First broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 23rd July 2008, as part of the series ‘When Writers Play’

When I close my eyes and try to remember, the first thing I see is the back garden of my parents’ house, on the Lickey Hills, just outside Birmingham. I am eight years old. I am sitting at the piano, and on the music stand in front of me lies a piece of sheet music. The title of the piece is “The Jolly Farmer”. But the piano keyboard remains untouched. Instead, I am staring out at the garden, the little rectangle of baize-green lawn calling me out to play, the overhanging branches of the sumac tree an irresistible temptation to climb. I know that I should be practising the piano music. My piano teacher will be arriving in a moment, and she will be angry if I haven’t practised.  But the black dots which make up the sheet music frighten and bore me. They seem to bear no relation to the music which I can hear in my head, and which I desperately want to play. The only trouble is, I don’t want to learn how to play it. I simply want it to pour out of me, in a spontaneous, free-flowing stream.

Well, my piano teacher gave up on me, quickly enough. Either that, or I gave up on her. Or my parents gave up on both of us. Whatever the reason, I only ever had a handful of piano lessons, before I was abandoned as a lost cause. And a few months later, I was given a guitar for my birthday. For the next few years, that became my instrument of choice.

But the guitar, in a way, was the start of my undoing. Back in the early 1970s, if you lived in a world full of pop music and your radio was permanently tuned to Radio One, it was pretty easy to make the music you wanted to make on a guitar. My hero at the time was Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and I soon learned how to play along to ‘Hot Love’ or ‘Metal Guru’ or ‘Children of the Revolution’. Being able to master these chord sequences in about ten seconds only confirmed me in my view that music was not like writing (which I had also started to practise). Writing required patience, and long hours of painstaking devotion to your craft. Music – which has always had a far more powerful and direct emotional effect on me than literature – was, I thought, much more straightforward than that. The simplicity of my favourite pop songs fooled me into thinking that music was an inclusive, democratic art form. Anybody could do it, as far as I could see. And so I strummed on, perfectly happy, for the time being, with my handful of unsophisticated chords.

At secondary school, I started to meet serious musicians for the first time – people who could actually play their instruments. I held such people in awe, and still do. And while I wasn’t deluded enough to think that they would accept me as an equal, I still couldn’t stop myself from wanting to hang out with them. Invited to one of these friends’ houses for the afternoon – he was a talented singer and horn player – I made a proposition to him. My musical ambitions had expanded by now, under the influence of so called ‘progressive’ rock music, and I suggested to him that we should collaborate on a rock opera. Looking slightly nonplussed, he asked me what I had in mind. I went over to the piano and bashed out the two-chord riff which represented the sum total of my ideas so far. As the last chord died away, he regarded me gravely, in silence. Nothing was said, and the subject was not brought up again. It was a long time before I had the courage to propose a musical collaboration to anyone again. For the rest of my school years, music became like sex: something I dreamed about constantly, but never actually did. Not with other people, anyway.

But still the urge to play music – and, increasingly, to write it – wouldn’t go away. I realise now, of course (it’s easy to realise these things in hindsight) that I should have knuckled down and learned how to play classical piano and also learned something about musical theory. But there were always siren voices telling me that this wasn’t necessary. As I was beginning to study for my A-levels I also started listening to jazz, and here was further encouragement for me to believe that music did not have to be rehearsed or pre-meditated. Jazz fans at the time were going crazy for Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert on the ECM label: and surely, all that he was doing on this album (or so I told myself) was sitting in front of an audience for two hours and playing whatever came into his head? So why couldn’t I do that?

In the meantime, my compositions were evolving, after a fashion. I had more or less given up on the guitar but I still played the piano the way a guitarist would, with my left hand voicing simple three-note chords while my right hand improvised a melody. But I’d also started writing tunes and recording them, using a primitive overdub technique which involved recording a backing track onto one cassette recorder, and playing along with it and recording the results on another. As my vocabulary expanded to take in vague approximations of the harmonies I’d been picking up from Ravel, Poulenc and others, I started to build up a little private library of compositions which – although I would never dream of inflicting them upon anyone else – now constitute, for me, a sort of musical diary of my teens and early twenties, and which evoke the emotional texture of those years far more directly than the written word ever could.

