James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes

by James Acaster

  The band had one final gig in the diary and it was on a farm in North Yorkshire. I can’t remember what the festival was called now but it was being run by a Leeds promoter, a friend of ours called Adam, and was the kind of gig that if we hadn’t been splitting up immediately after we would’ve been really excited about. Independent festivals are usually a huge amount of fun, because they’re small but busy and everyone is enthusiastic, so they feel like your own secret gig, and being one of the bands on the bill makes you feel like an integral part of some new and exciting thing that only cool people know about. Our friend George came with us (you remember George, he lived on the other side of my secondary school) because he wanted to film our final show. It took us ages to find the place because it really was a farm in the middle of nowhere, nothing but fields and hillside for miles, but we finally saw a stumpy old boy in high-vis directing traffic towards the site.

  We played to about twenty people in the smaller of two tents. There were a lot more people at the festival by then but we were one of the first bands on so everyone was too busy drinking elsewhere. Every now and then as a performer you have a gig that means more to you than it does to the audience. We didn’t mention this was our final gig during our set because that would’ve felt a little tragic, what with most people not watching us and all. It’s fine to announce it’s your final gig to a packed room of fans but not to twenty people mooching around who don’t know who you are and don’t care if you’re splitting up because it doesn’t make a jot of difference to their lives. We finished the gig and moved our equipment into a wigwam assigned to the acts, then we watched the other bands for a while whilst eating jacket potatoes. I remember being freezing because I only had my WowFit on and so I put my arms inside my T-shirt; then the lead singer of a different band made fun of me from the stage, and the audience turned and laughed. No one had any idea I had been on earlier or that I was even in a band. That sounds sad but at the time it made me feel better as I was officially a punter again.

  We had a four-hour drive ahead of us so we left at half past ten in the evening and by two a.m. I was asleep and if you’re good at maths you’ll know that that’s not good. This is the story of the second car crash.

  I woke up when Graeme shouted ‘Oi!’ at the top of his voice because he’d turned and seen me driving with my eyes closed (obviously he should’ve taken a leaf out of the skydiver’s book and shouted ‘We’ve got a sleeper!’ but ‘oil!’ did the job nicely all the same). I awoke with a jolt and immediately steered to my right and the car sped towards the central reservation of the dual carriageway, so I steered left and we headed straight towards the only other vehicle on the road, a huge lorry, then right again, headed towards the central reservation, then left again and headed towards the lorry. I steered away from the lorry once more and it was at this point that my car decided, ‘You clearly can’t make up your mind which way you should be going right now, we haven’t got all day, so allow me to make this decision for you.’ The car started lurching from left to right, up and down and side to side – nothing I was frantically pressing or stamping on was making a difference. Then the car made its choice, speeding towards the central reservation which we hit head on, hard. We then span away and hit the lorry with the back of our car (always nice to end up hitting both of the things you were trying to avoid hitting), then span away and hit the central reservation, then span away and hit the lorry, and we kept doing this over and over, spinning and hitting while still moving forwards down the dual carriageway. I remember all of the windows exploding and showering us with tiny balls of glass. George woke up halfway through, asked what was going on and I said, ‘We’re crashing.’ (I was the only one who had been in a car crash before so I was the most qualified to assess whether or not this was indeed a crash.) And then we stopped. The speed with which Graeme exited the car was remarkable. The second the car stopped moving he opened the door and ran away. George and I took a little longer because we were still taking it in, I think. I remember Graeme shouting from the side of the road, ‘Come on!’ and me replying, ‘No.’

