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

This, I think, is what we were attempting when we formed Wïldebeeste.

I had a cheap white Hohner electric guitar and a small practice amplifier. Dave played the bass, four strings of utter cool through one single enormous bigger-than-Adam’s-toilet speaker. The low notes resounded around the concrete and breeze-block like earthquakes. His younger friend Iain was a drummer, with all his own gear: drums, cymbals, sticks. Even back then I knew that this would be the start of something big.

Wïldebeeste had a limited repertoire, solely performing works by Pink Floyd. This was the single band that each of us knew some songs by. There was a limited audience locally for a teenage band that solely performed works by Pink Floyd, and – what’s more – one that solely performed them without a keyboard player to include the bits that might make them sound a bit like Pink Floyd. But Dave had a birthday party planned for his eighteenth, so we were able to gain our one and only public booking, from his mum.

When we were not getting bookings from his mum, we stuck to practising hard in our garage studio, which we had customised by taping an eiderdown against the door to create a modern noise-free rehearsal facility.

Growing in confidence, we incorporated ‘Walking on the Moon’, a song that didn’t need a keyboard player but that retained the slow tempo required to let us consider which chord to play well in advance. Meanwhile we were starting to write and eventually added two original songs. One was by Dave the Bass Player himself and was a simple straight-from-the-heart statement that he didn’t like motor racing. It was called ‘I Don’t Like Motor Racing’.

The chorus went like this:

The best thing about it is the theme tune

The best thing about it is the theme tune

The best thing about it is the theme tune

The best thing about it is the theme tune.

As a chorus it was pure gold – direct, hard-hitting, to-the-point. After the second time round, we would stop and play a bit of the Fleetwood Mac motor racing theme, before hitting the final verse, which resolved with a reconciliation between the lyricist and the sport of motor racing.

To my mind, it is a song that still has the power to shock today.

The other original number in our set was mine, and I was mighty proud of it. It was called ‘Aliens’ and was weightier all round, having more chords and being concerned with the implications to society of prospective extraterrestrial contact. The chorus to this one was more imaginative than a simplistic motorsport-related chant and stemmed from my early philosophical conviction that the human race cannot possibly be alone in this universe of unimaginable vastness. It went:

We are the aliens. We come from the planet Og.

We look like a cross between a monkey and a dog.

Run, run, run! Over the crossroads that might provide a sneaky short-cut home via Big John’s unnaturally elongated cottage, and up the brief but steep hill where the village starts to peter out into non-village. The grass is growing long here, and I keep my eyes firmly fixed on the ground, in case of dog shit. Then it is a hard left and I am back on the ill-maintained tarmac. The MP3 player moves on a track. It is Echobelly! This spurs me on more – it is good to keep up with what the kids of today are into. The immense opening guitar riff crashes into my ears.

I have a particular criterion for running music – it needs to be stuff that I can imagine myself standing on a stage and playing. That helps me concentrate and switch off from the agonising pain of the actual running. I am not just ‘listening to music’ with each step, I am experiencing it, examining the guitar, keyboard and drum parts, hitting the guitar solos, stepping up to the mic for the lead or backing vocals. To a non-musician this might appear odd. But it enables me to immerse myself in my world of performance. I do not close my eyes, in case of dog shit, but my brain and being is there, adrenaline pumping as I belt out the MP3 tracks.

I don’t have any tracks of Wïldebeeste – just a battered cassette tape in a drawer somewhere. It is a shame. We deserved a bit more than that.

A three-piece band puts huge pressure on the guitarist. We weren’t quite Cream (featuring Eric Clapton), but we approached the rapport of the Alex/Big Andy/Nigel bowls power trio. Dave was the larger-than-life character – the charisma of the band – the guy who would go on to do all the band’s media interviews, as he was funny and could do a more-than-passable Richie Benaud impersonation. Iain was a quiet lad, who preferred his hi-hats to toms, which is unusual in a teenage drummer. I brought everything together like glue and, as you have seen, was already developing as a promising songwriter.

When you are in a band as a kid, you suddenly become cool. I am used to being cool now, and being looked up to even by the likes of Eddie and Short Tony and the guys on the bowls circuit, but it is a shock when you are seventeen and have a friend-of-your-mum’s haircut.

‘I’m sorry – I can’t hang around outside Budgens today. I have band practice. I have to go and get my guitar. The electric one. Because I need to go to band practice. With my band.’

That’s what rock and roll is about.

We were so cool that other people did not realise how cool we were, because we were so cool. I guess our main problem was getting noticed by the musical establishment. If you are in a garage band today, you have a million outlets for your music. YouTube, MySpace and the internet in general – idiots from London can even download your songs as text messages to use as the sound for when their mobile phone rings. Like the Beatles, Queen, Cream (featuring Eric Clapton) and Pink Floyd before us, Wïldebeeste did not have this advantage of technology. And whilst those bands got their lucky breaks, we were stuck in our Essex commuter town, perfecting our sound in Dave’s dad’s garage. We just practised. We practised and practised. Waiting for our own big break that we knew was just around the corner.

Just around the corner is the last stretch of my usual circuit – a barely perceptible upslope that takes me from Colin’s farm up to the church gates. In fact, my entire run appears to be a barely perceptible upslope, apart from the upslopes that I very easily perceive. It is like one of those impossible Escher paintings. I am trapped in it, like a Kafkaesque Steve Cram, a Sisyphean Dick Beardsley, for ever destined to run uphill around a village.

Beside me on the road, a car slows to a crawl. A head pokes out of the driver’s window. I know what is about to happen.

Mixed feelings go through my head. Helping people with directions is the best thing ever, as it proves that I am as local as local can be. But we runners do not like stopping mid-run. It makes the breathing and stuff go all funny.

