Chapter 1 Don't not learn your instrument properly

What would Matt Barton do? How to Succeed In The Music Industry Part 1 This is a handy series on how to succeed in the music industry. If you are a budding singer-songwriter, you might want to print each chapter off and collect them in a file that can easily be kept in your gig bag, along with your book of chords and your pitch pipes. This guide will be indispensable. In painful detail, I am going to tell you about my own vainglorious search for fame and fortune. “But who is this guy?” I hear you ask. “I’ve never heard of him.” Well, that’s the point. If you want to succeed, it’s very important to know WHAT NOT TO DO. The story of my music career provides hundreds of text-book examples of this. After you’ve read what follows, you’ll be able to go into virtually any music-biz situation, thinking, “What would Matt Barton do?” Then simply do the opposite. I first tried learning the guitar at the age of sixteen, which is too late. Every rock star you admire, like Neil Young or whoever, could play guitar with their teeth before the age of two. I started at sixteen, in a place called Central Hall in Liverpool. At Central Hall you could get lessons in all sorts of things for about sixty pence a session. Kristian, a friend of mine from school, was learning saxophone and wanted to play soul; he used to take lessons there. I was struggling with a battered acoustic guitar that my brother had bought from Argos. I wanted to be in the band Madness. This was 1994, thirty years since the heyday of Motown and Stax, and at least ten years since Madness had mattered to anybody. Our fingers weren’t exactly on the pulse. While Kristian tooted on his horn next door, I learned chords off an old Jamaican guy called Chris. He was tall, had really long thumbs and was the first Jamaican I’d ever met. I asked him to show me how to play ska. In reply, he played me an Abba song on the off-beat. We were working our way through one of those 20 Great songs for beginner’s books. The cake was cheap. And then, out of nowhere, I just stopped going. I had no work ethic. I was lazy. The guitar just became a thing to hold while I zoned out in front of the telly. Anything I picked up over the next couple of years, I did so by pure chance. I was a doodler, nothing more. (Madness songs, by the way, always have about a million chords. I only knew three. So I got into Buddy Holly instead.) At school I’d write songs. I’d scribble the words down on scraps of paper when I should have been listening to the teacher, then try and remember the melody when I got home. But I was so bad on the guitar that I could never figure out how to play the songs anyway, so the whole thing was absolutely pointless. (Years later, when washing dishes for a living, sweating in the murky waters of a kitchen sink, I cursed those wasted years.) School was De La Salle, an old Catholic institution in Croxteth, one of the poorest areas in the city. I lived in nearby Sparrow Hall, which is a weird sort of nowhere zone. If you ever want to go and look at Sparrow Hall, it’s basically the area near the showcase cinema on the East Lancs Road. It doesn’t even appear on maps. Sometimes I wonder if I made it up. If you were catholic and you lived in this part of the city, you went to De La Salle, and you didn’t see girls between nine in the morning and half past three in the afternoon. The head of first year was a paedophile. He smacked my arse once. At school, everyone in my “gang” had really long fringes. I’m not sure whether long fringes were a thing in the 90s or if it was just us. Kristian could get his fringe in his mouth it was so long, and yet the rest of his hair was perfectly tidy. On the days that we actually bothered to turn up at school, we’d meet at break times in the court yard. We’d talk about what we’d like to do to Miss Foley, or Miss Cobley- or the female lab technician with the tight jeans. It was here that I had a life changing experience. Fino, who looked a bit Chinese though his mother was black, had written a song and he wanted to show us. He pulled a piece of graph paper out of his pocket, carefully unfolded it and began to sing. “Let’s buy a washing machine, let’s buy a new one. Let’s buy a washing machine, let’s buy a blue one. Come on, mum, come on, mum, Come on, mum, come on, mum. Let’s buy a washing machine.” It was so good that it blew the fringe out of my eyes. From that point on, I knew I had to be in a band with Fino. So, instead of organising rehearsals straight away, we began a two year process of talking about what the band would be like. Sometimes we were called Capri, sometimes we were The Flying Cars. Tony Dunne and Kristian eagerly joined up. Fino was a brilliant imaginary front-man. He had no shame and said he would do anything to draw attention to the band. He was going to rape Tom Jones at the Brit awards. This was a whole two years before Jarvis Cocker achieved similar notoriety, for his band Pulp, by mooning Michael Jackson. In Sparrow Hall it was impossible to walk down the street holding a guitar without having somebody challenge you to play it. Everybody, young or old, would scream, ‘Gis a tune lad,” as you passed by. It was a compulsive thing with some of them, they couldn’t help it. It was the same with long hair. If you grew your hair long, which we all did after we left school, everywhere you went, people had to comment. This was Liverpool, one time second city of the empire. Now, large sections of its population were no more than slack jawed yokels who thought hair length was the