It was as short notice as you could get. Brendan called on the Thursday night and said it was an emergency. Their regular guy had his arm in a sling after falling over a mistimed tackle at five-a-sides. They were desperate. ‘Look … all he ever does is rhythm guitar and a bit of backing vocals’ he said. ‘C’mon … one gig. Learn the stuff on Friday, play it on Saturday. It will be a piece of piss. And eighty quid in your sky rocket.’ Playing a gig with Brendan and his pals was certainly not high on my ‘to do’ list. I had no desire to stand in with a covers band at some dodgy social club just outside Edinburgh. I’m in a proper group, The Aircrash Bureau, playing our own stuff, getting noticed. We’ve had reviews in the papers and everything. Well, a couple of fanzines, but still. I don’t play music for financial gain; musical prostitution is fine for other people but not for me. I am in it for the glory. I want to make music that is immortal, music that transcends the everyday experience. I checked my bank balance and saw, unfortunately, that my incomings didn’t transcend my overdraft; there was, as usual, too much month at the end of the money. I could have done with an extra couple of bob. But there was also my social life to consider; what with having to learn the songs and all, doing the gig would rule out both Friday and Saturday night. I checked my diary and saw that all I had down for the weekend, along with re-arranging my CD collection and my socks in the sock drawer, was 'staring into space'. Maybe it would be nice to get out. Better still to be playing a gig, even if it wasn’t really my scene. Any gig is a zone of possibility and there was always the chance that there might be some attractive woman interested in pulling a member of the band. Stranger things have happened; well … not to me, but I’ve read and heard about stuff. So I decided to give it a try. Brendan was a mate, after all. What had I to lose, apart from my dignity?

I’m a reasonably quick learner but forty odd songs in a day and a half was a big ask. I spent all of that Friday at work downloading sheet music, pretending to colleagues that I was doing an important piece of research into copyright issues. There was no danger of my boss noticing, or caring. He sits in his office all day, dreaming about golfing holidays in the Algarve. I would have to ride into work naked on a baby elephant and download porn while playing a trumpet out of my arse before he would think that anything odd was going on. Good preparation was vital if I was going to complete my mission. My fee for the gig might have compensated for some degree of embarrassment, but I wanted to rule abject humiliation out of the equation. The crib sheets mounted on my trusty music stand would help bail me out of a situation that had the potential for disaster. I also decided not to tell the guys in my own band about this little one-off thing. They might have taken it the wrong way; they might have thought that I had sold out or something.

After a day and a half of frantic downloading and practising as many of the songs as I could, Brendan picked me up at my flat and we headed off for the club. He saw that I was a bit nervous and tried to assure me that most of the audience would be drunk and incapable of spotting mistakes, politely adding ‘not that I expect you to make any.’ Just as I was getting close to being convinced, however, he told me that ‘there might be one other wee thing to watch out for.’ Murray -the band leader, singer, keyboard player and all-round musical director- might decide, he said, to throw in the odd surprise.
‘Like what?’ I asked, suddenly several degrees more nervous. ‘Och, you know, a wee Beatles medley, or a couple of old Tom Jones numbers’ he said.
‘Is there any other kind?’ I asked, trying to appear flippant and unperturbed. I managed that for about four and a half seconds. ‘Fuck it Brendan’ I said. ‘You told me the set was fixed, man! I learned most of the songs!’ I thought for a brief moment about jumping out of the car at the next set of lights and reneging on the deal, but that would have been pretty lame. Brendan assured me that the set was pretty much fixed, more or less. ‘And what should I do if he decides to throw in something I don’t know?’ I asked. He said that if I was really struggling with anything, I could just to turn down my amplifier and mime the guitar parts. ‘Are you kidding?’ I asked him. ‘Mime the fucking guitar?’ He laughed and said 'listen, don’t worry … we've got a big enough sound to carry it off. The drummer plays with a click-track and a lot of parts are sequenced through the minidisk, including some guitars. I told you, the crowd will be pished anyway. No-one will notice.' Brilliant, I thought. I had downloaded the sheet music for forty odd songs in order to minimise the potential for humiliation, but now I had to be prepared for the fact that the set list might take an unexpected u-turn, leaving me to ‘pretend’ to play stuff that I knew nothing about. I would potentially be miming rhythm guitar parts in a dodgy covers band. Who would have thought that all those lessons and all that practice time would have paid off? My mum and dad would be so proud of me. I had thought I was putting some ironic distance between myself and the performance by picking out my favourite Iggy Pop t-shirt to wear to the gig. It was going to make my statement: I would be playing with a covers band, but I was not in a covers band. I would be playing Top 40 songs, but I was not into Top 40 songs. I was, however, now faced with the prospect of having to find some extra ironic distance by ‘pretending’ to play some of the songs. I wasn’t sure if that made my situation ‘more’ or maybe a good bit ‘less’ ironic.

