Musical Boat

I briefly hinted yesterday that I am a musician, or at least that I wanted to be a rock star. Twelve years ago, I started learning piano, reaching the dizzy heights of Grade One before ditching the instrument for guitar, which I considered cooler. Had I understood the subtle dynamics of cool and realised that a guitar is in fact a cool-polarising device which will make a cool person appear much cooler but will significantly reduce the coolness of a short, shy, pre-pubescent 14-year-old with a bad haircut if he insists on playing his songs on it in public...I might have reconsidered. However, I don't regret my decision. Come university, I accidentally found myself (I think) just on the happy side of the cool threshold which, once I had joined a band, finally allowed my guitar to fulfil its destiny as cool-booster. I won't pretend for a second that I was cool in comparison with other musicians, but amongst my particular social subset of badly-dressed, socially-awkward science students, I was punching well above my weight.

But the issue of cool is not what I wanted to discuss. I wanted to tell you something interesting about my band. After making one mildly promising but fairly shit home-recorded album, we decided to make another. We ran out of time before we graduated, but got bits and pieces of four tracks recorded. Now, faced with the daunting prospect of employment, we're having a stab at finishing the songs - on a canal boat. Being embarrassingly middle-class has its many down sides, but these are offset by my parents' ownership of a barge, which we are going to use to finish recording and mixing the songs in question. In the past, our recording process has been fractured and unsatisfying, with various band members flitting in and out of my room to record a riff or pass judgement on a mix and my time in between these encounters spent blindly fiddling with the tracks without any input. Plus, a crisp-packet-and-audio-cable-littered room in a student house with a view from the window of a concrete garden and the back of another house is not an inspiring environment. A tranquil, tree-lined stretch of water with bunnies peeking out from the tow-path ought to be an improvement. My only concern is whether the boat's electrical system is designed to cope with our guitarist's fearsome usage of sockets.

Perhaps in future I should think through my posts a little better before committing fingers to keyboard. Oh, while I remember, here are some ideas for future posts, which I have labelled with the names of my favourite Manchester United footballer to wear the corresponding shirt number:
1 (Peter Schmeichel): Why Harry Potter is just so bloody good
2 (Gary Neville): A review of Ricky Gervais live (got tickets for Wednesday 12th)
3 (Denis Irwin): My many piss-poor attempts at writing a novel
4 (Steve Bruce): My complex relationship with jazz
5 (Lee Sharpe): Why I'm so excited about Radiohead's new album
6 (Gary Pallister): The monotony of my job
7 (Eric Cantona): Why football is great and why supporting the England football team doesn't necessarily mean I'm a nationalist or anything like that
8 (Wayne Rooney): Why it's silly to ever say any creative work is rubbish, and why I do it anyway
9 (Andy Cole): Why I'm a vegetarian, and why I wish I wasn't
10 (Ruud van Nistelrooy): Cycling is great and four-by-fours suck - an unoriginal rant
11 (Ryan Giggs): Should I become a physics teacher?

Right, I have a bunch more, but I really should go to bed now, and I'm only continuing the list so that I can reminisce about Man Utd players.