The Sound of Laughter (9 page)

'So what you up to then, Peter?'

'Well, right now I'm drying my balls.' Get the picture?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not homophobic, I'm not scared of my house and for your information I watched
Brokeback Mountain
twice on the flight to Corfu last year. (Well, I had no choice,
Herbie: Fully Loaded was
broken.) But even I like to draw the line occasionally.

Some chancer did it to me again the other week. He strolled over to me in the changing rooms and his opening gambit was:

'So, Peter, how's it hanging?'

Words failed me, people.

Time for a brew I think and then onwards and upwards to the next chapter!

(that's if you don't count Carol Farrell who
broke two of my ribs trying to 'Do the
Hucklebuck' at a school disco)

Her lifeless body lay on the roof of the limousine, crushed. Everybody knew the old McKenna building was over forty storeys high and she must have fallen from the top in order to cause that kind of damage. Every window in the limousine had been shattered and I could hear the shards of glass crunch under the cop's shoes as he wearily tried to hold back the few onlookers that had gathered, too little, too late.

I lit myself a cigarette in the glow of the police lights but it didn't do anything to calm my nerves. That was
the last thing I needed to see on a day like this. I shouldn't have seen this. I wouldn't have seen this if I'd stayed with Melissa. I looked at my watch. She'd be sipping her orange juice right about now, watching the sun rise up over the San Fernando Valley. What was I doing here? Hold on, who is this? Who am I? This isn't my life . . .

Sorry about that, I don't know what happened there . . .

In third year we got the opportunity to learn an instrument. I decided to have a go at the saxophone as it had always struck me as being very cool. Black sunglasses, jazz and all that, but that myth was soon shattered as I staggered down the road with a saxophone case banging on my legs as I walked. It was huge, in fact it was almost as big as me.

A Welsh music teacher tutored me for an hour every Monday. I can't remember his name but I remember he was a miserable sod. I think he'd left his sense of humour in a jazz club somewhere, as well as his looks. It seemed as though he was wearing his head upside down. Very strange.

He also had no patience.

'Your fingering is all wrong, Mr Kay,' he'd shout at me like Mr Shorofsky (from
Fame).
'You must practise your fingering all the time.'

I wanted to show him a couple of fingers. I was only learning 'Three Blind Mice' for God's sake, it was hardly 'Baker Street'.

I succeeded in keeping up the lessons for three weeks, and was actually quite proud of myself, and then it all went wrong when I tried to clean my instrument. I only did it because I thought it'd make the Welshman happy. I remember it was a Sunday night because I could hear the theme from
The South Bank Show
coming from the telly in the back room (we flicked it off after the theme – that was the best bit).

I filled the kitchen sink with hot soapy water, squirted in some Fairy Liquid, got a fresh scouring pad out, put on my mum's Marigolds and plopped my tenor sax into the sink. Splash! I was just about to start scrubbing when my mum came into the kitchen and shrieked,

'What are you doing?'

'I'm cleaning my saxophone,' I said.

'Well, you don't use Fairy Liquid.' she said. 'If you want to clean it, use this,' and in saying that she leaned into the cupboard and pulled out a bottle of Jif cleaner.

Phew, that was close, I thought to myself as I squirted it up and down the saxophone.

'That'll get a proper good shine on it,' she said and then went to bed.

Cut to a close-up of the Welsh music teacher, inspecting my saxophone in horror.

'You washed it in the sink?' he said.

I nodded proudly. I even went as far as to stroke it for him in an effort to demonstrate the shine.

He held the saxophone aloft, studying it like Jack Klugman used to do with a dead body at the beginning of
Quincy, ME.

'Let me get this straight, you washed it in a sink with soap and water?' he said.

'No,' I said, 'not soap, Jif.'

'JIF?' he bellowed again. This time he made me jump.

Yeah, Jif, bloody hell, what's his problem? I was only trying to make him happy. He snatched the saxophone out of my hands.

'You can't clean a tenor saxophone with JIF, you stupid boy,' he shouted.

I thought 'stupid boy' was a bit uncalled for, but now didn't seem like the right time to mention that to him, especially with him turning maroon and foaming at the mouth.

'I only wanted to clean it,' I said

'You've done more than clean it, you've broken it.' And with that he put the saxophone to his lips and blew. There wasn't a sound. Personally I'd have loved it if a few bubbles had floated out of the end of it.