  No! What a bold move from someone who has just massively ballsed up, now refusing to actually do something sensible despite the fact he’s lucky to be alive. It finally occurred to me that I was sitting in the middle of the dual carriageway, stationary in a broken car with bits of said car strewn across the road behind me, and once I had taken that information on board I too ran out of the car and joined Graeme by the side of the road. George was still sitting in the back so we both shouted to him to ‘Get out now’ with maximum urgency. He opened the door, walked calmly towards us, then remembered he had left his camcorder inside so walked back to the car, rooted around until he found it, then completed his journey to the grass verge and started filming the wreckage from the roadside, occasionally walking back into the road to get some artier shots. The car itself had seen better days: the front and back weren’t there any more, the windows were gone and the one door none of us were sitting next to was completely caved in. The lorry driver ran up to us and checked we were ok, having worried that we’d gone under the lorry. I was certain he was about to give us a ruddy good dressing down but he was just concerned and relieved. We realised that the other side of the dual carriageway was closed and empty so we ran across and stood over there instead. It seemed safer than standing on the grass at least.

  The police never showed up, even though we called them, but the recovery service people did and they had a lot to say.

  ‘You know that lorry you hit?’ said a man with a torch.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, because of course I knew the lorry I hit, I knew it all too well, I knew it intimately thanks.

  ‘It were full of milk!’ he squawked; then he gave me a few seconds to allow the information to sink in before adding, ‘so if that had fallen on you, you’d have been dead!’ I sometimes wonder if this man got home that night and as he was getting into bed realised that the comment he had made about the milk not only made no sense but probably didn’t do much to reassure the survivors either. Did he think that if the lorry had not contained milk it would’ve simply bounced right off us and all would’ve been well? Or had he sized us up and had us pegged for a bunch of lactose intolerants and so the worst type of lorry to fall on us ever would be a milk lorry because if the impact doesn’t kill you, the contents will. Looking back now, I assume the lorry was carrying crates of milk but at the time I just imagined one huge tank of milk on its back, like a gasoline truck, and if it had fallen on us then a tidal wave of semi-skimmed would’ve been unleashed on the dual carriageway, the townspeople rushing to the side of the road to dunk their biscuits in the milky river as Graeme, George and I melted like the Wicked Witch of the West, the deadly milk taking its toll immediately – we never stood a chance.

  As the man with the torch was talking to us, one of the other recovery service people drove past us slowly and yelled, in a voice not unlike Otto from The Simpsons, ‘HEY BOYS! How does it feeeeeeeel? How does it feeeeeeel TO BE ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!!!!’ and then sped away. These recovery service guys were a little off.

  ‘Now I’ve got to ask you, have you been doing any drugs?’ the torch guy said (I was about to ask him and his pals the same question.)

  ‘No, never,’ I replied. I probably didn’t need to say ‘never’; saying ‘never’ was such a suck-up thing to do. ‘I’ve never ever taken drugs and would never dream of it; the only thing I’ve ever been high on is life. Hugs not drugs – I don’t need drugs to have a good time, sir.’

  This guy had probably (definitely) done drugs himself and now thought I was king of the squares for never having done so. It was at that moment, right after I had told this man that I’d never done drugs, that George walked over to us, smoking a roll up cigarette, and asked the recovery service guy if he wanted ‘a toke on this’. His timing and wording were both incredible. There’s no way he could’ve known what the guy had just asked me and yet as soon as drugs were mentioned that’s when he popped up
and chose to use terminology only ever associated with smoking cannabis. No one has a toke on a normal cigarette, do they?4 The recovery service guy seemed to agree with me: he suddenly looked suspicious, sniffed the air a bit, looked at us both, then smiled and said, ‘No I’m all right, mate.’ Meanwhile I was having a heart attack.

  We’d lost a bongo. Some of the recovery service guys were searching for it in the trees by the side of the road. Graeme had lost a guitar too. It was nowhere to be seen and we could only conclude it must’ve flown out of the car as we were spinning and landed outside the dual carriageway. But mainly, we lost a bongo. Months later George put all the footage from his camcorder on to his computer and while we were watching it back we spotted the lost bongo propped up against the central reservation. How perplexing it must’ve been for motorists to see a bongo in the middle of the dual carriageway, all of them trying to work out how it had got there. I like to imagine a beat poet crossing the road and abandoning the bongo halfway because it was slowing him down.

