy—ephemeral and often elusive, invisible and unquantifiable, but a natural tonic, a kind of organic battery charge.

Yes! The Muzak Brothers were back.

The end of the song may not have prompted the same audience response as the one that had greeted the Irish boys in the first half, but we weren’t far off. We were holding our own, and as a consequence I now felt confident enough to test myself still further. I like to think that over the past fifteen years I’d developed an easy style of delivery when on stage addressing an audience. But what would it be like when attempting it in another language? Well, I was about to find out.

I found myself introducing Brad and explaining that he’d been at his office desk in London that very morning and now he was here in the mountains singing for them. The audience applauded his efforts and Brad smiled. An innocent, naive smile. And then it occurred to me.

He had absolutely no idea what I’d just said.

I shared this thought with the audience and they laughed. Brad smiled again. An even more innocent, naive smile, tinged with a hint of bewilderment. I became mischievous and told the audience that it didn’t matter what I said about Brad, he wouldn’t understand. There were more chuckles at this, and so I took it as a green light to indulge my whimsy. Brad, I explained to the audience, had started out in life as a small-time burglar who had spent long periods in a string of different prisons. Later he had carried out two contract killings but had successfully blamed them both on innocent men who were now serving sentences in his place. I glanced across at my chum who was grinning inanely.

“What are you doing, you bastard?” he enquired, through clenched teeth.

I smiled back at him, feeling the faintest hint of the all-consuming power of a dictator. What should I say next? I had complete control over Brad’s entire history. Tempting though it may have been to continue exploiting the easy laughs provided by the blank canvas of Brad’s uninformed face, I elected not to milk it any further and I launched into the opening riff of our next song.

“
Et maintenant—une chanson de Stevie Wonder—“Superstition
”,” I announced.

And Brad Titman, the double murderer, joined in—none the wiser.

§

It turned out to be quite a night. After Brad and I had successfully concluded our five songs, Michel performed some pretty French duets with a mate of his, and the Irish boys played another set, including some traditional Irish music, which went down a storm. The culmination of the night was a huge jam session, a long stint of which I spent tinkling the ivories. Miles was an accomplished drummer as well as a brilliant pianist and once he discovered that I played keyboards, he urged me to take over from him, freeing him up for percussive duties. Initially I’d protested to the others.

“I can’t follow Miles—he’s so much better than me.”

“Ah, just shut up and play.”

Maybe it was the drink (the beers were now flowing thick and fast, and the musicians were well on the way to drinking any profit that the night’s bar takings might have produced), or maybe it was just the high of playing with such fabulous musicians, but quite unexpectedly I played the piano better than I can remember having played it before. The small amount of practice that I had got around to bore fruit, and I found myself exploring the keyboard with a dexterity and a creativity that completely took me by surprise. For at least half an hour I felt like a pianist. What could I achieve if I actually began to do what I’d set out to do? Could this be the kick-start I needed to make full use of the Piano in the Pyrenees?

At around 2.30am I took a break from jamming with the boys and I sat at a table at the far end of the room. For the first time in the evening I was truly relaxed.

“You played very well this evening,” said a voice.

I looked up from my beer and saw an attractive woman, probably close to my age, smiling warmly at me.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Where are you from?”

“I am from London,” I said, noting her pretty eyes for the first time. “My name is Tony—what’s yours?”

“Monique,” she replied, broadening her smile still further.

A ‘getting to know each other’ conversation followed. My eyes and instincts had already told me that Monique was an elegant and attractive woman but soon I had information to complement that. She was currently living in a neighbouring village, having moved to the area from Belgium many years ago with her former husband. As far as I could make out, there was no new man in her life, something that seemed to be backed up by the amount of time she was able to set aside for chatting to me at 2.30 in the morning.

“Tony! Tony! We need you on piano,” came a call from Nigel on the stage. “Miles is going back on the drums.”

Damn. I wanted to stay longer where I was. Monique and I seemed to have made some kind of connection.

“OK!” I called back to the stage, rising from the table.

“Well, goodbye, Tony,” said Monique. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Yes, it was nice to meet you too.”

I shook her hand. Quite why I chose to be so extraordinarily English at this point of the night, I cannot fully explain. Here I was in a country where they jumped at any excuse to kiss each other, and all I’d managed was a formal shake of the hand after an evening of music and alcohol.

“But did you get her number?” asked Brad, after Monique had disappeared with a wave twenty minutes later at the conclusion of our twelve-minute version of Bill Withers ‘Lovely Day’.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Schoolboy error, Hawks.”

“Yes, it was rather, wasn’t it?”

Brad didn’t respond, allowing himself instead to be seamlessly swept into the latest piece of musical improvisation, a vaguely bossa-nova version of ‘Hit The Road Jack’.

We finally packed up playing at 4 o’clock in the morning. Most of the smattering of ne’er-do-wells who were left in the village hall had attempted to play some instrument or other, however badly or drunkenly. When Malcolm’s old school chum and house guest Louise hit the drums in a kind of inebriated manic fury, we knew it was time to call it a night. Over the years I have noticed this irritating drawback to the drums. Somehow they call out to people with no musical ability, saying, “Play me, play me! This is the one instrument you can play!”

After Malcolm had wrested the drumsticks from the latest victim of this delusion, we all headed for the door.

“
Bonne nuit
all,” I said in my best Franglais.

“Goodnight and well played,” said Nigel, politely holding the door open for me and Brad. As we made our way out, I heard Nigel lean across to Brad and whisper, “By the way—helluva surname you’ve got there!”

I smiled, but then immediately reproached myself for not having taken Monique’s number.

Opportunities like the one I’d just missed didn’t come thick and fast in this part of the world.

Polka

Inspired by that magical musical evening, I practised on my piano much harder in the days that followed, concentrating particularly on building up the strength in my left hand. This was necessary because the right hand was naturally exercised in the course of my routine improvisations, whilst the left one mostly played chords that demanded less work from the fingers. So when a busy boogie-woogie or rock’n’roll accompaniment was required, this weakness became hopelessly exposed. Sometimes after only a minute of playing this kind of stuff it felt like my left hand was falling off, such was the shooting pain that built up in my wrist.

Many years back, during another period in my life when I’d resolved to improve my piano playing, I’d taken it upon myself to increase the strength in my left hand by using a wrist strengthener, effectively a kind of spring that you had to squeeze between the fingers and palm of the hand. I soon realised that I could use this little gadget pretty much anywhere, especially if I carried the thing with me in my trouser pocket. I only did this once in public, though, following an embarrassing and misinterpreted practice session on the London Underground when I happened to be sitting in front of a couple of rather pretty Scandinavian girls.

Fortunately, there were no such hitches with my Pyrenean practice schedule. I offended hardly anyone, apart from maybe Brad and Ron, who may have become tired of my endless attempts to master the piano solo from ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ or the fast bit from Stevie Wonder’s ‘Sir Duke’.