'It can it be fixed, can't it?' I asked him.

'I hope for your sake, yes,' he said. 'Now get out of my sight!'

I quickly gathered my stuff together and left, never to darken his music room door again.

I bumped into him a few weeks later in the convent gardens. I asked him if he'd managed to repair the saxophone. He said it'd been sent away and he'd let me know. Well, twenty years have passed and I've still not heard from him and between me and you I honestly don't hold out much hope.

I have images of the Welshman wandering round music-repair shops with a saxophone case under his arm, like J.R. Hartley in those Yellow Pages adverts.

That was my first and only venture into the world of musical instruments. Tragic really when I think how much I love music.

I realise that music is part of all of our lives to some degree but I've really let it rule mine. I still can't embark on a car journey without hand-picking a certain selection of music tracks to suit the right mood, season, weather. I find that everything has a bearing on what I play. I might only be nipping to the Late Shop for a bottle of semi-skimmed milk, but it matters nevertheless.

Apparently, my mum used to play music all the time
when she was pregnant with me and when I was a baby. We only had a few LPs
^*6
(as they were called then – in fact they still are by my nana). One of my earliest memories is of my mum playing the best of the Carpenters, Simon & Garfunkel and the Beach Boys to me, and for some reason the original soundtrack to
Paint Your Wagon,
all in rotation, all of the time. I have the vaguest recollections of her dancing around the room with me in her arms, and I'd listen to them as I lay on the floor, drawing on a piece of wallpaper with coloured crayons. The sun always seemed to be shining.

As I got older my mum and dad's record collection gradually became integrated with mine. In my teenage years I decided to revisit those worn-out LPs. Delicately sliding them out of their tatty paper sleeves for the first time in a long time. And as soon as I played them, a door swung open in my mind and all those priceless memories came flooding back.

Hearing them again evoked a powerful aching inside
me for a time that was long since gone. What really freaked me out was when I discovered I knew all the music off by heart. I found myself humming along to the tunes, sometimes even singing the words. This music was part of me. And on reflection they weren't bad albums to have grown up with either.

I remain fascinated by the moods and the memories that music conjures up. I hear a certain song and suddenly I'm transported somewhere else. Just off the top of my head, for example, if I hear 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough' by Michael Jackson, suddenly it's July 1979 and I'm back at Butlins holiday camp in Filey, it's raining and I'm drinking out of an 'I Shot JR' cup that I got for my birthday (they were all the rage).

If I hear 'Walk the Dinosaur' by Was (Not Was) I'm back in the school minibus on my way to Aberystwyth on a field trip. We're all listening to the Top 40 on the radio, Stuart Finnegan hits me in the face with a torch and cuts my nose, the hyperactive prick. Not a particularly good memory, that one, let's try another.

When I hear 'Mistletoe and Wine' by Cliff Richard, I immediately think of Christmas . . . That was a joke.

If I hear 'White Lines' by Grandmaster Flash (which isn't very often these days), I'm immediately transported back to March 1984. It's snowing heavily and I'm about to ride the waltzers for the first time on one of those
travelling fairgrounds. It knocked me sick. I puked on some gypsy bloke's hand and ended up missing
Shine On Harvey Moon
because I was sat on the couch with my head in a bucket.

I could go on but I think you get the picture. Every song has a story and that's the way it'll always be. Even this week on the radio they've been playing the new song called 'Trouble' by Ray LaMontagne and no doubt it'll always remind me of this time now, writing this chapter. It'll remind me of this afternoon, the spectacular weather I can see outside and here I am sat in the kitchen typing this to you. I've either got to be extremely dedicated or mad. I'll let you be the judge of that.

Of course I had toys when I was a child but I think the family record player was my favourite. It was a navy-coloured box with a flip-up lid, quite common at the time. It had a handle on the side, suggesting that it was portable (if you were a weightlifter) and it had four speeds, 16, 33, 45 and 78, the latter being my favourite because of the comedy value in being able to speed up certain records and make Simon & Garfunkel sound like Pinky & Perky.

