Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens

My name is Alex Marsh and I play bowls. And so does Eddie, and Nigel, and Big Andy, and even John Twonil’s been persuaded to give it a try. We are the exciting new faces of the sport. It sits oddly with the guitar hero status, I know. But there have been stranger combinations. Rock and roll, bowls; bowls, rock and roll. There’s nothing mutually exclusive – it does not need to be an either/or. One does not preclude the other. It is perfectly possible to both jack, and to Fleetwood Mac.

Barry Hearn knows.

Barry Hearn is the legendary sporting Svengali who does the snooker, and boxing, and darts. The man who made Steve Davis. The Don King of Romford. The Billy Graham of the baize. What Barry Hearn doesn’t know about marketing sport isn’t worth knowing. And he thinks bowls is going to be the next thing – which is why he has put it on Sky TV, during peak morning viewing. So scoff at the beautiful sport at your peril.

I suppose I have mixed feelings about this. It is like when you discover a new band – you want them to be your own special band all to yourself. You do not want them to become popular and mainstream and put on by consensus as background music at dinner parties. And whilst wishing your special band all the goodwill in the world, you would rather that they starved in the gutter than enjoyed any form of commercial success, as this would spoil it for you.

Something a bit like that happened to my own band. However, more of that later.

Will bowls as we know it survive the Sky TV experience? Will it retain its unique nature, or will it sell out to the forces of Evil Marketing? Will the money grow and nurture it, or will it corrupt it? Will it retain the nobility of sport, or will it descend into a new WWF pantomime?

The television camera itself is a great distortion pedal, a two-dimensional screen that loses the subtleties and many of the unsubtleties also. When you watch cricket, it’s impossible to judge how fast the bowler’s letting the ball go – you have to work it out from where the wicket keeper’s standing. Football is robbed of the intense physical aspect, horse racing is sterile without the flying hooves and mud; long pots on the snooker table appear easy and unmissable. I would not want the casual Sky TV viewer to see what I do every week and to dismiss it casually as some gentle meandering pastime. That would be crushing. But I think Barry Hearn and I are on the same wavelength.

Barry Hearn knows that it’s the new rock and roll.

‘Here you go.’

Nigel strides like a parade sergeant before the row of benches, where we are sitting changing into our deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes. He stops at each player and hands out new kit from a plastic bag – a brand-new, pristine, never-been-used, soft and lovely Stella Artois beer towel.

‘Thanks!’ I say in surprise.

‘I got them from work,’ he explains, moving on to Glen. ‘Given to me.’

Along the line, people take their towels and beam in gratitude, holding them up to look closer. Matching beer towels! The whole thing looks bloody professional, in tune with the new image of bowls, a co-ordinated wave of red that will raise pride and morale in the team, aside from providing more efficient wiping.

That’s us. The village bowls team. Sponsored by Wifebeater Lager.

It’s just a roll-up tonight. No opposition – merely a friendly opportunity to get together and to have a bit of practice before the league starts in earnest. But there is still a buzz of excitement in the air. The dawn of a new season – the first date on my headlining UK tour. The bowling green is my raised stage; the woods are my guitar, and the mat represents my effects pedals. I have not actually ever been on a headlining UK tour, but the parallel is there. The scoreboard is my set list; the beer towel is my guitar lead. Nigel, skipper of our block, is my bass player; Big Andy is my drummer. We don’t have a screaming hysterical audience of teenage girls – our most loyal and regular supporter has been unable to turn out to spectate since he got his foot amputated – although Eileen is here, and she sometimes likes to sit and watch, chucking in the odd heckle, in lieu of playing. But the parallel is definitely there.

I am pleased with my analogy. Songwriting is all about analogies – good songwriting is all about unexpected, hidden ones. ‘There She Goes’ by the La’s is about heroin, not a lady who is going. Really, playing bowls is just like being in a successful rock band. I can’t really see many differences.

Big Andy, Nigel and I do play like a well-drilled trio. We are comfortable in each other’s presence; there is a telepathy between the three of us, like Cream (featuring Eric Clapton). We don’t feel under pressure in front of each other; we barrack and praise each other in equal measure, and we go to the village pub afterwards. That’s the difference between a ‘side’ and a ‘team’, although just to be confusing, in bowls it is called a ‘block’. We are settled together this year – I have high hopes that our near-telepathic understanding will give us a big advantage. There is mutual respect and support there.

There are moments in making music when it all comes together. When you’re rehearsing a new song, the band hits a new chord change, someone drops in a phrase, hits a particular note and it’s just – right. You catch the eye of the bass player, of the drummer, and you know. That’s a magic moment. The tension resolved; the song opens out into perfection.

It’s the same when the skip bowls and you can see the wood coming towards the pack – slowing and arcing for the gap you pointed out, running out its weight perfectly, nudging past the short woods, skipping the bare patch, squeezing through the narrowest of spaces and finally falling to a halt touching the cott itself. It’s magic, it’s perfect. It’s like the big piano chord at the end of ‘A Day in the Life’.

It’s time to start playing again.

TWO (#ulink_7e855b52-447a-5a96-9112-28b580fbdece)

Last night a Strategic HR Initiative saved my life

Past the church gates, past the old Methodist chapel, up through the Tofts and out between the fields of beet. Past the small shed in the woods that acts as the hub of BT’s broadband activities in the area; down the hill through the woods to the junction with the main road that will take me into town.

