MEMOIR

What If?

The moment that changed everything

In any life, there is change. It’s part of the deal. You can’t stop it. It can be caused by a job, a friendship, a marriage, an affair, a death, an illness, an accident, or something trivial like missing a bus. Every day is brimming with scenarios that could change your life.

But I’m not talking about them.

I’m talking about that one event that stays with you forever. That What if…? moment. That one event that shifts your life from one state to another. It might be violent, thunderous, and distressing. Or it may be so subtle, you might not even notice it.

I’m going to take you back to 1996. Some of you may not have been born; some of you may have already been old; some of you may have been the same age as me: twenty-two.

I was living in Nottingham, UK. An industrial city located up the M1 motorway, about 100 miles north of London. I had gone there in 1992 as an arrogant, hormone-bloated eighteen-year-old to study Biology. I got drunk a thousand times, got laid, smoked weed, got my degree, and then wondered what I was going to do with my life.

My university chums, those who hadn’t had breakdowns or failed the course (a surprisingly high number), mostly left town for London or elsewhere to start their careers. I stayed in Nottingham. I had decided not to embark on a Biology career and was going to pursue music instead. So for four years, I played in bands.

University was fun. But being in a band was a riot — literally. At university (like school), there were rules. Being in a band, there were none. We made them up as we went along. We made our own PA system from disused timber and spare radio parts. We bought and did up old vans to travel in. We ate reheated dhall for breakfast. We met crazies, girls, old rockers, roadies, addicts, poets, drunks, mystics, druids, and the police (not the band).

After fifteen years of formal education: first school, then university, I understood what it was like to be free. Really free.

Then it ended.

When no one gives a fuck, it’s only a matter of time before someone does. For four years, the group of people I hung about with were all reading from the same page.

We didn’t give a fuck. We were going to have a good time, play some music, and to hell with the world. Then some started thinking too much. The seed was sown. The doubts crept in, and before long people started getting jobs.

We had always worked. If we weren’t gigging, we were hiring out our homemade PA system, doing removals with our vans, or putting up nightclub posters around town in the middle of the night. We worked all right! More so than my old university chums sitting in their offices in London.

But then people started working — nine to five! — and it screwed everything up. You can have a job and be in a band for sure. But it doesn’t make it easy, especially if you get a call to do a last-minute gig. Sometimes a band had cancelled or hadn’t shown up. So we would all jump in a van and head off to wherever the party was.

Once we played in a disused Welsh slate quarry. A semi-legal festival in the Glyn Ceiriog Hills put on by an ageing hippie who needed a band after one had dropped out. Our name got banded about (God knows by whom!) and we got the call. We stayed there for a week.

Only now things were different. Now some of us were working, things became more difficult. Not impossible — there were weekends — but it made it harder, and we had to turn down gigs because people had to get up in the morning.

And when you start saying no to gigs, they soon dry up.

I held on until 2000. I had a bit of money from my grandmother after she had died, but eventually that ran out, and I was faced with the inevitable. By this time, I was playing in a band called The Dead Heads. An amalgamation of various members of other bands, fronted by charismatic singer and band leader, Paul Brig.

The Nottingham music scene at the time was a tight-knit group of musicians, who all knew each other and often played in each other’s bands if one member was ill or had other commitments. Or invariably, we just jammed together for the hell of it to see what would happen.

The Dead Heads was the by-product of these sessions. And the result was quite good. A kind of psychedelic, folk rock, almost glammy, version of The Pogues but without an accordion. We quickly gained a following, and with Paul’s numerous contacts, things seemed to be on the up.

But I was starting to worry. It had been three years since Labour’s 1997 historic landslide election victory, and that vibrant optimism of post-millennium Britain was fading fast. 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, but things didn’t seem as rosy as they were four years ago.

I was fearing the future. Rent and food seemed to be getting more expensive, and life seemed to be harder. I wanted to still play music, but I needed to start thinking about the future if things didn’t work out. So I decided to enroll on a teaching course.

At first, I thought of teaching Biology, but after a day’s observation in a local school, I decided against it. Even at 25, I had barely started shaving. So when I was confronted by some tough 16-year-old boys, some of whom had more facial hair than me, I couldn’t imagine teaching them the rudiments of photosynthesis.

So I applied to do an intensive five-week Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course at the local college. It started in August, and I was told to block out the entire month. The lectures and teaching practice were full-time. And at the weekends, I would do assignments. Then if I passed, I could go and teach English anywhere in the world.

Furthermore, because I was on the dole (unemployment benefit) the government would pay the fees, which at £800, was a lot of money at the time.

I was about to accept when Paul Brig called and told me the good news. They had a load of new bookings come in for the summer: four UK festivals, a couple of shows in London, plus two in Ireland.

“Going to be away for most of August,” he said. “It’s going to be wicked!”

I remember those words to this day.

“It’s going to be wicked!”

When I told Paul Brig (I actually phoned him back a few days later), that I was going to leave the band, I knew a phase of my life had ended.

This is the shift I talked about at the top of the piece. This is when everything changed. Not in a bad way. Getting my TEFL certificate led me on many more adventures and broadened my horizons. But from that moment on, nothing was ever quite the same again.

That was 24 years ago, but I still think about that phone call today. I remember the silence on the line after I had told him. It seemed to go on for hours.

Then finally he said: “OK, Phil, fine. No problem.”

I felt like a failure. I felt like everything I had worked for over the past four years, extricating myself from the vice-like grip of contemporary society, had been for nothing. That at the last hurdle, I had thrown it all away.

I wanted to phone him back a week later to say it was a mistake. But I’d heard on the grapevine that they had already filled my place. Music is a ruthless business and things move quickly, and by August I was sitting in a classroom (again) with a notebook and pen in front of me.

As for The Dead Heads. Well, the band did go on tour that summer and by accounts it was wild. Over the winter, they played more gigs in London, where they had relocated, and planned to play the festival circuit again over the summer.

But it didn’t work out. The cost and pressure of living in the capital meant two members had left. Coupled with infighting and disagreements about musical direction (that old chestnut), the band folded the following spring. Paul limped along trying to put together other bands, but nothing worked out, and he eventually went into IT, a field in which he still works in today.

We met in a bar in Nottingham a few years ago. By coincidence, we happened to be in the city at the same time. A city neither of us had been to for nearly 20 years. But there we were. Sitting in one of the pubs we used to gig in — now a Wetherspoons (a British pub chain) — discussing the past 20 years.

Meeting old friends is often fraught. Sometimes there’s nothing much to say. Too much time has passed. But not this time. It was wonderful. We drank a lot and got in trouble with our wives. But it was worth it. It was great to reminisce. Great to see each other. Great to talk about the old times.

“You should have stayed in the band, Phil!” he said about a hundred times. “It could have worked out!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Don’t you think about it?” he asked.

It’s hard to lie, even when you haven’t seen someone for a long time. “Of course, I think about it,” I told him. “I think about it every day.”