In your other life as a rock ‘n’ roll star, what role do you play in the band? Are you the vocalist, leaping about and putting on a show for the audience? Are you letting your guitar do the talking whilst staring at your collection of pedals on the floor? Are you bearded, shirtless and sweaty, beating the life out of your drums? Are you the fat guy with a bass guitar slung low at your ankles or high up against your chest? Maybe you’re on keyboards, wondering if you should be allowed to stand up?
What type of band are you in? Are you one third of a trio? Are you headlining Glastonbury or bottom of the bill at the Frog and Fiddler? Are you all about the music or the money? Are you performing on Top of the Pops or refusing to play the game?
I am the plank spanker.
And, I’ll have you know, one night I spanked my plank on the same stage the reformed Little Feat spanked their planks the night before.
The big corner theatre in Kilburn.
Oh yes.
Really? I thought you’d be the guy on the door, smashing people’s faces in if they tried to get in! 🙂
“No dungarees, beardy!”
Really Colin you should know better. Take their money, play and sort them out as they leave.
Standing on the left of the stage, slightly out of the spotlight with a Gibson ES335. It’s strictly rhythm, I can’t make this lump of wood cry or sing. But I do know 5 chords (and one I invented when my finger slipped onto the wrong fret).
Basically the Bonehed role, or “the boring bloke in the band”
That’s a role I covet too, except I’d probably use my own trusty red Epiphone SG. I also have a Green Burns Steer, same model as 1984 vintage Billy Bragg, for those moments when I come over all political and feel the urge to belt out To Have and To Have Not or A New England. Yep, shouty vocals as well, before returning to the sidelines…
Similar except a Strat and backing vocals. Oh and lead vocals on that one song that the singer allowed me to have as a B-side one time (and which only I think is a fan favourite).
For some of us the talents of Clapton, McCartney or Hendrix are a dream too far. Bonehead is surely proof that anybody can make it in a band, you just have to be mates with the right people.
Definitely the singer’s girlfriend whose presence on stage the rest of the band resent. But c’mon – who else could pat that tambourine against her shapely arse completely off the beat as well as me?
are you Jeanine Pettibone?
The producer. Hiding in a studio, sprinkling magic dust, going home.
I am the engineer, head in a kick drum moving a mic around until you shout “that’s it!” I then go an make the tea and biscuits once all the mics are plugged in and positioned correctly.
In real life, this is actually me (at the weekends). Fantasy me earns enough for me to do it full time.
Huzzah!!
A talented singer who can switch voices effortlessly (Bowie, Numan, Gahan, OMD, Sumner) and sometimes with an accent (Kraftwerk). It’s all me though. And I write all the songs.
Sumner? Wow, you can do a whole set off-key whilst gurning furiously? I is impress.
You should hear my Klaus Nomi.
As a prime and note perfect air player on any instrument you may mention, my opportunities are endless.
Who-who-WHO-WHO
I’m the guy with the fat cigar who’s “Gonna make you a star, baby. Just sign this little contract here”.
Hey Mike!
I can’t sing and I can’t play and I look awful…
are your legs thin?
15% of gross after expenses is completely reasonable, I think.
I can sell you a really good used Transit. Only 3 previous owners.
150,000 miles on the clock but these things just go on forever.
Dreaming of becoming a missile expert with the Ministry of Defence
Did you sign Pink?
So I’m the leader and main songwriter for an eclectic, acoustic based outfit. Well under the radar and likely never to trouble the mainstream ….oh hang on that’s The Feedback File …
If you need a versatile and reliable side guy let me know.
I’m the tasteful but brilliant guitarist, stage left, adding essential harmonies and tasty solos. Probably write most of the music too.
….and then thirty years later sit next to a mixing desk on Friday night Beeb Four chuntering that you didn’t get the credit you deserved.
I’ll be so effing rich I won’t care.