  Back on the night of the crash the guy with the torch was still inspecting the car and making polite chit-chat. ‘So you’re in a band are you? When’s your next gig?’ he asked.

  ‘Never. We just split up,’ Graeme said.

  The man raised his eyebrows and looked around at the crash site. He nodded, looking somewhat spaced out, taking in what Graeme had said. ‘Yeah, man. I suppose you have, haven’t you?’

  Didgeridoo

  After the band split up, I still kept in contact with my singing teacher Melissa because she was cool and because I felt guilty about taking a secret dump in her house. One day she asked me if I would like to come to her house for a jam session. I was still approaching jam sessions with caution since 9/11 (if you’ve skipped ahead to this chapter then that sentence will seem a lot more intense than intended) but Melissa made this particular jam session sound rather intriguing.

  She had a student who she was teaching music theory to; he was in his late forties and could play the didgeridoo. She was grade eight flute and they had been meeting up and jamming together but they felt like they were missing some percussion. They suggested that I play the congas, which was a relief because I owned a pair of congas – if they’d asked me to play the bongo I’d have been no good to them (unless I fancied risking my life retrieving it from the middle of the A14). And so I said yes. As always I probably need to justify to some of you why I agreed to this. It was simply too unusual to pass up. As far as I was concerned the worst that could happen was we would have a rubbish jam session (although I was more than prepared for ‘All Along the Watchtower’ should they spring a didgeridoo version on me) and the best that could happen was that I would enjoy playing a different kind of music with other people again. Plus I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life since the band had split up and was currently open to anything. Maybe this band would be the one, who knows?

  I lived quite a long way from Melissa (as you already know) but apparently the didgeridoo player lived in the village across from me so Melissa arranged for him to pick me up after I’d finished work that day and drive me to the jam.

  He arrived an hour early. I was still greasy after a day in the kitchen and my body ached after taking several baked potatoes to the nuts (it had been yet another delightful shift for yours truly) and I needed a hot shower. I invited him inside so he could wait in the living room but he refused and sat alone in his car on my driveway. I didn’t have time to query his motives. I had a shower, loaded my congas into the back of his car and off we went. Before he’d even got to the end of my street he asked me, ‘Do you like conspiracy theories?’ There was a pause.

  ‘I don’t really believe any of them,’ I replied.

  ‘I love them,’ he said, then went on to tell me how 9/11 was an inside job (Too right! Those musicians knew I didn’t have Hendrix in my repertoire! They set me up!) and revealed that Gordon Brown had been kidnapping kids in vans and injecting them with diseases.

  ‘Seriously, if you don’t believe me, I could show you videos on YouTube.’ Great. He continued, ‘Melissa said you’re a comedian.’

  ‘Well, not really, I did a couple of gigs once.’

  ‘I’ve written a sitcom. Grant Mitchell is a lorry driver and he tries to fight people at karate but keeps putting people in headlocks all the time.’

  I’ll never forget his sitcom pitch and I can laugh at his idea all I want but I still remember it all these years later so maybe it’s brilliant. Grant Mitchell, not Ross Kemp which is the actor’s name, but Grant Mitchell the character from EastEnders (enemy of Eco Man) is a lorry driver (which was the didgeridoo player’s day job, by the way) and he tries to fight people at karate (why?) but keeps putting people in headlocks all the time. (All the time! I love the thought of every episode involving a scene where he puts someone in a headlock when he was meant to be using a wider range of karate moves on them.) If he was going to make this sitcom he would need a martial arts expert on set. I did consider giving him the address of the Jeet Kune Do class I’d gone to that one time but was worried that the sensei wouldn’t take kindly to a conspiracy theorist turning up and ranting about Grant Mitchell, and I didn’t want this didgeridoo-ist to end up on the business end of a samurai sword.