More records started to appear in the house as the years passed.
The Best of Henry Mancini and his Orchestra,
for example, I loved because it had the
Pink Panther
theme on it. Then my dad came home with a
Danny Kaye album, on which he performed selected works from Hans Christian Andersen and 'Tubby the Tuber'. My mum's favourite LP was the
TV Times Album
featuring the themes from
Magpie
and a
Bouquet of Barbed Wire
(filth). That album was played constantly. I hold it directly responsible for the longstanding obsession I have for TV themes.

The first LP that I ever bought was a BBC sound-effects album,
Disasters.
It seems a worrying choice on reflection. I was only eight. It was £2.30 from WH Smith's and I had saved up my pocket money for ages to buy it. Sound effects fascinated me. There were car crashes, collapsing mine shafts, inner-city riots (with or without petrol bombs), cattle stampedes, all the classics. Guaranteed to break the ice at any party. (I never went to many parties.)

I bought it because I'd now graduated to a Philips cassette player that my dad bought from the catalogue. It also had a built-in microphone feature that enabled me to play the
Disasters
album on the record player and also record myself on the cassette player, and make my own little plays and news bulletins. I was hooked. I'd spend the whole of the summer holidays writing and recording plays that always ended with a mine shaft collapsing or a riot (with petrol bombs). It was 1981 and riots were all the rage that summer.

We also had the bog-standard recordings of my sister and me singing a variety of nursery rhymes and hymns. 'I Can Sing a Rainbow' and 'Walk with Me, Oh My Lord'. I dug them out recently and transferred them on to CD for my mum as a Christmas present. It was actually quite emotional for us when we listened to them again after all of these years because my mum thought a lot of them had been lost. (It was also quite a cheap gift.)

I soon realised I could put the recording feature to better use and I started to record my family. Unbeknownst to them I recorded them almost all of the time. I know it may sound a bit strange and possibly even quite sinister, but I really had no ulterior motive other than to listen back to them. It sounds really stupid to confess that but even at such a young age I was absolutely fascinated by real-life conversations and I still am. What people say, how they talk over each other, how a conversation can spiral from one subject to another. I also loved the silence. The pauses that naturally occur in conversation can sometimes be funnier than the conversation itself. You couldn't write it but I could capture it and save it for ever on my TDK 90s.

Mind you, I say you couldn't write it but the creators of
The Royle Family
came damn close. It was one of the best comedy series I'd seen in a long time when it was
first shown on television. I was fascinated by the way they managed to replicate real conversations. They were so similar to the ones that I had recorded of my family over the years. I laughed at the series first time round, but I've watched it again recently and have found it far funnier than I did ever before, like the comedy has distilled and got better.

I was particularly fond of the real-time aspect to the show, which allowed for pauses in conversation to happen and that 'fat' for me is the funniest thing in the series, its greatest strength. I had nothing but admiration for the series' creators and luckily I've had the privilege of getting to know them over the last few years. In particular Craig Cash. I told him of the recordings I used to make of my family and even managed to play him some. It was like listening to something that he'd written, the rhythm of the speech, the discussions that we were having, it was all so similar.

I always used to play my recordings back to my family later — 'Is that my voice?' they'd say 'Oh, do I really talk like that? I sound awful' – and they'd laugh. People like to eavesdrop on conversations. Why do you think reality television has become such a big success (and I'm talking about
Big Brother now
not
The X-Factor)?

My family got used to me recording their conversations over the years. It became a part of our
everyday lives, like living in a real life
The Truman Show.

'He's taping us again, this lad, I know he is, where have you hid it?' they'd say.

I even stopped hiding it after a while and would just sit the cassette recorder on the table at mealtimes.

I've kept these recordings from Christmas, birthday parties, etc. The memories that they evoke are priceless and can sometimes be very emotional as well as funny, especially as some of the people on them are no longer around any more. I find that even the recordings that once seemed a bit boring are priceless now. Moments captured, that I can listen to and treasure.

One of my favourite recordings is of the time my dad was about to saw through a piece of wood and he asked me to sit on the end of it as a weight. You can hear him on the recording:

'Peter . . . Peter, come here and sit on this for me . . . and don't move whatever you do.'

I oblige and sit on the wood. You can then hear my dad start to saw. I remember it so vividly. He was halfway through sawing the wood and I got bored. I forgot all about his previous instructions about not moving, and with my attention wandering I decide to go for a little walk, perhaps hoping to finish off building my Lego windmill in the back room.