‘Music Was My First Love…..’

‘…and it will be my last. ‘

I was thinking the other day, if I get old and decrepit and have to go into some facility, I’d probably survive for a while, since I have a rich, inner life to sustain me!
But I would be miserable if I did not have some music to listen to and the right kind too. No jazz, show tunes or light operattas please. Rock, World and Bob Dylan! I made a mental note to make sure my children know this in case I get sent to Shady Pines without my IPod.
Music’s not the usual kind of obsession for me. I’m not very academically geeky about it. A lot of people are MusoPedias but that’s not my bag,I don’t have every album even of artists I love, or know the sock size of the lead guitarist and what year it was released. I am a lifelong fan of a few people, but I have incredibly wide tastes and I still have an ear out for what’s new.
No, for me it’s a spiritual thing, it’s what keeps me high. I hear some good music, instant endorphin boost. I’m obsessed with beat, melody and meaningful lyrics. And I just can’t get enough. My life really does have a soundtrack. I think it stops me being depressed, and it creates an aural ambience which erases some of the tedium, stress and ugliness of life.
How did it begin for me? Well, my musical journey is littered with synchronicities.
Well, while doing some genaeology last year with a cousin, I discovered from a 90 year old great aunt that my great grandfather actually made himself a violin in the 1890s. They were Thames lightermen and sailors in my family, so to own an expensive instrument like that would have been impossible, so he set to and made one. I’ve no idea what happened to it or what it sounded like, Aunt Florrie was too small to recall details.
When I was five, my grandparents moved to St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings. At Autumn half term, we were walking past a secondhand shop in my grandmother’s street and I was suddenly rooted to the spot. In the window was a half size violin. I was fixated. My parents were amused but not much was said. Was it in my genes? Was great grandad’s ghost leading me to this little fiddle?
I don’t recall what happened next except the violin was duly presented to me at Xmas.
This is where the musical synchronicity really gets going.
After Xmas, the London County Council decided to ‘bring culture to the masses’ so they dusted off a crusty old music teacher, rolled him into the classrooms of our slummy outside-toilets, 47- in-a-class, bomb site surrounded South London school. He did conjuring tricks and played some jokey violin. Then, turning round, he gripped white painted half walnuts with holes drilled in the middles over his eyes like monocles and whipped round at us, looking like a seriously mad person.
Of course, we five years olds just loved it so we all signed up. After a few months it was clear I had more than just my own instrument, I had serious aptitude.
By the time I was 10, forty of us were regularly scraping and sawing violins and cellos and we started winning a few Schools Music Competitions……. I fink that was one in the eye for them posh kids from Blackheaf!
I was entered for a junior scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I was ten, the minimum entry age was 14, but I still got in.
But I was too little to sit on a bus crawling into Central London for an hour every Saturday morning at 7 am alone, and I knew very little music theory. Others at the college, at the time graced by legends like Jacqueline Du Pre, were older, and came from posher schools or had private teachers. They knew their key signatures, triads and what pianissimo meant.
I knew that if you put your second finger on the G string you got a different note from if you put your first finger on it. I knew what sounded right, and I still do. I got enough theory to get by later at school, but I still am a total ‘ear’ player, I am a great busker, I don’t need to know the key, I can join in with any music any time, pretty much, I know what and when to play.
Guildhall was never going to work. After nearly five terms of torture my slightly clueless 1950s parents finally noticed my distress. One morning, my dad overtook and drove his plumber’s van in front of the bus in Brockley, forced him to stop, took me off and that was the end of that.
Next, I managed to break into a grammar school, courtesy of the violin. Sure, I’d passed the 11+ all right, but coming from the background I did, they still wanted added value. They got it in spades. They had an orchestra. I was a prodigy. Deal!
I entered school just turned 11 and was leader of the school orchestra pretty soon after. This of course made me immensely popular with people of 18 who were doing AS levels and waiting to go do their music degrees.
I could live with the sneering, but in the excitement at the end of term when I was 14 I left my own violin in school during the holidays and the school claimed they had ‘repaired’ it, demanding the cash from my poor mum who had none, so the violin was forfeit. I try not to see conspiracy here but I do wonder what on earth they were thinking. I didn’t care, I’d had enough of the music culture in the school, the head music teacher used our theory double period to go get her hair done, so the ones who had private lessons with theory got A’s, I got a B and there was an Enquiry. The hair appointment story was the truth, but it went down like a Gilbert and Sullivan song at an X Factor audition. And anyway, after two years of picking apart every bar of Haydn’s Clock Symphony for O Level (yawn)I never wanted to hear or play any classical music again.
