Sex & Bowls & Rock and Roll: How I Swapped My Rock Dreams for Village Greens

Each player has two woods to bowl. The home and away skippers bowl theirs last, their responsibility being to tie everything up – not merely hoping to gain points for the team, but perhaps to knock an opponent’s wood out from a scoring position, or to block things off in front in order to protect an advantage.

If you’re the one in the middle, then you have a dual role to play. First, you will be looking to build up a good strategic position within the head, to make the skipper’s life easier when he comes to claim the points. Second, you will sometimes be called upon to merely get as close to the cott as possible, if the lead bowler has failed to trouble the surrounding grass with his efforts.

The lead has a simple job – a very simple one. The lead must bowl two woods that come to rest right next to the cott, thus putting the opposition on the back foot from the word ‘have a good game’. It is a big responsibility, and it takes a certain type of person to make a good lead. Paradoxically, as your two colleagues are yet to bowl, there is the opportunity of rescue, and thus the lead position is also a good place to hide somebody if they are shit.

I usually bowl lead.

Unlike many sports there are no white line markings, behind which you must stand. Instead, as you bowl, part of your body needs to be in contact with the mat. It’s a black mat, but the colour isn’t particularly important. Clubs can get hold of mats from specialist bowls providers, who can supply a range with a combination of grips and surfaces to suit wet or dry weather conditions, indoor or outdoor surfaces, or with their own logo embossed in the rubber. Ours are reassuringly bog standard.

Placing the mat is the responsibility of the lead bowler. It is a responsibility that brings much pressure. The exact position of the mat is defined in the rules – but the rules tend to be different for each league, and are complicated, involving distances. In general, you can split bowlers into two groups – those who know exactly where the mat should go, and those who haven’t a clue. Being in the latter camp, and as a lead bowler, I have a particular mat-placing strategy that seems to work in all scenarios. I chuck it on the ground where I think it might go nicely, and if anybody shouts at me then I move it to where they say. It’s the same for both sides. If you get excited about poor mat-positioning then you are very likely an arse, and should be formulating Strategic HR Initiatives rather than wasting your time playing bowls.

‘Oh dear,’ I mutter, as I land about ten feet away from my target. We are rusty; I am rusty. No matter how many rehearsals you go through, nothing will prepare you for leaping up on stage in front of an audience of thousands. Likewise, the roll-up has blown away a few cobwebs but that is all. It doesn’t prepare you for the pressure of a match situation. I concentrate very hard for my second wood. I need to take quite a bit of pace off it, and give it a wider angle.

‘Oh dear,’ I repeat.

Some people would call the little white ball a ‘jack’ – in fact, this is probably the more commonly recognised term worldwide. A ‘cott’ or ‘the dolly’ are stubbornly local designations – I’ve never heard anybody use the J-word. If you referred to it as a ‘jack’ around here, people would immediately spot you for a tourist. It would be like walking through Edinburgh wearing a kilt and eating shortbread.

So the skips stand at the other end of the green, giving you instructions based on their reading of the game. But when the lead and second have bowled their two, then it’s their turn. Everybody swaps places. We walk up to the head of woods; the skips return to the mat.

The halfway pass is a key moment. Normally, it is the cue for a whispered ‘Well done!’ or a muttered apology, or a snarl of contempt. Sometimes you might stop to discuss a tactic or two; sometimes you might fit in some constructive feedback.

‘Put in a long cott. They haven’t worked out the slope.’

‘You’re bouncing them slightly. Try to get closer to the ground as you release.’

‘That was, without doubt, the biggest load of dog shit bowling that I have ever seen in my life.’

And suddenly, as you approach the cluster, the woods open out to reveal exactly what is going on in there. Invariably, your shot that you thought was really good turns out to be rubbish, whereas your shot that you thought was rubbish is still rubbish. Under normal circumstances it would be mine and Big Andy’s turn to shout at Nigel. We enjoy this. We usually shout things like ‘I’d go this way if I were you. Or that way.’ Big Andy tends to offer lots of advice, I am often less vocal. Nigel listens and then does what he was planning to do anyway, which is usually for the best.

