Bone Solo for God
City-Watching Field Notes 13th June 2023
Performance advice from Rosie Langabeer: “The audience don’t care how you feel, they just want to listen to some music.”
I’m walking down Cuba Mall when I hear someone singing Radiohead. The voice is amplified, and at first I think it’s a new cover being pumped out of Glassons or the shop with all the Docs, like how Subway pump out bread-smell, then I realise it must be a busker— they’re singing Creep,1 wavering around the notes. At first I think they’re a terrible singer, before I suddenly realise that au contraire— they’re a very good singer: sliding slowly up to the right note, perfectly accurate when they arrive, but playing with the note on the way, stretching it out and bending it, kneading it like aural dough.
It’s [hashtag] Benmanship, playing keys at his pitch under the now almost-leafless tree. I know from hearing him another time— yesterday? The day before?— that he’s a good singer. He does a mean falsetto. He has a guitarist with him, a young guy in a beanie.2 I sit down on the bench opposite, and feel my fingers begin to freeze. (I don’t know how people can play instruments outside in Winter.)3
I want to hear the next song, but a young woman has come up to the little band and asked if she can sing. She keeps saying that she hasn’t sung for years, she’s not a good singer, and sorry, sorry. Minutes of negotiation. I realise from their traded snatches of tune that it’s going to be a repeat. She wants to sing the song they just sang. “You’ll have to sing too,” she says to Ben, “to let me know when to come in.” Her dark hair is falling over her eyes. She rucks up her t-shirt so that a stretch of pale belly appears, then pulls the shirt back down. Ben’s trying to work out a good key for her, running through the high bit to make sure she can get up there. She doesn’t seem to understand, and keeps just trying to start.
They false start, he starts, she starts, he starts, sorry sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sooo out of practice, I haven’t sung for ages. The guitarist is out in front filming on the girl’s phone, smooth-panning. (This is a young-people thing, this obsessive record-keeping, in case of triumph. Potential virality can happen any time, anywhere.)4
Ben’s making the chords on the keyboard. When you were here before. Thom Yorke sings it Whenyouwere here before, but she sings evenly spaced When You Were Here Before, so I guess she doesn’t know it from singing along to Thom. Her voice is shaky, and her hands. She’s all shaky, she’s thin and young and I am thinking of the performance advice that the audience wish you well and want you to succeed. Not that anyone’s much around. It’s too cold to linger. I drop my eyes so as not to freak her out. I know this thing from the inside, stage fright, how your strong voice betrays you in your hour of need and shivers itself into a shadow.
They can’t get started though they try and try. It’s not him, it’s her, she’s hesitating at the edge of the song-precipice, going up to the very edge then stepping back, sorry, sorry, and I want to tell her, just stop apologising! Just suck but don’t be ashamed. They’re almost off, almost singing, but “I’m just going to take this off,”— the mic, that is— then when he unhooks the lead for her she changes her mind again and clips it back onto the mic stand. Then they’re finally singing: he is, anyway, and she joins in (in a different key? It sounds strange) quietly then loud, loud and shaky, I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.
Afterwards she says Thank you guys, literally, thank you so much, that she normally only sings show tunes, but that today is her birthday so she told herself, just sack up and do it. Sack up! As she walks off I call out “Happy Birthday! Well done!” She looks at me as if she only just saw me, though she was facing me a few metres away the whole time she was singing. “Thanks.”
Ben goes off for cigarettes, leaving the young guitarist in charge of the gear, and the audience— me. Guitar boy’s scruffy but smiley, hair falling over his face, black beanie, black hoodie, trackpants, and sneakers. There’s something written around the bottom curve of his guitar in Vivid, as if the word-strings settled down there by gravity. Like Woody, but too small to read. (Lyrics? Inspirational quotes?)
He asks me what I want to hear.
Me: “How about some Smiths?”
”Don’t know them. I can do Coldplay, Oasis, some classic Ed Sheeran, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish if you fancy, Post Malone?”
”Just play what you want to play.” I say.
”I’ll play something you can sing along to, anyway.” He launches into Oasis, Don’t Look Back in Anger, with full gusto, and although I hate the song, I love and appreciate his enthusiasm, his whole-heartedly offering this performance to me. It makes me think of Greytown last Midwinter, where I heard a busker singing this same song; and Richard Dawson’s Jogging, which has a bit about a busker singing Oasis, doesn’t it?
(Yes— at 3.43.)
I’m looking down, transcribing the list of bands into my book, so I don’t see the women arrive. Two rough-looking women have been attracted to the music— sailors to a siren— and the one in short-shorts gets in behind the keyboard, disregarding the sanctity of someone else’s delineated music-space. (Looking to steal? Or just that a microphone is a magnet?) As she discusses with the guitarist what she wants to sing, I see that her front teeth are missing. “Do you know [song] by Post Malone?” he asks her. “OK, well,” he says, “maybe let me sing this one and you can sing the next one?” But he’s too soft. She won’t be so easily dislodged, she’s behind the mic now, and when he starts to sing, she joins in. She does know it, the song. (I don’t.) Her friend’s dancing right in front of me, tattooed arms and legs filling my vision, and then another woman comes along pushing a shopping trolley full of stuff, and begins dancing too. She’s a lot older, and has a sheepskin tied around one leg and a sore-looking mouth. Ragged Graces.