The Cotton Workers and Miners Welfare Club was located in the heart of a truly grotty housing scheme on the outskirts of the windy city. The iron bars on the windows provided a clue to the socio-economic status of the clientele and, perhaps, to the leisure habits of the local disaffected youth, one of whom welcomed our arrival in the car park by waving a bottle of fortified wine in our face and slurring ‘are yooz cunts in a band, like?’

We were and –frighteningly- I was, for the evening at least. The band was called Galaxy. Brendan was the bass player, Dave –a social worker by day- was the drummer and I was standing in for Kevin, the absent guitarist. Murray, the band leader, was a flamboyant and theatrical kind of guy; by ‘flamboyant and theatrical’ I mean that he was at the camp end of the gay-straight continuum. His partner was a former marine called Geoff, who was built like the side of a house and had seen action in the Falklands. Geoff helped load and set-up the gear and appeared to be the band’s biggest fan. I thought Murray’s camp mannerisms might have given him some trouble in a place like this, but the fact, I was to discover, that he was a bit over the top somehow endeared him to folk, a bit like some of those foppish comics from the seventies you sometimes see on the telly. Having Geoff as his private bouncer might have helped a bit too. One of the first punters to arrive -who looked and sounded like he might have gargled with broken glass- came up to us as we were setting up and said: 'Can ye play Mambo No.5?' in a way that implied that, if we didn't already have it in our set, we might want to think about putting it in, or perhaps leaving town. I pretended to concentrate on setting up my gear, while trying to look as casual and as tough as I could, which is to say not very tough at all. Let's just say that if it ever came to a fight between me and your little sister, I would happily settle for a draw. But Murray handled the guy brilliantly. ‘Of course we’ll play it love – on one condition; that you and your lovely lady get up and dance. Is it a deal?’

The guys in the band exchanged small talk while we were setting up and sound-checking. I think they were trying to put me at ease but also checking me out to make sure that I was not a complete idiot who would be likely to ruin their gig. Being a bit of a musical purist, I had no previous experience of this type of venue, the run-down social club in the drab wee town on the outskirts of the city. Murray could tell that I was a bit nervous and told me not to worry. I asked him, as casually as I could, if there was likely to be a big crowd. I was used to playing to audiences that, could, if push came to shove, fit in the back of a taxi and still have room for a couple of suitcases. And maybe a giant stuffed panda. Murray assured me that the place would be packed come show-time. ‘Packed?’ I gulped, thinking about my less-than-ideal preparation. ‘So I guess the social club scene is alive and kicking in the 21st century?’ He passed me my microphone stand and said ‘Darling, I don’t care if it’s on a fucking life support machine and coughing up blood, as long as I get paid.’

