I ended my last column on a bit of a cliffhanger, heading towards performing a gig for the first time in 25 years, at the Moth Club in east London, and not sure how it would go. I was full of determination, and anxiety, and the two were held in an extremely precarious balance. The morning of the first show I was on the verge of a panic attack, wondering if I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, when Ben calmed me down by playing the piano and getting me to sing with him. It reminded me: “This is what we do, what we’ve always done.”
I’m not going to review my own gig, but I’m happy to report that the two nights went well – more than well, in fact: they went better than I could have hoped. I not only got through it but loved every second, had no memory of why I’d ever thought I didn’t like performing live. I couldn’t wait to do the second night, and then wished we were doing a third.
I’d been terrified, I suppose, of things going wrong, but had worked hard on persuading myself that it didn’t matter if things went wrong. Music can be imperfect and still be wonderful; a performance can be meaningful and important, while still being full of inevitable human flaws. In the end, quite a lot of things did go wrong, and none of it mattered.
I’d put my back out the week before, spent two or three days tanked up on painkillers and Valium, and done the final rehearsals sitting down. I realised I liked sitting down. So we took with us the chair I’d been using – an old chair from home, one whose legs we hadn’t checked recently. During the soundcheck a screw fell out, and the chair half collapsed beneath me. Fun if it had happened mid-song.
We had to change other things at the soundcheck too. The four of us had got used to rehearsing in a particular pattern at home, but that didn’t work on the stage, so we all had to swap positions. It didn’t matter. The mic I took with me – my old mic from 30 years ago, my comfort mic – sounded wrong in the club, so I was given a new one, which once upon a time would have freaked me out. But that didn’t matter either.
I won’t say the shows were a triumph, as I don’t trust in triumphalism. Maybe it scares me; too close to hubris. In a room full of people cheering you on, you can start to feel important. You can start to take yourself seriously.
On the poster outside the club, my name was spelled wrong. Ben and I got a cab home afterwards, and as we got out of the car the driver said: “Love your music by the way. That band you were in, Anything But the Girl, great stuff.” We smiled and thanked him, and laughed as we walked in the front door. I was reminded of some lines from a song we’d sung earlier in the night by Charli XCX – “I am famous, but not quite./But I am perfect for the background,/One foot in a normal life”.
We sat in the kitchen, eating some toast, and I was glad Ben had talked me down from my panic attack and got me onto the stage. I said to him that I kept thinking of another song, by the folk singer Devon Sproule, from a few years ago, which has a chorus that goes: “If you dress sharp, play well, be modest/And keep good what you have/When you’re warmed up, in a wood room/What could be better?” And we both agreed, yeah, there’s nothing better, is there.
You have to keep one foot in a normal life, like Charli says. It’s the only way to survive. But when music is working, when you’re warmed up, and playing well, it just feels transcendent, like you’ve stepped out of time and space and into something mysterious and fleeting that you wish you could hold on to forever before it slips away, out of reach. It’s magic really, isn’t it? I want to do it again now.
[See also: Samuel Beckett’s art of reduction]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer