spacemonkeygaz.com

This is a story about men.  Met who met in a distant age, before everyone had iPhones and laptops and wi-fi and facebook and neither the means nor indeed the inclination for the constant, relentless barrage of shared information which, if we’re all honest, is just another welcome distraction from what we actually should be doing.

It was 1999, and I was starting university.  I had terrible dress sense; a velour luminous orange v-neck Cotton Traders shirt was the worst offender, usually accompanied with black shiny plastic-effect trousers.  Inexplicably I was single.  I had no mobile phone, and no computer.  I had a scrap of paper in my wallet with the mobile phone numbers of a couple of my more fortunate friends, which I’d have to take to a nearby phone booth to call them.  Alternatively I would go and knock on their door.  I met a pencil-necked geek called Gareth Evans.  I thought he was a nerd.  I used to pass him offensive and sometimes threatening doodles in lectures.

In November ‘99 I got a red Ericsson T10 mobile phone.  It had a flip-down cover which I though was cool, and I could type in my own ringtones.  At the time this was just out of this world fucking amazing.  I’m not sure how people ever coped at university before mobile phones.  I mean, how the fuck did you know where everyone was all the time?

In my second year my sister loaned me the money to buy a computer.  I had no internet, but I didn’t need it.  I could type up my essays in my room, save them to a floppy disk and go to the uni’s IT Suite to print them off.  I was given a warning by the university’s Head of IT for printing out naked pictures of Shannon Elizabeth.  Big Steve and I would sit in my room playing Championship Manager 2 and Settlers III: Gold Edition, or we’d sit in his room and watch the wrestling videos his mum used to tape off SKY and mail to him.  Inexplicably, I was single.

Christmas 2000 Gareth Evans organised a social; a sit-down meal in as close as Loughborough got to a nice restaurant.  The dress code was shirt and tie.  My mate Andy and I turned up in Elvis costumes to try and piss Evans off.  By now Evans and I had a love:hate thing going on.  I loved trying to wind him up.

In my final year I finally got the internet, which opened up a world of endless pornography and the opportunity to download thousands upon thousands of songs from Kazaa for free.  Communication was now primarily through a little thing called MSN Messenger.  I met whatshername (not via the internet, I must add).

Evans wouldn’t share a house with me in the final year, and whenever we did group coursework he stoutly refused to let me into his group.  He was still a nerd, which is why I always wanted to be in his group.  He however, knew I was lazy and disruptive.  To wind him up, during a Management Accounting group coursework presentation we made references to him being a sex offender and a homosexual.  He took it well in fairness (no gay pun intended).  As part of the same group coursework we also left our friend, dressed only in vest, pants and afro, in a field to the mercy of a farmer and his dog. 

One day on MSN Messenger, Evans and I started discussing music.  And we bonded.  I recommended Gold by Ryan Adams (for which I must give credit to Big Steve for originally recommending to me).  Evans loved it.  We both, to a certain extent, became obsessed.  Me probably more so.  I bought everything Ryan Adams I could find and downloaded everything I couldn’t.  For our first Valentine’s Day, whatshername bought me the sheet music for Gold, and I learnt to play the whole album, especially loving ‘Firecracker,’ ‘New York, New York’ and ‘Wildflowers.’

A few years later Evans and I were still in touch on e-mail, still chatting about music, usually in work time.  However did people talk aimless rubbish with people hundreds of miles away during work hours before the advent of e-mail?  He bunked a day off work (the first time ever, he told me, although he did sort of get his boss’s permission first) and flew from Jersey to Nottingham to come with me, Andy and Big Steve to see Ryan Adams at Rock City.  It was fucking ace.  Afterwards we drank ridiculously large G&Ts and trashed my flat.  Whatshername hit the roof when she came home to find the place stinking of brandy and cigars and her computer fucked due to the large amount of porn we’d downloaded onto it.

A couple of months later Evans sent me a short e-mail saying: “Buy the album ‘I Sincerely Apologise for All the Trouble I’ve Caused’ by David Ford.”  Bizarrely I remember the first time I ever played it; in the car on the way to ASDA with whatshername.  “Is this a man or a woman?” she asked during the opening track.  “It’s a man, I think,” I replied, unsure.  It was the second track — ‘State Of The Union’ — that grabbed me by the balls.  And another obsession began.

The first time I saw David Ford was at the Sugarmill in Stoke.  Evans was supposed to come but had to pull out due to a strenuous-sounding work jolly in Barcelona.  I had liked Ford up to this point, but was captivated by his live performance.  I don’t care if that sounds gay; he was brilliant.

I went to see him a couple more times, once at the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham, and at Birmingham for his annual ‘Milk & Cookies’ charity gig, where he played a host of stuff including covers and requests.  He sat at the piano and played the full version of Bat Out Of Hell.  This elevated him to the status of God in my eyes.

