2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees

by Tony Hawks

  “And some food. I’m starving.”

  A small area had been set aside in the corner of the hall for the purposes of the musicians’ pre-concert dining. We looked over to see that the Irish boys were tucking into the nosh with gusto, along with a few others I didn’t recognise.

  “Come on. Let’s go eat,” I said.

  “Righto,” said Brad. “But can I suggest you steer clear of the courgettes?”

  “Fair point.”

  We were immediately greeted by the delightful Christine—the young lady who had taught me how to play the card game belote at the village dinner all those months before. As she ushered us to the table she told us that her tasks for the evening involved wait-ressing for the meal that we were about to eat, and then filming the concert on her dad’s video camera. The young people in this village had to be versatile.

  I found myself on the end of a long table seated next to a man called Michel, who seemed delighted to be beside someone on whom he could practise his slightly rusty English. With a cheeky smile he offered a series of short soundbites that initially did little to establish a relationship of great depth: ‘How is the Queen?’ or ‘Ah yes—you is Tony—like Tony Blair.’ His curly bouncy haircut resembled the one favoured by Kevin Keegan in the 1970s, just one of several things about him which led me to believe that he wasn’t a local farmer. His clothes were stylish and well presented, and his hands bore no traces of the hard skin and deeply ingrained dirt that usually defined those of the manual worker. The long thumbnail on his right hand also revealed to the astute observer that he was almost certainly a guitarist who played with a picking style. The only other alternative I could think of was that he’d been in the process of cutting his nails earlier in the day when he’d been interrupted by a visiting gypsy woman who’d advised him against completing the job or else a curse would fall upon his family.

  “Do you play guitar?” I enquired.

  “Yes I do,” he replied, holding up his thumb, in a gesture that cleared up any lingering doubts on the gypsy theory.

  Michel poured me a red wine and lapsed into French, finally enabling a meaningful exchange to develop between us. He began to tell me how he had moved to the village from Nantes, an area in France where he’d built a following as a songwriter and raconteur. He returned there regularly for tours and recording sessions, but village life in the Pyrenees provided him with the home where he could nurture his creativity. I began to wonder if this made him a little like a kind of French version of me. One notable difference was that he’d chosen to live here with his wife rather than his builder.

  By the end of the meal, which had been pleasingly free of courgettes, the first smatterings of audience were starting to make their way into the village hall. The sight of them brought home the reality of an imminent performance for which we weren’t properly prepared. I felt a ripple of nerves sweep through my body, and a slight rumbling in the tummy. This was followed by an unpleasant moment in which I realised what the obvious bodily corollary of this was going to be. Something that was unlikely to endear me to my new friend Michel. I had to move, and quickly, so I jumped to my feet and announced that I was going to the toilet, quite possibly at a volume that normally would have merited a statement of greater profundity.

  I began to make my way across to the toilets, happy in the knowledge that an embarrassing incident had been averted. Then I heard a female voice behind me.

  “Bonjour, Tonny!”

  I spun round to see two diminutive septuagenarian ladies looking up at me. It was Odette and Marie, two of the lovely older women I’d first met on village dinner night. By the twinkle in their eyes I could see that they wanted to chat.

  Was it true that I was going to perform tonight with my friend?

  What were we going to sing?

  Would I be singing a song in French?

  And then quite suddenly all the questions stopped and their faces displayed a mixture of pain and shock. I knew what had happened. The worst.

  I am not proud of what I did next. Not knowing the French for ‘He who smelt it dealt it’, I made an excuse about having to go and tune a guitar, and moved off with a fleetness of foot that bordered on downright evil. I just left them. I left them wondering who was to blame for the disagreeable odours that were currently engulfing them. Not being ladies in the fresh flush of youth, they both probably had their fair share of medical conditions and would therefore reasonably assume that the other was responsible. They wouldn’t for a moment suspect the young, dashing Englishman who was soon to serenade them.

  I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Once you’ve chosen your required act of cowardice, never weaken.

