Sitting in the soulless hotel bar in the giant industrial park, the band discusses the mistakes we made
he band I’m in has a run of dates, our first shows since summer: Exeter, Bristol, Cardiff. I am eager to play again, but I’m not looking forward to the first five songs of the very first gig, which is about how long it takes me to find my feet on stage. Up until that point it feels as if I’ve invited a bunch of people to come and watch me lose a tennis match.“The sound was good,” I say. “I heard all my mistakes clearly.
It takes a long time to find our hotel that night, which is buried deep in an industrial estate near the nexus of the M4 and the M5, apparently with access to neither. The hotel’s all-night lounge is the sort of facility you might expect to find on an oil rig – plastic chairs under bright lights. When I arrive, the accordion player is already at the bar.“What d’you want?” he says. The woman behind the bar looks up and smiles at me expectantly.
“How about that one?” I say, pointing to the shelf behind her. The woman turns and reaches for a bottle of white with a picture of a hummingbird approaching a flower on it.But the one next to it is four inches back from the edge of the shelf, just beyond the woman’s grasp. She stands on tiptoe, but her fingers only brush the label. She stretches, to no avail.“I’ll just see if we’ve got any out back,” she says, and disappears, seemingly for good. We stare at the bottle on the shelf for a while.
We reach Cardiff by 3pm, and at 8pm we take the stage for the final gig of the weekend. The audience is in high spirits, but they are also attentive, which I find unnerving. Between songs four and five they listen to me retuning my banjo in rapt silence. I think: I must try to engage them.
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