Once the place started to fill up with people and smoke, it looked even darker and dingier than it had first appeared. Most of the crowd looked like they had made entirely the wrong lifestyle choices - diet, clothes, partners, drug consumption, you name it. I began to revise my position about pulling a bird after the gig. The talent, what there was of it, looked a bit rough and ready. Ready I could handle, but rough was not exactly what I was looking for at this moment. Or any moment, for that matter, outside of an asteroid hitting the planet and drastically reducing the available female options. Few of the menfolk looked like they would have wasted much time reading poetry and, to a seasoned coward like myself, it seemed obvious that this would not have been an evening inadvertently to chat up the wrong woman. Any rock-star style philandering could wait. I was kind of ‘between girlfriends’, so adding another day or two onto twenty-three months without female company wasn’t going to hurt my batting average too much. But the truth was that, being a bit of a musical geek, my worst fear for the gig did not actually involve the threat of violence. I was more concerned about making a fool of myself; specifically, about the possibility of having to mime some songs and then be humiliated by some anorak bloke who would expose me for a fake by jumping up on stage, seizing the microphone and declaring to the audience: 'Ladies and gentlemen – there is no c sharp minor 7th on that song - this man is an impostor! Give us our fucking money back!' My muso pride was at stake.

We had to play two sets, each lasting around ninety minutes. I got over my initial nervousness after two or three numbers and it almost started to feel like fun. Apart from having to endure the passive inhalation of about 12,000 cigarettes, I was having a pretty good time. The band sounded good and Murray, although he was stuck behind his electric piano, held it together really well. He wasn’t exactly a great singer but he had three quarters of a bucketful of charisma and certainly knew how to woo an audience. It would be exaggerating to say that he could whip them up into a frenzy, but his encouraging hoops, hollers and bawdy exhortations helped stir up the odd flurry of drunken shuffling that a choreographer with failing eyesight might -at gunpoint- have called ‘dancing’. He handled every incoherent request for popular songs of the day with charm and gusto; when it was time to play Mambo No.5, he picked the broken glass gargler and his missus for some special attention. ‘This is for Len and his very special lady’ he said. ‘Len told me earlier that a little bit of Doreen is all he needs’. The guy loved it. Murray, you fucking showbiz tart, I thought. It hadn’t been part of our original set, so it was something of an immoral victory for me that I managed to get away with miming this dreadful song. I felt, of course, like a complete twat for faking it, but figured that, in a short time, nobody would be sober enough to notice my cunning sleight of hand. It appeared that the audience grew more and more appreciative, or perhaps less and less discerning, as the evening wore on. As my own band plays original, dark and moody material (Brendan says we make Radiohead sound like The Barenaked Ladies), you will appreciate that I was not really accustomed to seeing people up dancing and enjoying themselves. I could see the attraction.

Having survived the impromptu Mambo No.5 and returned to the sanctuary of the set list, I was alarmed when Murray took another detour from the agreed path. ‘Let’s take it down a bit, lads’ he said, after we had executed a storming version of Midnight Hour. He consulted his song sheet and announced that we would do Something by The Beatles, blissfully indifferent to the fact that I didn’t have the song on my set list. I looked over at Brendan, wondering what I should do. ‘Don’t worry’ he said, ‘the mini-disc has got backing tracks on it’. I was relieved, because I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to pick that one up quickly enough to busk along with the band. Those fucking Beatles and their fancy chords. With a subtle 'I'm-adjusting-my-settings-on-the-amp' gesture, I turned my back to the audience, put my guitar volume to zero and then resumed my stage position, 'playing' what I thought might look like vaguely convincing chord shapes. I could see Brendan trying to suppress one of his side-of-the-mouth grins. I knew he knew what I would be thinking. The shame of it all. And he knew that I knew he knew, the bastard. Brendan’s amusement I could cope with, but I then noticed -to my chagrin- that there was a guy in the audience who looked like he was eyeing me suspiciously. I had clocked him earlier because, unlike the vast majority of the punters, he had been paying particular attention to the band. There’s always one at every gig – the Guitar Buff, checking out amps, pedals, techniques. He would probably be up on stage at the end as we packed our gear, asking questions about distortion pedals or frequency response or would be giving me a lecture about the merits of heavy gauge strings. I recognised him immediately because I am part of that sad brotherhood myself; on another evening I might even have been doing his job. It started to look like he had an extensive knowledge of the Beatles songbook, because he turned and said something to his mate and shook his head in my direction. Fuck, I thought. Maybe I was imagining it, but it looked like he was talking about me. It was beginning to look like he was the real deal, a genuine Guitar Buff. Now that he had me in his sights, I had a sudden premonition that this whole thing was going to end in tears. Consequently, I was more than a little relieved when normal service was resumed and we returned to the set list after the Beatles number. Guitar Buff made his way back into the crowd, but he was still looking at me, paying me way too much attention. It was like one of those wildlife documentaries on the telly. In this case, he was the lion and I was the junior zebra, the weakest and slowest in the pack. He was out there, the scent of blood in his nostrils, waiting for another sign of weakness on my part. Once he got that signal, it would only be a matter of time before he pounced and ripped my guts out.