  Malcolm and Michel kicked off the evening’s presentation with an amusing little skit in which Michel spoke deliberately wooden English that was then translated into deliberately wooden French by Malcolm. They were playing to a packed house of about 150 people, drawn from not just our village, but from many of the surrounding ones too. I could see many familiar faces—Andre, Serges, Alain, Odette, Roger, Marie, Rene the Mayor, Leon the Deputy Mayor, my neighbour Pierre, a host of characters whose names I’d not yet properly committed to memory—and Fabrice and Marie-Laure, my new pals who had driven up here specially.

  “I’m starting to get nervous now,” I said to Brad.

  “In that case, I’m just going over here,” he said, moving to a safe distance.

  I shrugged and continued to watch Malcolm and Michel on stage. Somehow they seemed to represent the ‘new’ rural France. An Englishman and an outsider from Nantes, performing before the descendants of people who had belonged in these mountains for generations. This was the positive spin on the ‘new’ rural France. The communities were integrating—they were learning from, and enjoying, each other. This was a fine balance that could easily be upset. Fortunately we all knew it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Michel, “please welcome from Dublin—Nigel, Paul and Miles.”

  The three men must have made quite an impression with their performance the previous year because they walked on stage to a huge reception. Paul and Miles smiled almost self-consciously, whilst Nigel looked more at ease. He picked up a cool-looking jazzy guitar and took his place behind the microphone.

  “Bonsoir—nous aliens commencer ,” he said with a delightfully Irish accent, “avec une belle chanson qui s’appelle—“C’est Si Bon”.”

  The audience cheered. The French are often berated for being difficult to win over if you don’t speak their language, but the fact is that they don’t demand a great deal from you linguistically in order to be on your side. A poorly constructed sentence can often be enough to prompt an extremely friendly response. However, speak no French at all and nine times out of ten they’ll derive satisfaction from making things difficult for you.

  Paul smoothly slipped a bass guitar over his shoulder and Miles lowered himself onto the stool behind the electric piano. Then all three did what jazz musicians do better than anyone else—they indulged in a few seconds of’warming up’. Totally independently of each other they flirted with their instruments, their hands darting over keys or strings in harmonious disorder. They seemed more at ease than they’d looked since I’d met them. Even though they hadn’t started playing for real yet, their accomplished dexterity was already apparent and it was enabling them to exude a confidence previously not evident. Their fingers were talking.

  “I think they’re going to be good,” said Brad, who had carelessly allowed himself to drift back close enough to me to be in dangerous air space.

  “Yes, I think you may be right.”

  And he was.

  Miles’s tasteful keyboard playing blended with Paul’s thoughtful bass, whilst Nigel led them from the front with a slick, bluesy guitar sound. Then, at the end of his first solo, Nigel sang. He had a wonderfully smooth jazzy voice that was both laid-back and melodic, precise yet uninhibited. It was cool. No question. In fact, the whole band embodied the very thing for which the 1960
s had invented the word. We could have been in Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho but for the sight of Andre sitting three tables back in his beret and torn jacket, along with others dotted about the room who looked like they’d just stepped off tractors.

  The first verse of ‘C’est Si Bon was a triumph and the audience showed it by clapping before the song was even halfway through. However, they were going to like it even more very soon, because Nigel had a trump card up his sleeve. Just after the boys had completed the musical turnaround at the end of the first verse, Nigel began to do something quite extraordinary. He sang the second verse in French. What a coup (if I may appropriately borrow a French word). The spectators could scarcely contain themselves. Not only had these boys come all the way from Ireland to play top quality jazz music in a free concert, but now they were singing in French! The audience exploded with sundry noises of approbation.

  “Tony, do you know any songs in French?” said an anxious-looking Brad, during the semi-ovation that followed completion of the song.

  “Only a couple of lines from ‘Sur Le Pont d’Avignon’.”

  “I’m not sure if that will be good enough.”

  “Mmm. I feared as much.”