Bowls is scored very simply – the closest team to the cott gets the points. So if you have the two closest woods, and your opponent has the third closest, you get two points and he gets nothing. Even if that third closest is still very close indeed.

‘Can’t play next week – I’m going to Lord’s,’ Nigel mutters as we cross.

We stare at him; so much for well-drilled trios and mutual respect and support. ‘Lord’s,’ I repeat.

‘See the West Indies,’ he explains.

No shots are counted until the end is finished. Tonight, Big Andy is getting one or two close, I am getting one or two close…but then their skipper is stepping up and rolling one closer. He is very good, demoralisingly so. Despite the initial Zone fiasco, we’d be winning by miles if it were just Big Andy and me against their support act. As it is, the game balances evenly – swinging this way and that, with one side never more than a couple of points ahead.

We go into the final end one point down. Then something odd happens – their skipper misses his shot twice. He’s been playing like a bowls god all evening, but the pressure has got to him. We shrug in surprise as his second wood pulls up two feet short and wide. A missed drop shot, a saved penalty, Lewis Hamilton going through on the inside – who needs the likes of the West Indies when bowls can produce its moments of high drama such as this?

Final score: our block wins by one. The other blocks are yet to finish; the overall outcome will depend on their results, but Jason is a few shots behind and we are not going to make up that margin. A few minutes later and it is confirmed – but we have had a good game several times over. The mats and scoreboards are collected; the captains sign the cards. A big piano chord descends over the green.

We pass the closed pub sadly on our way out of the car park. Bowls is not a game to be played dry.

The village pub is austere and slightly intimidating from the outside, sitting haughtily in its prime position at the head of the little settlement. The whitewashed brick is always pristine; the metal tables dotted around outside polished and gleaming; the menu neatly typed in its menu box beside the front doors. Inside, modernity intrudes – some odd modern art prints and the remaining nine-tenths of the chandelier that Big Andy’s raised fist had connected with after Liverpool scored in the Champions League. The left turn into the main bar reveals a smaller than expected room – the presence of an enormous chimney breast carving the area into an awkward ‘L’ shape that would make it very difficult to accommodate a band and PA equipment. I’ve thought about this a lot, and the only practical solution I can think of would be to move all the chairs and tables and set up at the very apex of the ‘L’. There would still be very little room for the sort of audience that I would envisage, but they could overspill into the corridor, from where we could sell T-shirts and souvenir programmes.

There are more modern art prints, and a wooden floor that catches the light from the huge old mullioned windows that look back out across the road. There is a lot of history behind the building, I would expect, but really the main point of interest about the place is that it sells beer, will sell it to me, and I don’t need to pay for it immediately due to my bar tab arrangement.

Here dwell the people with whom I spend my life: the staff – principally the Well-Spoken and Chipper Barman; Mike, Ben and Lottie – and the regulars, who stand clustered in the usual area, adjacent to the Mini Cheddars. Short Tony from next door; Len the Fish, who knows all there is to know about fishing and fish; John Twonil who drives the bus for the old folk; Eddie with his soft Cambridgeshire burr. I chuck my stuff on the side of the bar and throw my coat on the back of a stool, where it’s gazed upon suspiciously by Len the Fish’s dog – a rustic and uncomplicated countryside dog, the epitome of uncomplicated countryside dogginess in this epitome of uncomplicated countryside.

‘Is that your phone?’ gasps Short Tony incredulously.

I explain the phone situation, matter-of-factly. It would be foolish to spend money on a new flashy Londoner’s phone when I hardly make any calls at all, and when the LTLP has a perfectly good one that I can use. Everybody laughs at the thought.