During the interval, as I chatted to Brendan about the performance, I felt some relief at having escaped pretty much unscathed. However, after ambling my way to the gents to answer a call of nature, the good vibes began to dissipate as I found myself standing at a urinal next to Guitar Buff. He initiated some small talk along the expected lines. ‘ Nice guitar mate’ he said. ‘A Washburn Idol, isn’t it?’ For one horrible moment I thought that I was going to be overcome by bashful bladder syndrome, but I managed to produce something as I answered his question in the affirmative. ‘But you’re playing through a Jazz Chorus amp’ he said. ‘Don’t you think it gets a bit peaky around 2K?’
I was dealing with a switched-on guy who knew his stuff. Normally, I would have been happy trading blows with him, but I was a little uncomfortable conducting a conversation about guitar technology with my penis out. I tried not to look down at his as we continued to urinate. ‘Yes’ I said, ‘the tone is a bit harsher than it has to be. But I can soften that through my Boss ME 50 pedal; that also gives me that wee bit extra power when I need it.’ He nodded his head in appreciation as I shook and zipped up rather more hurriedly than perhaps I should have. ‘Right’ he said, checking his steaming profluence as it splashed powerfully into the urinal. He, at least, was unperturbed by the intimacy of our experience. ‘Nae offence mate’ he said, changing the subject, ‘but does your band do any decent stuff?’ He nodded towards my Iggy t-shirt and said, in hope rather than expectation, ‘What about I wanna be your dog?’
I shook my head apologetically. ‘Well how about the Manics?’ he said, ‘or even some Bowie?’ As I dried my hands I smiled and explained to him that it wasn’t my band, that I was merely standing in. It somehow felt important to make him aware that I wasn’t some cynical musical whore, that I knew what real music was. ‘Of course, if it was up to me, mate …’ I said with a shrug. He then started to talk about his musical favourites and mentioned that he was thinking of starting his own band. He started to go on about ‘passion’ and ‘keeping the faith’, but I didn’t really want to hear about how he was going to change the world through song. I was keen to get back to the stage to prepare for the second half. ‘Nice talking to you’ I said. ‘But I’m due back at Top 40 central.’ He stood at the hand drier, nodding his head. As I exited, he shouted after me ‘Hey, mate … if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.’
I wasn’t sure whether it was a request or a warning.