only thing that set men and women apart. This is why long haired men made them angry. It was mass sexual confusion. So Capri, or The Flying Cars or whatever we were called that week, decided to head south. To Smithdown Road. It’s hard for me to stress just how big a change this was. The south of Liverpool had a large racial mix and students from all over the country trying to express themselves with stupid haircuts and daft clothes. If the local scallies had shouted at everybody they thought was ‘weird’ they would have been screaming all day, until their voice boxes gave in completely and they could never speak again. This was 96/97. You get people who are nostalgic for the nineties. Some of these people seem to hold it up as some kind of cultural epoch. To me, the nineties was just football. Like everything suddenly became football. Politics was football, cinema was football, music was football. It was the decade that everybody began cheering and putting their hands in the air as if somebody had scored a goal every time something happened that they approved of. When labour were elected in 97, after 17 years of Tory rule, people started doing Mexican waves and chanting Tony Blair’s name like he was Brucie fucking Grobbelaar. While everyone else was “having” the nineties, we were sat in a flat above a fruit shop listening to Temptations records, watching porn and playing Die Hard on the play station. A lot of people moved in and out of the flat but Fino, Kristian, Tony Dunne and I were the hardcore. There was also a lad called Joey who used to sleep on the couch. He was a pretty good shoplifter and he could play guitar. He would never pay for anything but he’d show us chords. He once robbed a book that had the music to every Beatles song in it. Slowly, we started playing together. But to be honest, most of the time we ignored our instruments. Fino liked to sleep all day, and as his bed was in the living room, it made it hard to do anything until after the evening repeat of Neighbours. As a gang we procrastinated expertly. Sometimes, at night, we’d turn out all the lights and play hide-and-seek. Joey was the best at it. He was brilliantly imaginative when it came to hiding places and he won every time. It must have been the summer of 97, when we’d been in the flat nearly a year, that we had a weird spurt of activity. It was hot and I think there’d even been storms. Tony Dunne, a burly guy with sideburns that made him look a bit like a lion, had been fiddling with a Hammond organ that Kristian had got from a skip. He’d figured out Under My Thumb by The Rolling Stones, Twist and shout and Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? The rest of us would sort of bang out an accompaniment on our guitars, dropping out for the bits where we didn’t know the chords. Kristian and Fino would sing and there were bits where it sounded almost…proper. We did this every night, slowly adding our own songs to the set. We figured out chords for Fino’s Washing Machine, and played it over and over again, like mad five year olds. I’d found Fino’s new years resolutions on a piece of paper by his bed and we managed to get a weird sort of reggae tune around it. “One, Go out every week, Two, get face treatment. Three, get dental treatment. Four, get a job, get a job, get a job, get a job. Five, go to sports centre Six…” There was no number six. He’d written a 6 down, but hadn’t added a resolution. It was a mystery. He sung like Yoko Ono and the song descended into horrible screaming, like some sort of performance art piece. I think they all ended like that. Fino was a big Otis Redding fan and he was on the dole. He adapted Redding’s I’ve been loving You too long, into his own I’ve Been On the dole too long. There was genuine pain in this number, and by the time we’d played it for the fiftieth time, I could see that Fino was a kind of genius. Not a really intelligent genius with an awareness of the machinations of his own art. More like a tortured fool with no filter, able to express what most of us keep deep inside. There were other songs; Asthma Attack, Fino’s wordless interpretation of breathless panic; Sunny Days and Sundays, his reply to the Carpenters’ Rainy Days and Mondays, and others, the names of which have sadly been lost in the sands of time. (Actually, the last time I saw Fino, he claimed to still have all the songs on a tape, along with his solo album, Bone That Guitar. Maybe one day, they’ll see the light of day.) I could hardly sleep with the excitement of all this. Every night I would imagine our stratospheric rise to the top. If we could just get a drummer, and a bass player, and if I could just learn how to play the guitar properly, then everything would fall into place and we’d be snorting coke off strippers’ tits in no time. About four days into all this activity, Fino said he wanted a word. He sat me down in front of the TV while he watched Going for Gold, and announced his retirement. He’d had enough. It just wasn’t for him. There was no talking him round. We’d lost him. He never gave a proper explanation for his retirement, but I like to think he’d expressed himself as fully as he was ever going to. Like Richard Hell after he made Blank Generation, he just thought that there was no more to say. He was done. Why take away from what he’d achieved by diluting the formula, playing songs just for the filthy lucre? It wasn’t long after all this that Fino drifted back to the north of the city, where he slowly became a postman. It was now up to me to pick up where Fino left off. The baton had been passed.