Having A Bash!!

I am now reading my third Stuart Maconie book, Cider With Roadies. It is definitely the best book of his that I have read. I won the book on the local radio station a few years back but never got around to reading it until now. I have recently converted to listening to Stuart and Mark Radcliffe's show on BBC6 Music, far better than Radio 2 is of late in the afternoons.

Cider tells of a life lived through music and it starts with his first experience of attending a concert with his mum as a small child. It was The Beatles (what a place to start!). He interviewed his mum about the night and all she can remember is being in the queue and the chippy after. Nothing about the Beatles appearance on stage. Which made me laugh, that seems typical of mum's, they always remember the most important things.

When growing up in Wigan and attending the famous Wigan Casino he became a Northern Soul boy, and then as he calls himself 'the only Punk in Wigan' .

"As anyone who tried to form a teenage band will know, drummers are gold dust. Tone-deaf , troglodytic gold-dust maybe, but gold dust. Drumkits cost a lot of money, especially when compared to a guitar from the Grattans catalogue. they are a bugger to transport , taking up the entire back seat and obscuring all the rear window of the average Seventies saloon car. Assembly and dismantling the kit takes hours. If you rush home from MFI salivating at the prospect of spending a weekend putting together a flatpack bookshelf with poorly translated instructions then the drums are your instrument. worst of all you can never practise. Not unless you possess your own small Scottish island or underground silo anyway. No one in their right mind wants to listen to a trainee drummer..."

Cider with Roadies, Stuart Maconie, 2003, Ebury Press

That is about where I am up to at the moment with the book. It made me laugh as I recently acquired a drumkit and had a go at playing but I decided against it as my flat is too small and I was quite frankly rubbish!