Then Benmanship gets back with the cigarettes (an honest-to-God cellophaned carton of tailormades: living high from busker’s lucre) and when the woman at the mic sees the pack in his hand, she turns her whole body to him5 and beseeches him for a cigarette. He’s stony-faced, immovable— he’s not even unwrapped the cellophane— and she amps it up, begins to really beg, bending her body low, raising her long-nailed finger in his face to show Just one, just one, but in vain. He’s totally implacable, I guess from past experience. Wrangling wasted people is part of street performance.
I don’t see how it ends because I feel too hemmed in by unpredictable bodies, I’m up and out, bowing palms-together to the young guitarist as I go.
Down by New World Metro the tubby karaoke-busker, the one with the dyed beard, is in full flight.6 In Unity the hipster staff discuss how it is that he is allowed to do that, to point his speakers at them and bellow. They speculate that he must have a permit— did he pay money for it? (Anyone can have a busker’s permit for the asking, for free. Although you’re meant to stop and move on after an hour. But I don’t bother to tell them that.)
This one’s the kind of busker you pay to go away, like the bagpipes man who blasts Flower of Scotland non-stop for 59 minutes then vanishes. He’s singing Darling, you look wonderful tonight, or if not exactly that, something equally saccharine, but he’s coming to the end and switches into Radiohead, Karma Police, slurring even the first words out the gate— Gaarrrmuh B’ll’eese, and I feel like brother, don’t you know? Thom Yorke is the only Thom Yorke: nobody else can touch him, you can’t do what he do. I mean, I can see how singing Radiohead covers could theoretically be a good way to showcase your vocal chops,7 but this guy’s not even doing the minimum due diligence, it’s more of a poor man’s Joe Cocker. His singing style is like a half-arsed attempt at jazz. Fucking with things, but sloppily, mashing the colours together. There’s a major difference between being unskilled but genuine, and being somewhat skilled but lazy.
Street performance is as public as it gets. Pushing yourself into people’s eye and ears, whether they will or no. Like advertising, there’s a right of response. The true reason I don’t like this guy, though, is my instinct that he’s scarily unhinged. There are a few about like that.
Nuar Alsadir: “Looking at life through the lens of art allows you to enter a transitional space in which you can begin to imagine how you might live creatively, regain contact with the freedom and spontaneity of the True Self, without losing contact with fact-based reality. At the same time, in order to feel alive, to be your own narrative— with whatever extent of freedom— it is likely you will have to pay a price for frustrating the agendas of others, which is why creative work, as [Janet] Malcolm tells us, takes place at the boundaries of the system…
New literary forms, Anton Chekhov observes in a notebook, always produce new forms of life and that is why they are so revolutionary to the conservative human mind. Roethke— who approached life phototropically8 (I wish I could photosynthesise)— says, along similar lines, When you begin to get good, you’ll arouse the haters of life.”
I’m the hater, and I’m also the hated. This is what you’ll get, when you mess with us.
In Newtown I see a man carrying a large trombone. It looks unnaturally golden, as if spray-painted, and it’s an unwieldy thing that sticks out past the edges of his silhouette. His feet bounce as he walks, the heels not meeting the ground: tight hamstrings. As he passes, I see he has a prayer mat strapped to his backpack. (I think it’s a prayer mat— it’s patterned, and rolled up in a special strap.)
OK, but… I can’t reconcile these two items. Bone solo for Allah? Isn’t jazz haram, though?
I saw someone on the bus a few days ago with Pablo Honey on vinyl, showing it to a friend, the baby’s face in the yellow flower. I had it on cassette.
The youth are so organised, and their self-promotion skills are so honed. He has a sign with his Insta handle— the cunning one-word pun on his name that I’m turning over in my mind for ages afterwards— sticky marketing.
The woman who plays classical guitar outside the Whitcoulls at night wears fingerless gloves, but still, don’t her fingertips go too numb to feel the notes?
Sing Hallelujah down a well, and next minute you’re a hit-trillionaire.
My favourite busker of all, as I may have mentioned before, is the ragged genius guitarist who puts his guitar on the ground and refuses to play whenever he spots someone filming him. Luddite solidarity!
From his own rightful place behind the keyboard that she’s illegally occupying…
Didn’t he used to play the guitar once upon a time? Didn’t Simon, before he slipped into pure begging? Where is Simon, anyway?
Me and Hadleigh in my living room, angel-voice Hadleigh noodling out every Radiohead song he can think of on the house guitar, doing whole albums track by track.
(The Radiohead song that plays in my head most often is this one, for what it’s worth:
We’re not scaremongering, this is really happening…)
Phototropic: (Botanical) growing toward or away from the light; taking a particular direction under the influence of light.
As I was writing this I realised what a friend has now confirmed- Simon died last year