The Chipper Barman is a placid character. I am sure this placidity disguises some deeply hidden threat; his slightly short and swarthy appearance conceals a robust frame beneath. In fact, he is a double black belt in something from the Far East and despite being a steady and thoughtful chap, he could probably steadily and thoughtfully break your neck. I am always careful to compliment him on his barrel-tapping.

With the momentary rush at the bar easing off, he acknowledges us with a nod, wandering slowly over to the corner where we live.

‘Show him your phone!’ someone prompts.

The Chipper Barman’s face lights up. ‘Girl’s phone! It’s a girl’s phone! Hahahaha!’

There is a bit more laughter, which I am starting to think might be at my expense rather than the ludicrous fashion-victimness of city types. It is good-natured, and I smile it off, but I am surprised by the ‘pink is for girls’ sexist implications, to be quite honest. It is as if The Vicar of Dibley never happened. I am not particularly affected by it – it is just boring and predictable. If people want to spend hundreds of pounds on the latest gadget when there is one in perfect working order that they can get for free then they are the idiots, not me.

John Twonil returns from the toilet.

‘Mppphhhhhffrggghahahahaha!’ he chortles, bringing up the phone thing again. He is bloody immature for somebody his age. Short Tony and Big Andy join in once more. So are they. Even Mrs Short Tony, who you think would have some sort of gender solidarity.

‘You are wasting your breath,’ I inform them. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’

Honestly, they are all living in the dinosaur age. It is the post-sexist twenty-first century now, and if I want to carry round a pink phone then I am perfectly at liberty to do so. The world has moved on, and I am proud to say that I have moved with it. There is a bit more laughter at my expense. I smile it off and place my order. The banter of the locker room is part and parcel of sport, and bowls is no exception; to be teased and wound up (albeit immaturely and unfunnily) means that you have genuinely arrived.

FOUR
There were three fine English boys

I go for a run.

Run, run, run!

Across the road, right at the tiny bus shelter, past the secluded bungalow that neither the silver-haired man nor Pat, his wife, have ever returned to. He was probably a time-waster, bored, with nothing else to do during the day. Across the lane that leads up to the church and towards the village shop and the back lanes.

Many people who knew me of old might find this unlikely. I was never a particularly fitness-conscious person, and even now I wonder whether I am doing the right thing or whether I am just encouraging myself to drop dead. Against other males of my age, my height and weight do place me comfortably into the norm group; unfortunately it is the ‘Norm from Cheers’ group, and I have been advised quite forcibly that I should do something about this.

That is the LTLP and her all-encompassing medical knowledge for you. But I have to concede her point. I’m not a natural dieter. And whilst bowls and snooker are sociable pastimes, you cannot really count snooker as exercise. If a further honing of my athletic physique makes the love between us ever stronger then the odd run is a price well worth paying.

Psychologically, running is nothing like bowls. With bowls, once you get into the Zone, your focus is entirely on the pack of woods ahead – the game, and what you must do. But I have come to find that running sets your mind free once you have got your legs and lungs working. It’s great quality time to reflect and to lose yourself in the world.

I love music. I love music really a lot, much more so even than John Miles in the song ‘Music’, where he takes pains to emphasise that was his first love and will be his last. For as long as I remember it has enthralled me, apart from a few years in the 1980s when Miner Willy on the ZX Spectrum said more about the anxieties and aspirations of teenage life than Limahl.

‘Highway Star’, ‘Autobahn’, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. Things that touch me in the way that other art has never been able to. Film, paintings, mime – they are all very nice as media, but are as ping pong and horse dressage are to bowls: you’d watch them if they were on the telly, but could never become truly emotionally involved. Whereas there is nothing like a good song.