I joined my fantasy band when I was 14, as bass player and main songwriter. Over the next five or six years we must have had about 6,000 hits, in a variety of musical styles. Our hundreds of albums all topped the charts. We starred in films, and filled stadiums the world over. At some point I moved to lead vocals and guitar, and eventually dropped my imaginary colleagues altogether.
I lost touch with me a bit in my 20s, but last I looked I was semi-retired, doing occasional solo gigs for charity and tossing off the occasional Grammy-winning song whenever I felt like it.
I do a party piece to the Four Tet remix of Carmella by Beth Orton. At first there’s only me and a female singer on stage. I get the drum track going and then I invite members of the audience to play the other parts, trigger samples, hit percussion, play simple keys etc., until the stage is full of ad hoc musicians all playing their part to create a gorgeous communal noise, which gets even more epic and climactic than the track itself. I’m running around directing the piece, maybe playing the odd bit of guitar. As the track ends we are all a little changed by the experience, grins are plastered on faces, eyes glisten. We have created something special.
I’m Herbert Von Karajan.
I have the best hair in the universe. My sinewy forearms command the greatest musicians on the planet. The shape of of my shoulders causes apocalyptic fortissimo. I close my eyes and no-one has a clue where I am in my head at that moment. The only person I have smiled at in 50 years is Rostropovich. I have Von in my name. I am from beyond time and space. And I have the best hair in the universe.
Yebbut – your first name is Herbert..
But I’m also German, so that’s fine.
Agreed, Herbert in England is someone in a pullover knitted by his mother.
And vot iss wrong vis dat? Mein pullover ist varm und calmink.
An English Herbert is also duty-bound to shoot the sherbert to John Cooper Clarke.
Frenkly he ken get hiss own konfectionerries.
Yebbut, who had it first?
In the first place, the German clearly aces this hair-off.
In the second place, what is Frank Finlay doing conducting an orchestra? I didn’t watch Bouquet of Barbed Wire to the end, admittedly…
I’m the ‘other’ guitarist in a sextet called Biscuit Factory. I shun the spotlight even though I write the words for the vocalist to sing. I leave the music to the more competent musicians. Our drummer is really into jazz and hip-hop/grime. Our bassist is a multi-instrumentalist who has her own recording studio in her shed. Our keyboardist is classically trained. Our lead guitarist can plays beautiful Nashville-style guitar licks when he’s not leaping up and down like a lunatic. Our singer can’t play anthing, but he looks cool and he sings with sincerity.
I am completely constructed of dreams.
I am shapeless
I am noise cancelling
I am a sonic cathedral
I am jelly
Are these Chesney Hawkes lyrics?
There’s no one he’d rather be.
At the side of the stage jogging up and down (out of time). My maraccas are not plugged in. Possibly have a large watch round my neck and may well rush the mike to shout #’boyyeee# every two minutes.
I’m the drummer out of Budgie. Dungarees, thousand yard stare and lots of noise when I hit stuff.
It’s a shame Budgie isn’t the drummer in Budgie isn’t it?
And Adam Faith the vocalist.
I was the original drummer but replaced when it became evident I couldn’t execute a decent flam and my double paradiddle was pretty much all left hand.
Just be thankful you didn’t combust, Stumpy.
Me too. I was meant to be studying Buddy Rich’s Snare Drum Rudiments. I was studying a very different kind of rudie-ment.
hur
I’m at the lights. I tried to perform miracles with a couple of slide projectors and some spotlights, but ended up blowing the amps and giving a person in the front row an epileptic fit.
I’m Head of Video. I’m expecting @fentonsteve along any moment to remind both of us our place in the rock n roll pecking order.
Great minds think alike: see my answer to Producer Gangle’s post above.
You’re supposed to say “no one goes home humming the lights” and “no one cares about your screens” 😉
Bass player who ends up running away from the circus to become an accountant (or an academic, there are an interesting number of those)
I see you already have a hat with “BASS PLAYER” written on it. Nice!
Started as Bass player.