I’ve lived in three places in Britain: Essex, with my mum and dad; London, in a flat underneath a man with an enormous toilet; and here, in this small and friendly corner of Norfolk. It’s here that I truly feel at home, in this place that’s impossible not to love, in countryside and a community where I truly belong. Where I have my friendly neighbours (Big Andy, Short Tony, etc.), my close family (the LTLP) and – perhaps for the first time in my life – true and unconditional membership of a youth tribe (bowls). DJ Ken Bruce asks a question on the radio, the answer to which is clearly ‘Norman Greenbaum’.

Past the gates of the old airfield, up the gentle hill towards the old service station. The sunshine washes across the fields and hedgerows and the music fills the car. I’d say that it was the sort of morning that made it impossible to have a worry or a care in the world about life, if I weren’t so worried and full of cares about life and – specifically – the morning ahead itself.

I park the car and slowly walk up the street towards my appointment. It’s a nice day, but let’s not get complacent. It’s at just these sorts of moments when life has a habit of hitting you in the face with a hammer.

I am hit in the face with a hammer.

I recoil from the shock and surprise. Not being complacent is one thing, but it is fair to say that I was not expecting anything quite so unpleasantly literal. The man hits me in the face again. Boff.

It is not a nice feeling, not a nice feeling at all, and improves not one jot when he repeats his assault twice more.

At some point, I tell myself, I should say something. He does seem pretty competent, and I get on with the chap reasonably well (although perhaps less so now, seeing that he is hitting me in the face with a hammer), but truth be told it is an unpleasant experience and I would like him to stop.

‘Diss crown is priddy impossible to shift,’ he explains, in a South African accent. ‘I hev tried wiggling it with dee pliers. Now I am hitting it with diss hemmer.’ He bashes my tooth with his hammer once more, to emphasise the point. Boff.

Randy Newman wails from my MP3 player. Unfortunately, I have absent-mindedly selected the wrong ‘genre’ in my haste for musical distraction, and instead of uplifting and rousing cheerful pop music, my head is filled with mournful minor-key reflections on losers and low-life tragedies in the medium of the blues, whilst I am being hit in the face with a hammer.

The anaesthetic seems to have made my face swell up, as if somebody has pushed a marble into my mouth and under my top lip. They may well have done. Or perhaps it is a snooker ball. It certainly feels the size of a snooker ball. It could be a penis, for all I know. I have my eyes firmly shut. I do not wish to open them as the hammer is unpleasant enough as it is without watching its descent. I can’t believe that it is a snooker ball – what dental purpose would that serve? I also do not think it is a penis, as he would not be hammering it so hard if so.

The only really good thing about a dentist putting his penis in your mouth and starting to hit it wildly with a hammer whilst you are under local anaesthetic and have your eyes firmly shut and are listening to mournful Randy Newman songs is at least you know that you will get offered some mouthwash afterwards.

‘It’s coming,’ he explains, not entirely reassuringly.

The sterilising machine in the corner of the dental surgery starts up with a big ‘whooooosh’. It makes me jump, but diverts me momentarily from the hammering, and from Randy Newman, who has just finished singing a verse about a girl who stole his car and went on to cause a traffic accident, running over a man named ‘Juan’. Randy Newman sounds particularly extra doleful about this; he has no car, and undoubtedly his insurance will be affected. The ‘whooooosh’ is presumably steam, but sounds remarkably like an enormous toilet being flushed.

Adam’s enormous toilet was, due to a quirk in the architecture of the London flat conversions, situated directly above my face.

This is what it had sounded like anyway when I lay sleeplessly in bed, my stare fixed on the ornate ceiling, marvelling at the noises that could be made by a simple item of plumbing. Whooosh! it went. Rushhhh! Sloshhh! It is virtually impossible to describe to somebody who has never lived in a converted Victorian house just how loud the noise of a man weeing in the flat upstairs can possibly be. Cities are never quiet, but the background noise will fall to a dead silence when set against the watery rumble of half a pint of urine hitting the base of an enormous toilet bowl over one’s head. The roar of the main stream, the sonically perfect echo of each single salty droplet as it splashed back against the rim.

Sloshhh! Slossssshhhhhh!

I had been on friendly terms with Adam. He was an amiable man who tended to keep himself to himself, but would always be up for a cheery ‘hello!’ as we passed on the stairs. Living on his own, his habit was to go to the pub each evening, returning at around midnight to start weeing.

I would lay in bed listening to the performance, work anxieties surging around my head. Beside me, the LTLP would snore gently in her anxiety-free woman’s world. As the weeing tailed off, the noises of the city would gradually fade back in: some drunks shouting, the clatter of freight on the East Coast line, perhaps somebody trying to steal my car. And then forty minutes or an hour later, the weeing cycle would begin once more.

Sloshhhhh! Slossssshhhhhhh!

Boff. Boff.

Another couple of bashes with the hammer brings me back to the present day.

The music fills my head to bursting point. Piano, bass, slidey guitar. As each chord hits home, I concentrate hard on trying to envisage myself playing it; the shape of my left hand across the strings, or the sensuous womanly caress of a minor seventh on the ivories. It is not enough to dismiss the hammering stuff, no matter how I want it to. Boff. I blink to myself. Why am I here? Why the bloody hell am I here? The hammer pauses for the gap between songs and then starts up again in earnest.

Why am I here?

Boff boff boff boff.

Why the bloody hell am I here?

Boff the boffy-boff boff boff boff.

Why the…and more to the point, how is this man hacking into my own personal inner monologue in order that he can hammer in perfect time with it? I give him an angry look from behind my protective goggles.