The first ever song that truly spoke to me was ‘We Are the Champions’ by Queen. I had heard pop songs before, of course, Bob Dylan’s and Steeleye Span’s and Leonard Cohen’s – but they were my mum and dad’s music. ‘We Are the Champions’ was mine. It came on the radio and it was the most brilliant thing that I had ever heard. When you are a six-year-old boy, it is extremely cool to be a Champion. It is the best. For a six-year-old boy, the song says everything about what you want your life to be: it is noisy, it is rousing, it involves punching the air a lot and it involves being better than everybody else, who are all losers compared to you. ‘We Are the Champions’ is the ‘Teenage Kicks’ of being six. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, then a final chorus with mindbogglingly aspirational lead guitar soaring high above it, to end on that oddly and yet brilliantly unresolved bass note.

I do not listen to ‘We Are the Champions’ any more. I have immense respect for Freddie and Brian still, but I have a policy of not listening to music that might ever conceivably be played over the tannoy at any sports arena on the occasion of a goal or point being scored. This discounts much of Queen’s later repertoire, as well as ‘Simply the Best’ and the woman that constantly and repeatedly sings that she is Ready to Go. I find this policy protects you from much pain, and if it has meant that ‘We Are the Champions’ has disappeared from my personal playlist then that is sad from a personal history point of view, but a price well worth paying.

Listening is one thing, playing is another. I love playing music. I love the butterflies beforehand; I love the embarrassed blink when you realise that it is about time to start. I love the looks on people’s faces as you hit the first couple of chords and they realise that you are going to be brilliant; I love seeing drunks dancing as they lose any awareness of your presence as a musician and just start getting into the groove. I love the power of being behind a mic stand and holding an excruciatingly amplified guitar that sings and hums and squeals even though you’re muting all the strings because it’s so powerful. I just love the noise that playing music makes. I love it.

I cannot imagine a time when I will not be playing music. Apart from the present day, when I don’t have a band or anywhere to play.

Speak to any musician and they are likely to tell you that they started small. My personal musical journey began like so many others – in a garage band. Dave’s dad’s garage.

Teenage bands are the most important thing in the development of popular music. Everybody should be in a band when they are a teenager, whether they want to be a successful musician or just a nicely well-rounded character. It doesn’t even have to be a very good band, although I like to think that ours was better than most. It teaches you discipline and interpersonal skills, unlocks the man or woman within and provides a way in to understanding and exploring the fundamentals of intellectual creativity, arts and literature.

This, I think, is what we were attempting when we formed Wïldebeeste.

I had a cheap white Hohner electric guitar and a small practice amplifier. Dave played the bass, four strings of utter cool through one single enormous bigger-than-Adam’s-toilet speaker. The low notes resounded around the concrete and breeze-block like earthquakes. His younger friend Iain was a drummer, with all his own gear: drums, cymbals, sticks. Even back then I knew that this would be the start of something big.

Wïldebeeste had a limited repertoire, solely performing works by Pink Floyd. This was the single band that each of us knew some songs by. There was a limited audience locally for a teenage band that solely performed works by Pink Floyd, and – what’s more – one that solely performed them without a keyboard player to include the bits that might make them sound a bit like Pink Floyd. But Dave had a birthday party planned for his eighteenth, so we were able to gain our one and only public booking, from his mum.

When we were not getting bookings from his mum, we stuck to practising hard in our garage studio, which we had customised by taping an eiderdown against the door to create a modern noise-free rehearsal facility.

Growing in confidence, we incorporated ‘Walking on the Moon’, a song that didn’t need a keyboard player but that retained the slow tempo required to let us consider which chord to play well in advance. Meanwhile we were starting to write and eventually added two original songs. One was by Dave the Bass Player himself and was a simple straight-from-the-heart statement that he didn’t like motor racing. It was called ‘I Don’t Like Motor Racing’.

The chorus went like this:

The best thing about it is the theme tune

The best thing about it is the theme tune

The best thing about it is the theme tune

The best thing about it is the theme tune.