Earlier, as a Chris Squire clone, Rickenbacker with round wound strings, 100 progressive notes per minute of complicated counterpoint, using a pick in a treble styleee….
Now, still using the Rick, but with flat wounds, never use the bridge pickup, playing fewer notes, further up the neck, with fingers (and thumb occasionally), always completely in the pocket……and completely deaf in left ear due to standing next to drummer’s cymbals for 30 years…..millions in the bank due not having destructive/self-destructive tendencies like the rest of the band….
Still the Bass player.
When someone shouts “More COWBELL”
I’m waiting and ready.
What a lot of bass-players we are.
I’m the bass-playing lyricist of ‘Apprehensive Coastguards’, on the ‘Famous Tumfuttle’ label.
Usually a black Fender Precision, but sometimes – for old-times sake – one of my trademark doublenecks, including the truly ghastly Steinberger, with one fretted neck and one fretless.
Pedals? Oh yes. More than you can shake a Chapman Stick at. Bass synth pedals? Ohhhhhhhhh, yes.
Apprehensive Coastguards – I saw you guys when I played at a festival in Todmorden when I was with The Trespassers W. I was on mellotron, Norman Haggis was on mellotron, Reg Spuntley was on a stand-up bass which he played with a windscreen-wiper. I think there was a drummer, or some drums at any rate. And another Mellotron. We didn’t have a road crew, we had Pickfords. Great days man.
“Never knowingly under-Mellotronned…”
Oh, the Spuntmeister. Is he still with us? Used to get very upset if his wiper blades weren’t genuine Uniparts, for a Rover P6.
King Crimson think they’re so different with their three drummer frontline, but you guys were there long before them with your wall-of-Mellotrons.
Virtue out of necessity old bean. Our hash-befuddled manager put the wrong number on the order form and we ended up with 10 instead of one. We finally paid them off in 2014. Had a little get-together – dry of course, all red bush and too many biscuits.
The Spuntster has a caravan in Rhos On Sea and a Dachsund called Sisyphus. Sends his best.
There are a lot of bass-playing engineers around.
I work in a team of eight, three of us are root-note plodders. Well, one can actually play and me and John plod. The other five – no guitarists, drummers, keys, nothing.
At the beginning of this clip you can see a band made up entirely of engineers…
You know that guy played by Bradley Cooper in “A Star Is Born”? Cool, rugged, ridiculously handsome, perfect hair and beard, voice to die for and a fine axeman….. That’s not me. I’d be the slightly shy gangly one stood behind the 3rd keyboard trying not to catch anyone’s eye while apologising internally for existing.
Well at least you won’t ever piss yourself on stage at the grammys.
I’m the rockstar wearing a parka and a hairstyle last trendy in 1994 with a tambourine round me neck, staring out at the crowd intending to look cool and hard, yet thinking fook me it’s 25 years since I made a decent record, why am I doing this when I could be watching Love Island..
From Spike to Love. Via Novelty.
Singer. Deep voice. Tall and wearing a dark suit and white shirt.
Actually, more vocalist than singer.
Lucky as hell to have a fantastic set of musicians in the band (my band). Imagine a less cool Matt Berlinger. Actually, a massively less cool Matt Berlinger.
Quite obviously, I’d be the lead guitar player stood stage left. Tacit, shy almost, but the molten core of the band. Incendiary runs, limpid aching slow licks and all fills in between. And providing support to the rhythm guitarist with some well judged funk chords on the backbeat.
And the crowd will be heard to murmur low in awe, ‘but he’s a fat goofy twat with banana fingers’
I’m a root note plodder. Think I’ve got away with it though.
Root note plodder
The root note plodder
He must know something
He Don’t Say Nothing
He just keep ploddin’ along
You did only mention it once
Reading this thread, I sense the lineup for the 2020 Scarfolk Festival forming before my eyes.
Root Note Plodders of the world unite …steadily.
