TRUMPET OR FLUNKET

At school I was a lazy daydreamer. Hunger and fatigue kicked in the moment my satchel crossed the threshold. Academically I would disappoint at every available opportunity, sporting an uncanny ability to retain absolutely nothing at all. I did however excel at music, something I can partially attribute to my Dad. He was a compulsive cine cameraman. Beret clad and permanently dressed in suit and tie, Channel 4 would not hesitate to document his behaviour, along with the hoarders and body-shockers, if they came across him today. Nothing went un-filmed and every second of my childhood became footage. As my siblings and I grew older though, the joy of this eccentricity would tarnish and wane. I’m sure he would have turned up at the hospital for the birth of our first child, if my wife hadn’t tricked us all into a last minute emergency home-birth.

In the summer of 1971, on a ‘compulsory’ holiday outing at the Scarborough Open Air Theatre, he spotted, somewhere in the corner of his viewfinder, a young seven year old boy copying the movements of a trombone player, armed with just a bucket and spade.

That Christmas there was a real life trumpet in my stocking (I don’t think my dad had planned for me to be a trombone player) and an obsession would begin (and be filmed).

My Mum had gone to my school and asked if there were any instruments available. Indeed there were; two trumpets, one at seven pounds and one at eleven. I was the lucky recipient of the seven-pounder, which being made of brass and un-lacquered, was dull and would after half an hour of playing, turn my hands green. This was of no consequence to me until I met the boy with the lacquered, eleven-pounder. I enquired naively as to why his trumpet was so shiny. “because I polish it .. stupid”. That year our local hardware store would discover that ‘Brasso’ was a very successful line. It never quite did the trick though.

My Dad, being a gifted academic, must have been disappointed and frustrated by my slow progress at school, but things would pick up after a successful audition at the Royal Northern College of Music. All I needed now was an O’level in Maths (which I had failed the previous year) and I was good to go. Thankfully in those days there was something called a CEE which somehow managed to scoop up the dullards, spoon feed them with the answers and force them into achieving an equivalent in something or other that amounted to an O’level. Shame all round.

Let nobody tell you “a music college is the same as a University, it’s just that everybody is studying music”. This is a lie.

Music College is a hot bed of young adults who have been spared a childhood, and with some coaxing from their parents, have willingly traded disco’s, youth clubs, record collections, pop music, fashion (and any knowledge of it), sex, alcohol, sport and of course drugs, for hour upon hour of practise on their chosen instrument. School then practise, sleep then school (after an hour of practise) and so it goes on. They think they have had a childhood but they haven’t. They have mutated into something else. They have become a ‘Walloon’.

And so in 1982 an unsuspecting Yorkshire boy, with trumpet in hand (by this time it’s a lacquered one) will arrive at such an establishment to discover the difference between a University and a Music College.

A ‘Hall of Residence’ is I think for most first year students a pretty good idea, an easy way to make new acquaintances even if they don’t manifest them selves in to life long friendships. This theory loses weight however when each one of the little f**kers is practising from dawn until dusk, filling my cell-like ex-seminary room with a cacophony of well-honed technique. Where are the parties? Where is the fresher’s ball? Where are the students for that matter?

When a Music College student is not practising or studying, you will find them in the refectory, for like humans they must eat to survive. It is here that I learn more about this culture. The brass players are the boozers and will display a brash and crude behaviour pattern. If you are a female brass player you must quickly learn to shed all femininity and ‘hang with the guys’. For both sexes an RNCM sweatshirt and unfashionable jeans are the order of the day (every day). String players will sit around sipping tea, reading books and discussing bowing technique while Opera singers burst into song between mouthfuls of pepperoni. Percussion students manage to combine refectory time with practise by hitting any available surface with a biro, while woodwind players shave their reeds into shape in readiness for more practice.

Practice, practice and more practice.

A riot if ever I saw one.

And so I have landed in the wrong place and must escape, some how.

It will be a year or so before I manage this and rest assured when I slip unceremoniously from this ship it is not something my Dad will decide to film. I am in good company though. As I face the Dean of Undergraduate Studies to be told my time is up he informs me that Howard Jones had gone in a similar way. With the singers hit single ‘What Is Love’ ringing round my head, I knew that I hadn’t found the answer to that question here, and must tread some pastures new.