As a pre-teen, I had three dreams for adult life. One: I would adopt ten children and run a household of chaos and generosity. I cannot say for certain where this fantasy came from, but it might have had something to do with my high levels of consumption of Jacqueline Wilson novels. It was, perhaps, the least likely of the three: even if I could find the money to buy a house that slept ten children, I didn’t think the state would trust me with that many, or that I would know anything about being a parent.
Two: I would be a journalist, and sit at the window of my New York City apartment writing columns about my life (this fantasy is sponsored by Carrie Bradshaw). To write a column about your life, though, you had to have an interesting life – as it turns out: wrong! – and, aged 12, I wasn’t sure I could summon one of those.
Three: I would be the girlfriend of a musician. In my daydreams, that musician was – in order from least to most feasible – Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (dead), Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong (alive, but happily married, 20 years my senior, and living 5,000 miles away), or McFly’s Dougie Poynter: alive, UK-based and only four years older than me. He also remains the only member of McFly who isn’t married… Alas, my screaming at gigs didn’t seem to be reaching him, so I settled for cutting out of magazines every McFly press appearance I could find and sticking them in a scrapbook. Genuinely.
With that particular bit of psychopathy in mind, you might be surprised to hear that I did eventually bag myself a musician – three, in fact (consecutively, not concurrently). The first, when I was 15, was a prodigy jazz pianist, and played song requests on my mother’s upright at house parties, and once directed the orchestra for his (private) school performance of Sweeney Todd. The second was a bassist in the church band – my street cred immediately dropped, but still I stuck with him for five years.
There was then a ten-year hiatus in which the rockstar girlfriend dream slipped further out of reach. Little did I know that while I was writing “Pippa Poynter” in my exercise books, a few towns east there was a budding guitarist a few months older than me who, aged 14, played Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” at his school battle of the bands and on finishing – again, genuinely – shouted to the crowd, “YOU LIKE THAT?” (This story became at least five times funnier when I discovered the lyrics include the line: “Well I make a pussy purr/With the stroke of my hand.”) That daring frontman was, of course, M—. Some 20-odd years later, I came across his Hinge profile and saw – sweet relief, among the tide of fintech bros – “musician”. There was also a video of him playing guitar. This, to be honest, was a bit of a turn-off – what a move. But I overlooked it (and his identikit boy answer to “favourite TV show”: The Office US), and here we are two years later.
“Here” looks nothing like how I imagined it would. I don’t cling on to his hand as we fight our way through clawing fans towards the stage door. I don’t (alas) look like Kate Moss, propping up a narcotics-fuelled Pete Doherty. I don’t follow M— around the world to watch from the wings as other women scream his name. I do occasionally get to say “I’m with the band” to a doorman, and I still get a thrill watching him play Albert Lee’s “Country Boy” on stage and thinking, “He’s mine.” But “here” mostly looks like finding plectrums all over the house, and having to move at least one instrument out of the way to get into my wardrobe. Last night, it looked like putting his pyjamas out in the hall before I went to bed so he’d stand less chance of waking me when he got home from a gig at 2am. In a few weeks’ time it will look like rattling around our flat alone for a month, unable to reach the microwave without the aid of his height, while he tours Canada.
Of course, dating a musician was not the only of those pre-teen dreams that came to pass, or else you would not be reading this column. But let me assure you, if there’s one thing less glamorous than the reality of being a musician’s girlfriend, it’s being a columnist.
[See also: Vashti Bunyan’s second life]
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This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War
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