To the wilds
of Mid-Suffolk, where erstwhile SftBH banjo-botherer Turny Winn has decamped,
all the better in order to be able to get it together in the country. He lives in some converted
cottages amidst many unpacked boxes in a village with two pubs, a Co-op and a transitory
weekend population – principally through choice rather than for geo-politically
motivated migratory reasons. As a permanent resident he is therefore considered somewhat of a social reformer locally, not being given to arriving on a Friday in time for a late supper before packing up his Macbook again on a Sunday night and cursing the A12 road works during his enforcedly slow journey back to a glittering media career in That There London. In the village there are also, we are to discover later, street
lights, which provoke a faux-Randy Crawford inspired outbreak of car singing on the way home. We don’t get out much.
Darkness
falls. A sense of foreboding pervades. “It’s a good job he moved out here
once we already knew we liked him” offers Helen, well into her second hour of
driving. And this is just to rehearse. “Ah – here we are!” she trills. Wendell
and I despatch thoughts of who we’d have to eat first in order to survive from
our minds as we are ushered hospitably into the welcoming hearth and home of The
Winns. There are, satisfactorily, roses around the door and a sturdy latch with
which to secure it. No mobile coverage mind, but at least it has its own post
code.
We are here
to revamp, reboot, rewrite and reverse engineer material for a forthcoming
performance under the nom-de-song Helen and the Neighbourhood Dogs – it’s not a
great moniker, I know, but offers just the right amount of flexibility in that as
long as there’s a nominative Helen we can make up the rest of the numbers in
pretty much any fashion we prefer. After a couple of hours of capo shifting,
note searching and unfolding bits of hieroglyph-ridden paper – notes written in
the white hot crucibles of previous rehearsals, aides memoires from another age -
or, in one case, “Come on Tony, you used to play this!” we have five songs of
consistent quality which we can perform from start to finish and in mostly the
right order of verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, outro. That’s pretty much most of what we’re going to need. “Once you
start talking, that’ll fill the time up” says Tony, sanguine through experience.
I demur. “I’m all about standing at the back tuning between songs these days”.
“Hey, Helen”
suggests Wendell, brightly. “Why don't you tell them your joke?”
*I read somewhere on social media
that use of this word rather than ‘me’ or ‘I’ was driving someone crazy. This
one’s for you.