Having more or less recovered from the Beatles incident and having made, after a fashion, some peace with Guitar Buff, the second set seemed to get off to a better start. Until, that is, Murray threw his ultimate curve ball. There is no polite way to describe this, so I’ll give it to you straight: He decided on an off-the-cuff medley of Ronan Keating’s greatest hits. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There was nothing about Ronan fucking Keating on my set list, nor had I been warned that his material might be likely to constitute one of the ‘wee surprises’ Brendan had told me about. I really was in trouble now. I looked over at Brendan, standing in front of his big Trace Elliot combo; it was fine for him; he was used to playing this kind of shit. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘what can you do?’ I asked him what the chords were on the first song, deciding that –rather than mime- I would try and tough this one out. It wouldn’t be that difficult to pick up the thread of the songs, surely? Brendan shouted: ‘Rollercoaster … C, G, F and A minor’. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Guitar Buff hovering on the edge of the dancefloor, giving me some more of his special attention. Having stalked his prey during the interval, maybe the lion now sensed that the junior zebra was about to get separated from his extended family. I could feel myself tense up.

There are problems, I found, with trying to wing it completely on a medley of barely-familiar songs. Just as you get used to sailing the calm waters of the first one, you have to negotiate the choppy seas of another tune, without the benefit of a map or compass. Then, just as you get familiar with the second, it’s time to abandon ship and try to scramble on board the emergency life raft of the third. You fight to overcome your seasickness and try to get used to the third, but before you know it you’re blindfolded and walking the gangplank of the fourth. You get the picture. It didn’t help that I was only vaguely aware of these songs, in the same way that one might vaguely be aware of a bad smell coming from the bottom of the fridge. Ronan fucking Keating, the musical antichrist. I hated that guy with a passion that bordered on the psychotic. When his face appeared on the TV, singing another one of those anodyne ballads, I wanted to commit an act of extreme violence. I wanted to maim. I wanted to kill. Hearing Ronan Keating on the radio was a bit like standing on dog shit and walking it into your house. You had to wipe it off immediately, but the mere thought of it made you gag and the smell could linger in unexpected places for a long time.

Brendan mouthed some chords to me again, but I knew this was only going to alert Guitar Buff to what was going on. Life is a fucking rollercoaster indeed. The band played and I joined in, approaching the various parts of the medley in the same way that a drunk man approaches a bar. OK it's … just getting the hang of it … it’s not so bad … fuck … I could see Guitar Buff in the corner of my eye. I was sure he knew what was going on. Then the song changed again. Right … ‘When you say nothing at all’ shouted Brendan, helpfully signalling the change to the next song. I was sure I had heard this one before. ‘G, D, C, D’ he said. I was sure that my panicked facial expressions alone would give the game away to anyone who was halfway to being observant, let alone a feral prowler like Guitar Buff. Brendan was saying stuff to me, but he was no longer making sense. I saw his mouth open and close, I saw it form shapes, vowels, consonants, words, but I had lost the power of interpretation. I couldn’t think straight. In normal circumstances, if someone had shouted the chords to me, I would have been able to busk along, but this was different. I felt like one of those poor suckers on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the sweaty guy who gets frozen in the studio headlights and stalls on a ridiculous question like ‘what is the capital of France?’ or ‘what is your name, you stupid piece of shit?’ 'She believes in me’ shouted Brendan, then named some letters of a long-dead alphabet. Wait a minute ... is this Baby can I hold you … no … fuck!'

At some point during this fiasco, I decided that discretion was the better part of cowardice. It was time to turn down and mime, so I headed stage left to 'adjust' the settings on my amp once again. When I turned around to face the audience once more, I found Guitar Buff standing right in front of the stage, his eagle eye fixed firmly on my left hand as it adopted a number of frankly unconvincing shapes vaguely in the key of Keating. He edged his way closer and, in barely a moment or two, was more or less in front of me, shaking his head and mouthing the dreaded words: ‘Those aren’t the right fuckin' chords mate.’

I tried my best to ignore him and prayed that the medley would come to an end so that I could once again play something vaguely familiar. Murray was too far into his singing to notice anything untoward. Brendan, the bastard, looked like he was ready to burst out laughing. He continued mouthing chords to me, but the laser beam glare of Guitar Buff’s eagle eye was burning a hole in my forehead. I had his full attention and it had paralysed me. I could only do my best to pretend not to notice.

