The wonder and the dread

We’re currently practising for a Jonny Flame tribute gig in aid of Help for Heroes, a charity you’ve probably all heard of.

For percussion, there’s no better choice than Pete: a long time friend and Monkey Farmer who previously played drums for us at the Flapper and Firkin when Jon was on his first tour. Jon taught Pete to play, and Paul and I were in El Kermito, a fast paced punk band with Pete on the drums. So there’s a musical connection to pick up on as well as years of friendship. Even more than that, Pete has attended most of our studio sessions, helping out with the drum tech and giving his encouragement and opinions during recording and mixing. He’s always been at the front of the crowd gamboling and throwing his shoes: the traditional signs of music appreciation. I’m proud to say that he’ll be behind the kit from now on.

But we do want to get this right, and it takes a lot of practice to learn a full set of songs. So that’s what we’ve been up to. No matter whether you fill stadiums or spend five years in the studio recording a double album, 95% of being in a band is practice. If you can’t enjoy playing the same song for three hours whilst standing in a stale smelling room with no windows, you’d be better off taking up watercolours.

At Apex Rehearsals, they had a poster up for a while that warned about the dangers of excessive loud noise – obviously to your hearing but also its potential to cause feelings of anxiety, depression and dread. Dread! When you get to practice everyone is keen to warm up, to test out a new setting on their distortion pedal, to throw out the new riff they’ve been working on or pound a syncopated beat. The golden rule for any band practice, whether you’re a marching band, a ukulele orchestra or doom-sludge metallers is that when someone is trying to talk everybody stops playing and listens. Otherwise, you’re never going to be able to identify what you need to work on, drill specific sections of a song or come up with new ideas and sounds.

We started to say that we could feel the dread coming on whenever a practice threatened to turn bad. Being interrupted can be frustrating, and it’s a normal part of conversation. Imagine how helpless you feel being cut off by 120 watts of amplified riffage! And since you can’t be heard you end up sullenly noodling along and drown out everyone else’s thoughts. It can quickly descend into a mess. Of course, it’s easy to wave your hands and say, “let’s try it again”, but the dread remains and the productive feeling is gone. I’m sure this is why many bands split up. As you mature individually and become more professional as a band, it becomes a thing of the past.

Then there are those practices where everything clicks.

For me, practice is often a great time to catch up and have a laugh, it’s like having a kickabout or playing poker. It’s something we do as friends. But it’s only truly satisfying when you hit a gallop and the four of you play with ease and the song comes through naturally. A song is only half-written until you play it with the band, even if you have all of the chords, the lyrics and the melody. You were given that song for the band to play: more than anyone you listen to, or anyone who teaches you, it’s the band that informs your sense of what can be both imagined and played. When you hit one of these strides, with enough practice and awareness you can listen to yourself, not having to think about what you’re playing, only responding to the beat and changing your attack to emphasise the rhythm. Everyone finishes the song with a grin.

But this is often a frustration in itself, because you want people to hear what you’ve done then and there. The satisfaction of a new song going down well at a gig is probably the best feeling, but even then you know that the song is still transitory: it exists in the practice room and is at best half-remembered by the audience. So you have to record it to have some sense that it’s a finished thing, and make sure that recording means what you want it to mean.

You have to be able to step back and count your blessings. If you practice regularly, you may not notice much improvement from one day to the next. Sometimes it may even seem that you’re heading backwards. But then you listen to something you recorded six months, maybe a year ago and realise that you’ve covered a huge distance… maybe without really trying. What drives you on then is to see the vision complete, or at least as complete as your time and talent and cash will allow. We say we practice to become better, to improve, but practice is what allows us to say we’re in a band: it gives us the opportunity to try new things with old songs and old things with new songs.