The Joy Of Bad Bands

Caught this school band playing outside the Forum (by the way, inside the atrium you're looking almost directly at the cute little BBC studio where Joy records her radio shows).

Boy, were they bad!
I mean really BAAAAD!
They stunk the place up so much that I just had to stay and applaud like mad!

The kid with the French Horn made me think of Robyn as a little girl, though I very much doubt she ever made the thing sound like a tortured pig.
And oh, that glorious noise that a mass of instruments ALMOST in tune, but each one microtonally off pitch makes …
It's like having your soul pulled screaming out through the roots of your teeth.
Painful yet somehow masochistically delicious.
It hurts so goooood …

All kid musicians have to pay their dues in sucky, untogether, squeaking, mis-timed, blarty-pooping, caterwauling, screeching bands like this.
It's a baptism of fire so shameful and embarrassing yet essential if each one is to mature into the emotionally traumatised, socially damaged freak that is an adult musician.
The sheer sensual pleasure of the combined grin and cringe that we older musicians experience at times like this is cathartic beyond belief.

There are few more joyous things in this life than a bad band.

Case in point:
The more attentive among you may be aware of "Rugby Guy", one of Old Dive's Saturday morning breakfast companions.
Rugby Guy's a musician (well he actually plays drums, which technically makes him "someone who hangs around with musicians", but since he can also play keyboards, guitar and trombone, he scrapes in under the rules … plus, I love to use the misnomer: "tromboner").
He and Phil sometimes talk about the finer points of maple shells or double bass drum pedals in that strange secret language that drummers have; that guttural combination of grunts and wild gestures with subtle nuance provided by scent marking (whenever two drummers meet there is always bottom-sniffing).

Anyhoo, Rugby Guy's a retired headmaster and he gets together once a month with three other retired heads to make a joyful noise unto the Lord as the pub-rock band "The Four-Heads" (geddit?).
Now normally I refrain from going to see local bands; they take it all just a teensy bit too seriously and are invariably posturing twats whose abilities as musicians are far outstripped by their opinions of themselves.
But Rugby Guy eventually wore us down and so last Friday evening Phil and I drove up to North Norfolk to be polite.

To borrow Maria's eloquent term again: "Boy, howdy!"
In the back room of a remote country pub, packed to the gunwales with entire inbred Norfolk hick families (toddlers to dribbling crumblies), all dancing like a whole tribe of dads, we found what is quite probably the most untogether and shambolic excuse for a band this planet has ever seen.
We looked at one another in disbelief.
Then we grinned.
Then we listened a bit more and grinned a lot more.
Then we partied (it's not a verb except when I say it's a verb).

The band's raison d'être seems to be that wonderful quote from Kurt Vonnegut: "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different."
And fart around they certainly did.
They didn't just murder songs, they gleefully tortured them and hurled the bleeding lumps into the audience.
The fact that they could easily have been outplayed by a troop of baboons didn't seem to hold them back one jot. Neither did the fact that only one of them had anything resembling a singing voice prevent them all from having a go and believe me when I say four-part harmony has never sounded more painfully yet hilariously atonal.
They were exuberantly, joyfully and wonderfully appalling and they knew it and they didn't care.
When they launched (staggered would be a better word) into a lurching, cacophonous assault on John Hiatt's glorious "Paper Thin" Old Dive was singing away at the top of my voice.
It was a disgraceful racket and I loved every minute of it.

I'm going back next month for more.
This could become a serious addiction.