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Back in the band

After more than a decade away from playing live with other people, Guitar Planet writer Russ Thorne is part of a band again. What's it like to be back, and has anything changed apart from his hair in the past 12 years?

Monday, 26. September 2011 - by Russ Thorne

“Any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most,” Jack White once claimed. There's a mic in front of me now, but I couldn't tell you what's pleasing me more. Is it the familiar weight of my Strat across my shoulders, the pops and clicks as successive valve amps stretch and warm up, or the fleeting looks between everyone? It all seems good to me.

Perhaps I should explain. I'm in a little shed-cum-rehearsal room in the wilds of Yorkshire, and this is my first time playing with a band since my university outfit's last live hurrah in 1999. I was in the same band a lot of people were: we were going to be huge, we had a unique sound, we were it. We had it all, from the dubious mid-90s retromania name (My Cat Prudence) to the imaginary album titles and fantasy tracklistings that we'd discuss with glee in the corner of the pub, or in our rooms, or indeed anywhere we were awake.

All play, no work

What we didn't have was the work ethic. Coldplay tell – possibly apocryphal – tales of practising for hours at a time. We drank a lot and danced with girls in order to find inspiration for songs about drinking a lot and dancing with girls. Every now and then we'd rehearse in the Flying Saucer Café – in a basement room where you were literally shut in via a trapdoor. We'd play our songs for a couple of hours, each guitarist gradually turning up their volume, until we emerged pleasantly deaf and jangling. And that was it. Needless to say, we didn't make it.

We did have a bloody good laugh though. Those three years of saying 'why yes, I am in a band' were a delight that I woefully failed to appreciate at the time, as was my inalienable right as a mascara-wearing humanities student. So when we played what was to be our final gig in the beery, dark-wood auspices of Leamington Spa's 'Jug and Jester' pub, the significance of the event passed me by. Well, there were girls there, after all.

...12 years later

Back to the present, and it's not until I crack open my guitar case and breathe that just-set-up Strat smell of polished wood and virgin strings that I realise how much I've missed playing with other people. More than a decade of strumming alone at home, with occasional open mic forays or bits-of-the-band reunions, but never a gig. Never a rehearsal. I've neglected the gigging guitar to the extent that the nice guitar tech tells me it actually creaked as he adjusted the neck. Sorry, guitar.

I'm here because a musical friend – who plays in several other groups – had a curious desire to play in a country band. When he mentioned it, I discovered that I did, too. Well, the songs are about what happens when you drink too much / dance with girls / dance with the wrong girl / should have asked that one girl to dance, right? And it turned out that a few other friends felt the same way. So we arranged a gig to give ourselves something to aim at – something My Cat Prudence would have found baffling – and got together for this, our first rehearsal.

I've always found the first time you play with people, friends or otherwise, to be a bit first-date-ish. There's nervous excitement beforehand. You play some safe small talk stuff to get settled. You worry whether one of you is hotter than the other (this applies to both riffage and aesthetics). Most of all, you fret about the connection between you. Will you click? With people you're already friends with, failure to click – on a date or at a practice – can feel pretty ruinous.

Older dogs, new tricks

But we're in luck. As first dates go, it's a cracker. We do the safe small talk songs and it turns out that we have a lot in common – we want to think about how songs are arranged, we like to talk about how guitar parts can complement one another, we have a lovely female lead vocalist who can hold the stage while we get on with being a solid, ego-free backing section. I find that being in my thirties has helped me realise close harmonies can be beautiful, and that the volume control also turns anti-clockwise.

But while some things have changed, some are just the same. Getting picked up and squeezing four or five of us into one car, guitars piled on our laps and snare drums chattering in the boot. Tuning up and noodling, discovering the drummer may well be a better guitarist than anyone else and quickly walling him in behind the toms. The sheer joy from wringing a song together out of nothing and the little smiles that pass around the room when everyone's in time, in tune and in the zone.

Expectations have changed, though. Will we be successful? I don't think anyone's even thought about it. Our debut gig is less than a week away, and I'm going to make the most of it in case it's the only one. I've learned that much. And the mascara? Not this time, but I am going to sport a natty show-off hat - time doesn't change everything. Now hand me that microphone, I've got something to tell you...

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