As a chorus it was pure gold – direct, hard-hitting, to-the-point. After the second time round, we would stop and play a bit of the Fleetwood Mac motor racing theme, before hitting the final verse, which resolved with a reconciliation between the lyricist and the sport of motor racing.

To my mind, it is a song that still has the power to shock today.

The other original number in our set was mine, and I was mighty proud of it. It was called ‘Aliens’ and was weightier all round, having more chords and being concerned with the implications to society of prospective extraterrestrial contact. The chorus to this one was more imaginative than a simplistic motorsport-related chant and stemmed from my early philosophical conviction that the human race cannot possibly be alone in this universe of unimaginable vastness. It went:

We are the aliens. We come from the planet Og.

We look like a cross between a monkey and a dog.

Run, run, run! Over the crossroads that might provide a sneaky short-cut home via Big John’s unnaturally elongated cottage, and up the brief but steep hill where the village starts to peter out into non-village. The grass is growing long here, and I keep my eyes firmly fixed on the ground, in case of dog shit. Then it is a hard left and I am back on the ill-maintained tarmac. The MP3 player moves on a track. It is Echobelly! This spurs me on more – it is good to keep up with what the kids of today are into. The immense opening guitar riff crashes into my ears.

I have a particular criterion for running music – it needs to be stuff that I can imagine myself standing on a stage and playing. That helps me concentrate and switch off from the agonising pain of the actual running. I am not just ‘listening to music’ with each step, I am experiencing it, examining the guitar, keyboard and drum parts, hitting the guitar solos, stepping up to the mic for the lead or backing vocals. To a non-musician this might appear odd. But it enables me to immerse myself in my world of performance. I do not close my eyes, in case of dog shit, but my brain and being is there, adrenaline pumping as I belt out the MP3 tracks.

I don’t have any tracks of Wïldebeeste – just a battered cassette tape in a drawer somewhere. It is a shame. We deserved a bit more than that.

A three-piece band puts huge pressure on the guitarist. We weren’t quite Cream (featuring Eric Clapton), but we approached the rapport of the Alex/Big Andy/Nigel bowls power trio. Dave was the larger-than-life character – the charisma of the band – the guy who would go on to do all the band’s media interviews, as he was funny and could do a more-than-passable Richie Benaud impersonation. Iain was a quiet lad, who preferred his hi-hats to toms, which is unusual in a teenage drummer. I brought everything together like glue and, as you have seen, was already developing as a promising songwriter.

When you are in a band as a kid, you suddenly become cool. I am used to being cool now, and being looked up to even by the likes of Eddie and Short Tony and the guys on the bowls circuit, but it is a shock when you are seventeen and have a friend-of-your-mum’s haircut.

‘I’m sorry – I can’t hang around outside Budgens today. I have band practice. I have to go and get my guitar. The electric one. Because I need to go to band practice. With my band.’

That’s what rock and roll is about.

We were so cool that other people did not realise how cool we were, because we were so cool. I guess our main problem was getting noticed by the musical establishment. If you are in a garage band today, you have a million outlets for your music. YouTube, MySpace and the internet in general – idiots from London can even download your songs as text messages to use as the sound for when their mobile phone rings. Like the Beatles, Queen, Cream (featuring Eric Clapton) and Pink Floyd before us, Wïldebeeste did not have this advantage of technology. And whilst those bands got their lucky breaks, we were stuck in our Essex commuter town, perfecting our sound in Dave’s dad’s garage. We just practised. We practised and practised. Waiting for our own big break that we knew was just around the corner.

Just around the corner is the last stretch of my usual circuit – a barely perceptible upslope that takes me from Colin’s farm up to the church gates. In fact, my entire run appears to be a barely perceptible upslope, apart from the upslopes that I very easily perceive. It is like one of those impossible Escher paintings. I am trapped in it, like a Kafkaesque Steve Cram, a Sisyphean Dick Beardsley, for ever destined to run uphill around a village.