  Seconds later Brad was speedily shuffling away from me, and a few moments after that the family on a nearby table began to look at each other accusingly. Terrible thing, nerves.

  Following an amazing half-hour set from the Irish boys, it was the turn of the French. Michel did four songs, two that were well known and a couple he’d written himself. He was an assured and accomplished performer with a fine voice and easy guitar-picking style. I particularly liked the song he’d written many years ago for his wife Christine. “T’es Petite,T’es Grande, T’es Belle, Toi” (You—you’re small, you’re big, you’re beautiful). I looked to see if I could find her face in the audience. I didn’t know what she looked like, but I reckoned I’d be able to spot her as being the only one who was really glowing.

  After the jazzy complexity of the Irish boys’ opening set, which had drawn on songs from the Great American Songbook, I was struck by the marked contrast of the ‘French song’. Sophisticated chords and subtle melodies didn’t seem to be in the forefront of the creative minds of the French songwriters. They preferred the strength of a bold transition from minor to major, and then back again. I bet that during their song-writing sessions there weren’t many discussions about whether chord progressions were ‘too obvious’. Obvious was good, obvious was strong, obvious was catchy. And anyway, it was the words that were important. The French song told a story or expressed an opinion. What mattered ‘was that you knew what the song was about. I guess that’s why the British have never really been fans of French songs. We don’t understand them.

  Mary closed the first half even though she’d wanted to get out of playing.

  “I’ll leave it to you fellas,” she’d said. “You know how to play properly.”

  Lacking in confidence though she may have been, her ten-minute set was a big success. She led the whole room in a spirited sing-song, thumping out the chords on the piano whilst Miles shifted onto the nearby drum kit and proved his versatility by banging out an upbeat rhythmic accompaniment. With an almighty rendition of what I recognised as ‘Those Were The Days’ but which almost everyone else knew as a French song, the first half drew to a close. A first half that had been close to perfect.

  Brad and I spent the interval outside, around the back of the hall. The light hadn’t completely faded and we finished our frantic last-minute rehearsals as the distant peaks gently surrendered to the advancing darkness. I was suffering from doubts about our choice of songs, but Brad had regained his confidence and was steadfast.

  “Let’s stick to what we’re good at,” he said.

  I thought for a moment.

  “Drinking and watching?” I replied.

  “Come on. Don’t be so negative. We’re going to knock ‘em dead.”

  “I do hope so.”

  Brad and I continued with our musical equivalent of last-minute cramming for an exam until we were called back in by Malcolm and told to stand by the side of the stage.

  We obeyed the instructions in silence. As Malcolm moved towards the microphone, we knew that our time on stage was imminent. I don’t know why I felt so uneasy. In my professional career I’d faced larger, noisier and more cynical audiences than this on a fairly regular basis. But all of a sudden, and for the first time, the stakes here seemed high. If Brad and I did well then I would have made a shortcut to acceptance with many in the village, but get it wrong, and then not only would I lose credibility with those I’d already met, but I may well have an uphill struggle with the rest.

  “Mes dames et messieurs” announced Malcolm, “fe deuxieme acte de la soiree commencera maintenant avec Tony Hawks et Brad Titman”

  And then my nerves vanished. The sound of my friend being announced by a daft name reminded me just how silly it was to be uptight about this. Yes, it mattered—but by the same token, it didn’t matter either. Probably in the grand scheme of things, nothing really matters, but certainly the fifteen-minute set by Tony Hawks and Brad Titman in a small village in France didn’t merit any further anxiety.

  “Let’s enjoy this, Titman!” I whispered to Brad through a suppressed giggle.

  Brad turned and nodded and I felt a little like the escape officer addressing a fellow prisoner upon entering the tunnel for our break-out attempt. We had our fake passports, civilian clothing, the tunnel was clear, and all we had to do now was give it our best shot.