I’m the misunderstood introvert whose innovative home-recordings will be discovered by my heirs and released on a cool hipster label specialised on digging up unknown future classics. Quietus will praise it as the best box set of the year and in the future hip young artists will cite me as their biggest influence. Your great grandchildren can thank me later…
Stood at the back where I can do my own thing, I’m playing the trumpet in the horn section of a foot stomping soul revue. No need to learn endless scales, just an ability to parp joyous runs of half a dozen notes with immaculate timing while shuffling from side to side. On the road 300 nights a year, only a small instrument (heurgh!) to carry around. That would make me very happy.
For all that I do get the chance to get up and be centre stage doing the vocals, (there’s no-one else on the stage with me, I should point out) making quite a noise, my heart would really like to be jamming with the musicians, riffing away on any trad instrument to hand – box, fiddle, gurdy, it would matter not.
On a particularly large stage the Afterword Band play a ‘remarkable’ set in support of The Feedback File and The Trespassers W.
Sharing lead vocals throughout are Leedsboy, with his deep baritone and Black Celebration, who claims to be able to mimic at least five singers (and will presumably sing many of the songs that aren’t Leonard Cohen or Johnny Cash covers). Additional vocalists in the band include thecheshiecat, Diddley Farquar (when he isn’t saying horrible things about his brother on Twitter) and, when the band play that shouty, political song, Nick L.
Beezer and Twang the role of Lead Guitarists in the band, both stood stage left (imagining their Pete Townshend or Jimmy Page, and hopefully not getting in each others way). They will add, in their own words, ‘tasty solos’ ‘limpid aching slow licks’ and all other things in between – even with fat banana fingers.
Joining them stage-left, but hiding in the shadows (and only playing on the songs in which the five chords he knows appear) is Rigid Digit and his Gibson ES355. Nick L (Epiphone SG or green Burns Steer), paulwright (Fender Strat) and myself (Rickenbacker 360) are gathered on stage right adding rhythm alongside attackdog, who is spanking his plank or even planking his spank.
Chiz (who is clearly Paul McCartney) by another name switches between bass guitar, guitar and vocals throughout the set. He does pretty much what is needed, depending on the song. Presumably he is able to play piano too when required, otherwise the keyboardist role is filled (somewhat reluctantly) by Dave Amitri.
The band have more bass guitarists than even Freebass, as Freddy Steady’s and Fentonsteve’s dual root-note plodding is joined by GCU Grey Area on his pedal-laden black Precision, fitterstoke and his Rickenbacker, Illuminatus (taking a break from his accountancy studies) and on occasion (with Hofner Violin bass) Paul McCartney… I mean Chiz.
Whilst the more adventurous bass players eye-up the audience, the root-note plodders gather round the two drummers, bobness and fortuneight. Few flams or double parradiddles are required.
Adding, somewhat out of time, percussion to the proceedings are Sewer Robot (who also enjoys the role of singer’s girlfriend) on tambourine, moseleymoles on maracas and Hubert Rawlinson on cowbell.
Finally, atcf is there to provide a bit of brass, with his his joyous trumpet lines.
Of course, none of this would be possible without Mike H’s management, or Vincent (lights) and fentonsteve (sound engineer) and the music is (at the very least) conducted by Moose the Mooche (as Herbert Von Karajan) and produced by ganglessprocket.
A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
This is my baton and I am pleased to see you.
See? I knew no one cares about my screens.
Why, the screens are the most important bit of any band. Where would Pink Floyd be without their screens? Ditto S Club 7, Kenicke, KC & The Sunshine Band and countless others.
So I’m one of five vocalists? I’ll get me long coat and stool.
I make it 27 members. Perhaps we could call the band “Twe20 7even”?
“That was Stormzy Who? from our studio guests tonight, Twenty-Seven Plonkers. Three more from them later. Now over to Corey Caulfield in the newsroom.”
71 more from them later.
*Afterword implodes*
After seeing James Intveld last weekend, I’d like to be one of the two guitarists, sporting a nifty 10 gallon hat, playing the hell out of a Telecaster.
If only I could play like that.