When the following year’s Milk & Cookies gigs were announced, an auction started online for the opportunity to perform live on stage with Ford.  Long story short I ended up winning the auction to perform at the Eastbourne Hippodrome on my 28^th Birthday.  My song: ‘Firecracker’ by Ryan Adams.

December 13^th 2008 was the best day ever.  Whatshername and I went down with Andy and his wife Rachelle.  We went First Class on the train, had a Mexican and some beers.  Andy filmed a documentary in the style of X-Factor, which to this day I still can’t convert into a format Youtube likes.  Eastbourne was cold and as windy as any place I’ve ever been.  At five o’clock I went to meet Ford and rehearse the song.  I was shitting it.  The auction had been caveated with “Mr Ford reserves the right to change your song choice and your part in the performance if it’s likely to comprise the quality of the show” so I knew I had to be not terrible.  The guy who had won the auction the year before had played ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ on piano with Ford singing, and it sounded brilliant.  I was feeling the pressure of expectation.

In the Hippodrome I met Ford and watched him rehearse and soundcheck with his band.  When they called me up on stage Ford just handed me a guitar and said, “I’ll count you in and we’ll just see how it goes, OK?”  That was it; no pissing around.  We ran through the song about five times to iron out any creases.  The band were fantastic, and really put me at ease.

“OK,” Ford said, “the plan is that we’ll play the first half, have a break and then I’ll call you up at some point in the second half.  So you can enjoy the first half and the break but then shit yourself through the second half.”

Now, I know it isn’t perfect.  I started flat because I couldn’t hear my own voice over the instruments (I suspect they’d turned my microphone right down, perhaps rightly), but it was probably the best experience of my life, singing one of my favourite ever songs in front of about 700 people. 

And if you’re wondering about the hat: in the first half of the show Ford had worn a cowboy hat while playing Beck’s ‘Devil’s Haircut.’  I decided I wanted to wear it, so I picked it up on my way onto the stage.  It seemed appropriate for a Ryan Adams song.

After the show we wandered aimlessly around Eastbourne for a while, eventually ending up in Wetherspoons.  We ordered posh ladyboys: Leffe, Baileys and G&Ts.  Andy did his impression of Clyde from Any Which Way But Loose.  At one o’clock the pub called last orders and we got up to leave.  As we stepped outside Rachelle noticed someone knocking and waving through the window; it was Gary ‘G-Man’ Page — Ford’s drummer.  In quite the most surreal ending to the evening we stood outside chatting with Ford and his band for about half an hour about all kinds of nonsense. 

Evans — unable to make it due to a tricky commute from Dubai, and who’d still not seen Ford live at this point — had asked me to ask Ford where we should go for his upcoming stag do.  He suggested “something different… like a football tournament in Barcelona or coal mining in Wales.  And do it the night before the wedding.  Not enough people do that these days.”  We said our goodbyes and went back to our £35-a-night hotel on the seafront to drink Baileys, warm lager and red wine until the small hours.  It was — and without meaning to sound like an 8-year-old’s report on what I did for my holidays — the best birthday EVER.

Eight months later it was Evans’ wedding day.  I had made the transition from annoying cock at uni to best man.  I had got hideously drunk on Evans’ stag do and lost my glasses.  The wedding was great and my speech went down pretty well, but the best part was the surprise the bride — Erica — had organised for the groom.  After the speeches I told the guests that the bride and groom were going to make their way to the dance floor for their first dance, and they should follow.  I ran ahead to give the surprise his cue.

The bride and groom walked to the dance floor to the sound of David Ford at the piano playing their song, ‘Song For The Road’.  Evans looked over at the piano, back at Erica then back to the piano, proper double-take style.  “He looks like David Ford,” he whispered.  “It is David Ford,” she said back.  “Did you know about this?”  “Yes Dear, I organised it.”

 

At the end of the set Evans asked for an encore.  Later he would confide in me that he wished he’d thought of an obscure album track that he really wanted to hear, but all he could think of was to ask Ford to play Firecracker.  With me.  Feigning reluctance I got up there and played the song.  Again, I bloody loved it. 

Afterwards Andy and I plucked up the courage to ask Ford if he wouldn’t mind just saying a few words into Andy’s video camera.  We’d made a kind of documentary in the style of X-Factor, we said, and we wondered if he’d like to do a Simon Cowell-y type critique of my performance.  He smiled, “I think I’d be good at that…”

Click the link to see 

I’ll never be a rock star but I’ll be able to tell my grandkids that I sang and played my guitar on stage a couple of times.  I’ll ask if they want to see the DVD.  They’ll scoff and ask me to explain what a DVD is.  I’ll explain it’s something we used to watch films on in the olden days before telepathic holograms and I’ll say, “You think that sounds shit, let me tell you about my red Ericsson T10…”