  We walked onto the stage to a warm round of applause and Brad hit the first chord. E minor. I joined in, and we quickly established a funky rhythm. This caused a ripple of excitement through the audience. A couple of high-pitched whoops wafted up into the rafters of the hall’s high ceiling. I took a deep breath and belted out the first line.

  “Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man—no time to talk…”

  More whoops and hollers. I caught Brad’s eye and gave him a look, as if to say, “Yup, we’re on our way.”

  The old Bee Gees song ‘Stayin’Alive’ had been a little favourite of ours, a song that we’d found surprisingly easy to convert into an arrangement for two guitars and two voices. When we’d first learnt it Brad had worked very hard at the high-pitched harmony line, and as he leaned into the microphone to deliver it to this new French audience I noticed that he was grinning like an excited child.

  The Muzak Brothers were back. We were on a performance high. However else the simple dynamic of the performer⁄audience relationship may be confused, abused and perverted by money, managers, agents and ego, the simplicity of it can return in a magical instant. And it was happening right now. The real thrill of the performance comes from a positive exchange of energy—ephemeral and often elusive, invisible and unquantifiable, but a natural tonic, a kind of organic battery charge.

  Yes! The Muzak Brothers were back.

  The end of the song may not have prompted the same audience response as the one that had greeted the Irish boys in the first half, but we weren’t far off. We were holding our own, and as a consequence I now felt confident enough to test myself still further. I like to think that over the past fifteen years I’d developed an easy style of delivery when on stage addressing an audience. But what would it be like when attempting it in another language? Well, I was about to find out.

  I found myself introducing Brad and explaining that he’d been at his office desk in London that very morning and now he was here in the mountains singing for them. The audience applauded his efforts and Brad smiled. An innocent, naive smile. And then it occurred to me.

  He had absolutely no idea what I’d just said.

  I shared this thought with the audience and they laughed. Brad smiled again. An even more innocent, naive smile, tinged with a hint of bewilderment. I became mischievous and told the audience that it didn’t matter what I said about Brad, he wouldn’t understand. There we
re more chuckles at this, and so I took it as a green light to indulge my whimsy. Brad, I explained to the audience, had started out in life as a small-time burglar who had spent long periods in a string of different prisons. Later he had carried out two contract killings but had successfully blamed them both on innocent men who were now serving sentences in his place. I glanced across at my chum who was grinning inanely.

  “What are you doing, you bastard?” he enquired, through clenched teeth.

  I smiled back at him, feeling the faintest hint of the all-consuming power of a dictator. What should I say next? I had complete control over Brad’s entire history. Tempting though it may have been to continue exploiting the easy laughs provided by the blank canvas of Brad’s uninformed face, I elected not to milk it any further and I launched into the opening riff of our next song.

  “Et maintenant—une chanson de Stevie Wonder—“Superstition”,” I announced.

  And Brad Titman, the double murderer, joined in—none the wiser.

  §

  It turned out to be quite a night. After Brad and I had successfully concluded our five songs, Michel performed some pretty French duets with a mate of his, and the Irish boys played another set, including some traditional Irish music, which went down a storm. The culmination of the night was a huge jam session, a long stint of which I spent tinkling the ivories. Miles was an accomplished drummer as well as a brilliant pianist and once he discovered that I played keyboards, he urged me to take over from him, freeing him up for percussive duties. Initially I’d protested to the others.

  “I can’t follow Miles—he’s so much better than me.”

  “Ah, just shut up and play.”

  Maybe it was the drink (the beers were now flowing thick and fast, and the musicians were well on the way to drinking any profit that the night’s bar takings might have produced), or maybe it was just the high of playing with such fabulous musicians, but quite unexpectedly I played the piano better than I can remember having played it before. The small amount of practice that I had got around to bore fruit, and I found myself exploring the keyboard with a dexterity and a creativity that completely took me by surprise. For at least half an hour I felt like a pianist. What could I achieve if I actually began to do what I’d set out to do? Could this be the kick-start I needed to make full use of the Piano in the Pyrenees?