'Those aren’t the right fuckin’ chords, mate' he mouthed again, this time with the helpful addition of his own mime of the 'right' chords. Oh please God, I thought, bring this unholy medley to an end. How many hits did that fucking cheesy Irish bastard have? And why, if he was such a proper music fan, was Guitar Buff so familiar with the work of the Irish Antichrist?
I tried a new strategy, one of staring at my effects pedals, prodding around with my right foot in the hope that it would look like I had a technical problem. A desperate and wonderful thought occurred to me and I prayed that the pedals might turn into a Star Trek-style transportation device that would whisk me far, far away.

'Hey, mate’ shouted Guitar Buff. I continued ignoring him. ‘Hey, you, Milli fuckin’ Vanilli! Those aren’t the fuckin' chords.' He was clearly someone who believed that you could never really over-egg a pudding. I turned my back to him, once more pretending that I was having trouble with my amp. I had run out of options. Having started with the miming charade, I had to go through with it and all I could do was pray for the ordeal to end.
Frozen in the glare of his attention, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I would have settled for a comet hitting the building, with maybe a lightning bolt thrown in to strike my nemesis down. Anything. Whatever I was being paid wasn’t worth this humiliation. I was sucking the devil’s cock. In fact, it was worse than that; I was sucking Ronan Keating’s cock. I was sucking Ronan Keating’s cock while Guitar Buff announced my disgrace to the rest of the world. I could feel the cold sweat on the small of my back. Just as I got to the point of thinking seriously about jumping offstage and running away, the Keating medley ended, after what had seemed like a mere 57 minutes in very slow motion.

Murray had decided it was time to return to the script. I thanked the almighty as I checked the set list and saw that the next song was ‘Won’t get fooled again’ by the mighty Who. I prepared myself to go into guitar hero mode. This was a chance to save some face. I knew this song. I loved this song. I could play it without referring to my chord sheets. Guitar Buff could go fuck himself. Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be Pete Townsend. I turned up my amp all the way up to eleven. I activated my trusty distortion pedal, harbouring thoughts of redemption and revenge. Dave the drummer counted us in. I raised my right arm and invoked the spirits of the rock gods, preparing to slay the infidel with my trusty axe. The A, followed by the glorious G to D shift. It sounded great. No more Mambo Number Five. No more Ronan fucking Keating. The intro was awesome and righteous. Intoxicated by my musical redemption, I decided to attack the second eight bars with a degree of blistering choreography. I prepared myself for a Townsend-esque leap, timed to coincide with that next glorious, ringing downstroke on the thundering A major. I caught Guitar Buff’s eye once more and thought: Eat my distortion, you fucking anorak. I am onstage and you paid to get in. You are drinking piss disguised as lager and I am up here with the band and, who knows, maybe pulling a bird after the show. You can stick this up your geek-boy arse. I leapt towards that next apocalyptic A chord and landed with impeccable timing, my right arm connecting gloriously, violently with the guitar. But instead of a beautiful ringing major chord, I added only a choking, horrible, gurgling farty buzz to the Who’s classic song. In my enthusiasm to execute the perfect power chord, I had not only disconnected my distortion pedal, but had spectacularly burst a string. The backing music on minidisk meant that the rest of the band carried on regardless. I could hear that there was another guitar part playing and it wasn’t mine. I stood still for a moment, back in the now familiar realm of utter shame and humiliation.
I tried to recover some composure and work my way around the broken string, but Guitar Buff just stood at the front of the stage, laughing and shaking his head. He held his pint in one hand and with the other made a series of masturbatory gestures which made it clear that he was not altogether impressed by my performance. Suicide now seemed like a viable option. My rational mind knew that everyone else in the crowd was either inebriated or having too good a time to notice anything untoward, but I was playing to an audience of one. Well, two if you counted his mate. They would know that I was a buffoon, a charlatan, a disgrace. And, what was worse, they would come up to me after the show and point these facts out in mocking, forensic detail.