  We arrived at Melissa’s and set up our equipment. There wasn’t much pre-jam chat, which was odd, but to be honest I was just glad all the conspiracy theories had stopped and he wasn’t pitching sitcoms at me. Mischa walked past the door and gave me a look, a look that said, ‘I know what you did,’ and I was reminded of how I’d dashed through these very corridors, naked from the waist down, urgently searching for toilet paper after having effectively broken into the premises illegally.

  ‘Thank you so much for doing this, James,’ said Melissa, and I looked at the floor in shame, shrugging my shoulders, trying to convey that it was no hassle whatsoever while also trying to stop myself from saying, ‘Sometimes I come in here when you’re away and go for poos.’

  We were ready to play so our didgeridoo-er began the first jam with a long drone on the didgeridoo. I haven’t heard a lot of didgeridoo players but I know it isn’t easy to do circular breathing so I’m going to say he was actually very good at playing the didgeridoo. It sounded pretty good to me anyhow. Melissa joined in on the flute playing some classical-sounding melody and then I joined in on the congas like an absolute hero.

  The first song we jammed lasted about fifteen minutes. It was very experimental and to this day I’d say I haven’t heard anything exactly like it, mainly because flute/congas/didgeridoo is not the full line-up of a single band ever. We finished the song (all at the same time too) and looked at each other. There was excitement in Melissa’s eyes. I could tell she was happy. I was feeling pretty happy too, considering the journey I’d just had with this man, and I was quite surprised to find myself already considering making this a regular thing from now on because I genuinely enjoyed how the three of us sounded together.

  Then the didgeridoo-ist looked at me, furrowing his brow. ‘You need to slow down on them congas,’ he said. ‘You’re playing too fast.’

  ‘OK, sure, no problem,’ I said before Melissa raised her hand.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we need to tell each other what to do, just keep doing whatever you want to, James, it’s fine. Let’s play again!’

  The second jam lasted roughly twenty minutes and in my opinion sounded better than the first. I did try and play slower, like he asked, and to his credit that had instantly improved the quality of the overall sound of the band. I started trying to think of band names. Maybe All The Kings Men? Rumpty Pumpty? Sunny Side Up? PinYak? So many options.

  As the jam came to an end (all together again!) he pointed at me. ‘Too slow that time,’ he said. ‘Speed up the congas a bit.’

  ‘Honestly, James,’ Melissa countered, ‘just do whatever you like, I think it sounds nice.’ He threw Melissa a glare and opened his mouth to speak, but then the doorbell rang. Time had gotten away f
rom us and Melissa’s next student had arrived for her singing lesson. She was a sweet woman in her seventies and smiled at us all as she walked into the practice room.

  ‘Oh my! Are you in a band these days, Melissa?’ Melissa nodded and then proceeded to tell her how wonderful she thought it was all sounding, how original and unique.

  ‘It’s like nothing you’ve ever heard before, and I’m blessed with two amazing musicians. This one believes the Royal Family are all Lizard People and this one runs around my house covered in shit!’ She didn’t say those exact words but I read between the lines. The student was completely drawn in by Melissa’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Wow, well my son is a record producer, did you know that?’ We didn’t. ‘If you like I can ring him now!’ And then she rang him. ‘Hello darling, I’m sitting here with a hot new band who’d like to play a song for you, listen!’ And then she held the phone out and nodded at us to start playing.

  I was stunned. This is the kind of story you’d usually read about in the autobiography of a rock legend, their big break, where everything just falls into place at once and they manage to get a record deal during their first ever practice because they were that awesome. Where was this kind of luck when The Wow! Scenario were still going?!

  The man started playing the didgeridoo, Melissa started playing the flute and I joined in with the congas.

  The third jam lasted one minute, a good fourteen to nineteen minutes shorter than usual. The man stopped playing the didgeridoo and when we realised he wasn’t going to join back in we stopped too.

  ‘Slow down on the congas, you’re too fast,’ he said, pointing at me without looking at me.

  ‘James, you can really just do whatever you feel like doing,’ Melissa said dismissively.