All the same, a voice inside me could not help phrasing a question, and asking it more and more insistently as the years went by: would any of my music ever find its way into the wider world – or was it destined to remain a secret, between me and my headphones?

Fast-forward.

So - the year is 1986, and I’m sitting onstage at a pub in North London called The Pied Bull. It’s a Saturday lunchtime and a decent-sized audience has gathered. Whether they will still be there an hour later, when we’ve finished playing, is another matter entirely.

There are five of us in the band: drums, bass, alto sax, guitar and keyboards. (That’s me, of course.) There is no singer, as such, although two of the members have been known to sing, when push comes to shove. But most of our set is instrumental anyway.
The tunes are mainly written by me, and I am at last getting to experience the terrifying novelty of hearing my own music performed outside the confines of my bedroom.

1986, though … I could hardly have chosen a worse time to foist my particular brand of music onto the listening public. We are by now post-punk, post-New Wave, and post-New Romantic. Probably the most acclaimed and fashionable band in the country is The Smiths. And what am I writing? Lengthy, jazzy instrumentals which sound like they could have come from a 1970s Frank Zappa or Soft Machine album. I am also starting to experiment with time signatures and one of our songs is in 9/8 when at least half of the band already have enough difficulty keeping time in 4/4. It’s no wonder that, when I approach the manager of The Pied Bull at the end of our set and make an enquiry about repeat bookings, he looks embarrassed and shuffles away awkwardly, muttering something about our music being ‘hard to categorise’.

But we’re undeterred, for the time being. I’m in the closing stages of writing my PhD on intrusive narration in the novels of Henry Fielding. Our drummer – and lyricist – is writing a PhD at Cambridge about Dante and his influence on the Romantics. Our guitarist is a medical student at Guy’s Hospital. But none of that really matters. We live for the few hours we spend every week in South London rehearsal studios. We are high on the romance of rented transit vans and trips up and down the M1 to the gigs we manage to secure every once in a blue moon.

Ah, yes, how heady, exciting and full of possibility it all seemed at the time … We had no grand plans to storm the album charts or sell out Wembley Stadium, but we did assume that, before too long, we would land ourselves a record deal and perhaps rate a few column inches in Melody Maker or the NME. My first novel had just been accepted for publication and I envisaged having two interesting parallel careers, as a writer and a musician. Shades of Anthony Burgess, perhaps – who always made a big deal out of his composing ambitions. But, of course, it never happened. After a couple of years, those rehearsal studios and rented vans didn’t seem so romantic any more. A series of increasingly polished demo tapes had failed to bring the A&R men streaming to our door. It was the old story, which must have been told by many thousands of aspiring musicians over the last few decades. As musical arguments intensified and rehearsals began to seem curiously joyless, we simply had to reconcile ourselves to the idea that the world wasn’t ready yet to embrace a band which had started to sound something like the bastard child of Prefab Sprout, Everything But The Girl and The Average White Band. It was time to call it quits.

I signed up for evening classes in jazz piano at Goldsmith’s College, and for a year or so I relished the opportunity of feeling superior, for once, to all the classically-trained musicians on the course, who had never improvised and were terrified of breaking free from the notes on the page. I also took my tiny fragments of music business experience and worked them up into a comic novel called The Dwarves of Death.

And so I quietly kissed goodbye to those two parallel careers, and for the last twenty years, words have been the tools of my trade. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – I don’t like words very much. I distrust and get irritated by them. Perhaps I expect too much of them. And perhaps, where music is concerned, the reverse is true, and I ascribe too much power to notes, chords, melodies and harmonies. Sometimes, when I’m writing a novel and a scene is going badly, I will sit down at the piano and improvise, and the music that comes out – however primitive and imperfect it may be – always seems to be a more truthful expression of the emotions I was trying to convey. I can still never be in a room with a piano, and not want to play it. Music, for me, will always be my doorway into imagined worlds, and also to remembered ones. If only it could transport us back in time: if it did, I would want to go back to the room in my parents’ house, overlooking the garden, and tell that eight year old boy to stop staring out at the sumac tree, and get on with his practice.

© Jonathan Coe 2008

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