It was, however, exactly at this point that fate intervened on my behalf. Unfortunately for Guitar Buff, Geoff had just returned from an extended visit to the gents. He would certainly have noticed that the former marine was built like the side of a house, but there was no way that Guitar Buff could possibly have guessed that Geoff was not only:
a) our biggest fan
and b) not entirely open to anything but the most positive interpretation of our musical abilities,
but, crucially, c) worryingly short-tempered.
With a former marine’s eye for detail and opportunity, Geoff surveyed the scene and made an immediate assessment. Perhaps suspecting that his partner was being ridiculed, he walked across the floor and pushed his huge open palm into the side of Guitar Buff’s face, knocking him sideways and slightly downwards, somewhere in the general direction of oblivion. Geoff then turned to Guitar Buff’s mate and asked him if he would like more of the same. By the looks of it, the mate was none too keen to accept the offer. As the band continued with our Who tribute, one of the stewards came over to join in with the debate; the heated exchange then developed into some pushing and shoving. The endgame arrived when Guitar Buff and his mate were frogmarched towards the exit by Geoff and the steward.
As the hapless two were ejected, side-of-a-house Geoff and the steward waved them away with a laugh. Maybe they were known as trouble-makers, or maybe Geoff -biceps, pecs, tattoos and all- looked to the steward like someone he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of. Whatever the reason, it was clear that Guitar Buff’s opinions were no longer required in da house. I limped my way to the end of the song and changed over to my spare guitar for the remainder of the set, which thankfully stuck pretty much to the agreed script.

After the show, as we dismantled our gear and loaded it into the various cars, Murray, who had clearly been concentrating so hard on his own performance that he hadn’t quite picked up on what had gone on, asked Geoff what had happened during the incident.
‘Oh, just some drunken tosser trying to work his ticket’ he said, before modestly adding that he had merely suggested to the gentleman and his friend that they might want to leave early in order to avoid the rush.
‘I though he might have been looking for a request from our excellent stand-in guitarist’ said Brendan with a snigger. I mumbled something about the set perhaps not being exactly to his liking.

When the club had been more or less cleared of punters, with only a few drunken stragglers hanging back to be swept up with the rest of the rubbish, Brendan and I were loading our gear into his car. He asked me if I had enjoyed the experience. ‘For fuck sake’ I said. ‘Enjoy it? Did you see that fucking idiot in the crowd? I wanted to die, man. Thank god no-one from my band was here. And … they won’t get to hear about it. I mean it Brendan, if you tell anyone, I’ll fucking kill you.’ He just laughed and said ‘So would that be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to the enjoyment question?’
‘Oh, it was a totally magical evening’ I told him. ‘I’ve played my first club gig, I’ve betrayed my musical principles by miming in public, I’ve played along with, and mimed to, Ronan fucking Keating, I’ve made a total fool of myself pretending to be Pete Townsend, I’ve been laughed at by a drunken anorak and …’ I looked around and lowered my voice, ‘to top it all, I’ve only been saved from further humiliation by the timely intervention of a love-struck, short-tempered, violent homosexual.’
Brendan just laughed. ‘What a triumph, son’ he said. ‘I think your musical career is at last starting to take off. Here, give me a hand with this flight-case.’

As we loaded the last of the gear, Murray came out to the car park, having completed his dealings with the club manager. ‘Well done, young man’, he said, handing me my fee with a smile. ‘You played very well. Would you fancy doing that again sometime? It’s just that our man Kevin is becoming less and less reliable … we could probably put some more gigs your way.’ He paused as if to gauge my reaction, before adding: ‘That is, if you are up for it?’

‘Eh …’ I glanced at Brendan, who was pretending not to be paying attention as he slid into the driver’s seat. ‘Sure’ I said, ‘no problem.’
I nodded my head, feeling the notes bulge in my back pocket. ‘Absolutely. Yep. Love to.’

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