I was in a band once. Probably most of us were. The long and short: I did a bad thing going to uni – we were pretty good. Most of us probably thought that, too. But anyway, and whatever. I’m still top pals with the lads I played with. One of them went on and got himself a record deal for an LP he made on his laptop.
We went to Barcelona the year before his album came out. We arrived the same day terrorists failed to blow up London. I was writing clumpy nonsense around then, and he was mastering the last few tracks before the album was pressed. So we got waffled and gabbed about the parallels you can’t ignore – the indulgent solitude of the creative process, that kind of thing. The loneliness and regret at the lost ideas you didn’t jot down. How you’d start something, ebullient, and start hating it three-quarters through. How you don’t want to show anybody any of it… but kind of do. And we’d sit by the marina, by swaying boats and broken glass, with our litres of beer, and dream.