Beside me on the road, a car slows to a crawl. A head pokes out of the driver’s window. I know what is about to happen.

Mixed feelings go through my head. Helping people with directions is the best thing ever, as it proves that I am as local as local can be. But we runners do not like stopping mid-run. It makes the breathing and stuff go all funny.

The car is an old Fiesta. It has been sprayed luminous yellow, given an outsized spoiler and some wheels that have been taken from a more powerful and striking vehicle, perhaps a Ford Focus or a Vauxhall Viva. Bulbous arches complete the effect. Somebody has clearly spent some money on it. Although it’s beyond me as to why they didn’t use that to just buy a better car in the first place.

It is less a car than a cry for help.

I slow my jog, nod to the chap leaning out of the window, and remove my headphones in a gesture of communication. He looks at me from beneath his baseball cap.

‘Scuse me,’ sneers the man in the Car of Shame.

I do a bit of a double-take. This is a different sort of ‘excuse me’. It is not the polite ‘excuse me’ of a well-dressed homeseeker, with a wife named Pat, who will be genuinely grateful for my help – it is ‘excuse me’ as a contemptuous throwaway, as an insult, as a challenge. Not knowing quite what to make of an ‘excuse me’ of this ilk, I slow to a halt, there in my tracksuit, jogging on the spot to keep the breathing going correctly, the living epitome of health and exercise.

‘You got a light on you, mate?’

I gape at him. Although this is hardly the vibrant metropolis of Norwich or Fakenham, I can see at least three other people going about their business in the street or in their front gardens. No matter how I try, I just cannot comprehend the thought processes that have led him to conclude that I’d be the particular one likely to be carrying a silver Zippo and twenty Benson’s. I pat my tracksuit apologetically.

‘No. Sorry, mate,’ I reply. I almost add: ‘You got a copy of The Brothers Karamazov?’ But I am keen not to be hit.

He does not reply, but sticks his foot down on the throttle and the car accelerates away. I am incensed by this rudeness. I want to shout after him: ‘Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you fucking know who I am?’ But this would involve finding something to do, and practising it really hard, then working at it for years and years until I receive some form of recognition from the public at large. So instead I stare at his rear lights angrily. I can see him swearing as he goes.

People like that don’t respect real achievements. He probably knows as much about music as he does about bowls. I guess he would have been more polite had he seen me on the X Factor or Pop Idol or whatever it is people with hair gel settle down to watch in lieu of serious programming such as Later with Jools Holland. He’s probably never even heard of the Sultans of Ping. This small incident makes me just a little bit more determined. It is criminal to leave a talent lying dormant.

I love music, and music has always loved me. Whatever I plan to do in the future – and if I am completely honest it is probably time that I started thinking about this in-the-future thing – perhaps it will involve music. I have a few irons in the fire. Some solo ideas that are running around my brain which might come to fruition. But it is early days.

There was no big break back then. Despite our coolness and two prospective dynamite gold top-ten singles, Wïldebeeste petered out after a year or so. There was no single reason. We had no gigs, we had no transport, we had no focus. I wrote a couple of songs of which I was really proud but that the others rejected as ‘too Jethro Tull’. It is not quite being dumped by your girlfriend or having your home address mixed up with a paedophile’s in the local paper, but being told that you are ‘too Jethro Tull’ when you are a teenager can be firmly placed in the mental lever-arch file marked ‘Disappointing’. The BBC lost the rights to cover motor racing to ITV; the title sequence changed accordingly – including the music. And whilst this was after the band split, and I am not claiming it as a major reason why we didn’t make it big, it seemed to drive the final nail into our prospects.

I don’t want to live in the past, but it is quite nice to pop in there for a short visit, and perhaps a spot of breakfast. It’s so easy to be embarrassed by stuff that you’ve done when you’re a kid. But I can think back and smile, given where I am today. We were a good little outfit, a good start. Yes, it’s time to do something like that again. I have to. I really have to.