The car is an old Fiesta. It has been sprayed luminous yellow, given an outsized spoiler and some wheels that have been taken from a more powerful and striking vehicle, perhaps a Ford Focus or a Vauxhall Viva. Bulbous arches complete the effect. Somebody has clearly spent some money on it. Although it’s beyond me as to why they didn’t use that to just buy a better car in the first place.

It is less a car than a cry for help.

I slow my jog, nod to the chap leaning out of the window, and remove my headphones in a gesture of communication. He looks at me from beneath his baseball cap.

‘Scuse me,’ sneers the man in the Car of Shame.

I do a bit of a double-take. This is a different sort of ‘excuse me’. It is not the polite ‘excuse me’ of a well-dressed homeseeker, with a wife named Pat, who will be genuinely grateful for my help – it is ‘excuse me’ as a contemptuous throwaway, as an insult, as a challenge. Not knowing quite what to make of an ‘excuse me’ of this ilk, I slow to a halt, there in my tracksuit, jogging on the spot to keep the breathing going correctly, the living epitome of health and exercise.

‘You got a light on you, mate?’

I gape at him. Although this is hardly the vibrant metropolis of Norwich or Fakenham, I can see at least three other people going about their business in the street or in their front gardens. No matter how I try, I just cannot comprehend the thought processes that have led him to conclude that I’d be the particular one likely to be carrying a silver Zippo and twenty Benson’s. I pat my tracksuit apologetically.

‘No. Sorry, mate,’ I reply. I almost add: ‘You got a copy of The Brothers Karamazov?’ But I am keen not to be hit.

He does not reply, but sticks his foot down on the throttle and the car accelerates away. I am incensed by this rudeness. I want to shout after him: ‘Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you fucking know who I am?’ But this would involve finding something to do, and practising it really hard, then working at it for years and years until I receive some form of recognition from the public at large. So instead I stare at his rear lights angrily. I can see him swearing as he goes.

People like that don’t respect real achievements. He probably knows as much about music as he does about bowls. I guess he would have been more polite had he seen me on the X Factor or Pop Idol or whatever it is people with hair gel settle down to watch in lieu of serious programming such as Later with Jools Holland. He’s probably never even heard of the Sultans of Ping. This small incident makes me just a little bit more determined. It is criminal to leave a talent lying dormant.

I love music, and music has always loved me. Whatever I plan to do in the future – and if I am completely honest it is probably time that I started thinking about this in-the-future thing – perhaps it will involve music. I have a few irons in the fire. Some solo ideas that are running around my brain which might come to fruition. But it is early days.

There was no big break back then. Despite our coolness and two prospective dynamite gold top-ten singles, Wïldebeeste petered out after a year or so. There was no single reason. We had no gigs, we had no transport, we had no focus. I wrote a couple of songs of which I was really proud but that the others rejected as ‘too Jethro Tull’. It is not quite being dumped by your girlfriend or having your home address mixed up with a paedophile’s in the local paper, but being told that you are ‘too Jethro Tull’ when you are a teenager can be firmly placed in the mental lever-arch file marked ‘Disappointing’. The BBC lost the rights to cover motor racing to ITV; the title sequence changed accordingly – including the music. And whilst this was after the band split, and I am not claiming it as a major reason why we didn’t make it big, it seemed to drive the final nail into our prospects.

I don’t want to live in the past, but it is quite nice to pop in there for a short visit, and perhaps a spot of breakfast. It’s so easy to be embarrassed by stuff that you’ve done when you’re a kid. But I can think back and smile, given where I am today. We were a good little outfit, a good start. Yes, it’s time to do something like that again. I have to. I really have to.

FIVE (#ulink_f64acb03-6cbe-5a61-ae6b-b4bc7f8861f1)

These deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes are made for walking

Lord’s.

Nigel is at Lord’s.

So much for well-drilled trios and mutual respect and support. Pissing off to watch the West Indies and upsetting the delicate balance of the block like this. I haven’t even donned my deeply, deeply unfashionable shoes yet, and already I am thinking negative thoughts about the game. I shake my head and curse my stupidity, dragging myself back into the Zone.

The first home match is always an interesting one. Let’s get some points on the board.

Immaculate, fine grass, mown lovingly once lengthways and then once on the traverse, to create a geometric criss-cross of stripes that makes you want to hug the ground or at the very least stroke it with your cheek. Manicured borders and a white picket fence, with a wooden pavilion constructed simply but in the Edwardian style, with a small verandah. Three elderly men, rooted to the same seats since time immemorial, sit watching the play knowledgeably, smoking clay pipes, whilst a couple of wives diligently cut the crusts off ham and cucumber sandwiches.

I would imagine that some bowls clubs are like this. As for us, we sit outside the draughty builders’ demountable hut that serves as our rain shelter and toilet, waiting for Howard to allocate the score cards for this agricultural square of land. You need a score card before you can move on to the ‘have a good game’s, as this tells you which rink that you’ll be playing on and against whom – and there’s not much you can do until you know that.

This is the key to home advantage. It’s nothing to do with being comfortable in your surroundings, or having a large crowd to roar you on. It’s certainly been a bit less since we were asked to vacate the nice green beside the pub. It’s the fact that by rights it should take the opposition three or four ends to work out that there’s a slight slope up and down, and that when bowling forehand on the uphill you need no angle at all.

Big Andy checks the card. Three – we have been given rink three. The one with the most pronounced hump three-quarters of the way on the downhill, where the skill is to attempt to bring the wood to a halt just on the prow where the grass is barest, so that it might roll gently down the other side vaguely towards the cott. We stroll across the green, up and down, up and down its undulations until we reach the mat. Light brown patches, dark green patches.

But it doesn’t matter.