That, it seems, was that.
Until I was 22 and working as a reporter in Wimbledon. I’d helped run a folk club, and had always been crazy about Motown, Beatles, chart music, folk music and the new heavy rock, but it had never occurred to me to pick up my violin or any other instrument.
Besides, there was study, 60s protest marches, journalistic ambitions, sex and drugs, as well as rock n roll, so it simply never crossed my mind to join in.
Until I covered the Merton Festival in 1972 and the festival chairwoman, who was in her seventies, asked me if I played any music myself. I laughed and said I’d learned violin at school. She said: would you like to play again? I said: I don’tknow, I haven’t thought about it.
She said she had a violin in her loft which her father had had since his childhood. She had no one to pass it on to so would I like it? I shrugged and said, well ok. Synchronicity continued to stalk me, musically. Or was it great granddad giving me another nudge with his home made bow?
A few weeks later I was transferred to another newspaper. I must have mentioned that I played, I do remember I took the thing out of its case and fingered it a couple of times, so it was on my mind. The next thing I knew a colleague had drafted me into a friend’s electric folk band.
We had a record deal for about ten minutes before one of the other band members had a meltdown and blew it, but we had loads of fun. We did folk gigs, pub gigs and summer festivals. We girls wore trumpet sleeves, crochet and floppy floaty hats. The boys wore velvet jackets and Che Guevara T shirts. It was like a lovely musical dream, but when I woke up it had partly wrecked my first marriage, well, that and the alcohol.
But once the dust had settled, I decided that having paid the price I was going to have the goods. I advertised in Melody Maker for musicians to join a rock band I was forming. This was an act of astonishing arrogance, looking back. I knew nothing about rock!
I have to laugh, I’d never even seen a bass guitar or played in front of a drumkit. But by now I had a bridge pickup on my 150-year-old fiddle, a Fender Twin combo, a wah-wah pedal, a boob tube, waist length hair some silver platform boots and plenty of attitude! Sod all that beards’n ties, fingers in the ears, oh I was walking down the cobbles one day with my bonny milkmaid rubbish.
I was seriously Ready to Rock!
Various lunatics came to the audition but the one with a bass guitar took my fancy. Steve ‘Art’ Hill became my husband and the father of my children, both incidentally, incredibly musical but so far haven’t done much with it.
The new, louder, dream began. At various points we had a recording studio, a PA hire business, we made some records, played all the A&R-friendly gigs in London like the Speakeasy, the Rock Garden,Music Machine, Upstairs at Ronnies, did a brief tour with Widowmaker, and slogged up and down motorways with our raucous and musically snobbish (cellos, trombones, three keyboards concept-ish Frank Zappa- inspired band in our single decker bus). But I had some babies on the way, punk had made our pomp rock aspirations a little outdated, and so we sold the studio and PA gear, bought a house and grew up. Steve taught guitar, including at the newly opened B.R.I.T. school. I abandoned newspapers and trained as a therapist.
And no, we didn’t stop the music, we just evolved into a covers duo with backing tracks, which Steve made from scratch on a stereo tape mixdown machine, because this serviced the mortgage far better than the Zappa stuff ever would. We went from scummy social clubs to corporate functions, it was a hard, ten year slog but through the 1990s recession music rescued us financially. We were even in a working country and western band which is a whole other crazy story, for a while, but then recession stress took its toll, there was more meltdown, and with the end of that marriage, music went on hold pretty much for the next few years.
In the Noughties I was in a superb drum’n bass live band for a couple of years. But when that ended I made halfhearted attempts to play with other people but something wasn’t right, I had invitations, but nothing gelled. Another country and western band which earned, but tanked early, and the discovery of a local rock jam filled the gap for a while.
I’d sold my BBC Challen boudoir grand piano in 2002 when I moved into a house that simply wasn’t big enough to accommodate it, but in 2007 I acquired a guitar, so again I had a polytonal instrument (you can play chords on it) meant I could start writing songs again. And I did. At first, lyrics started to pour out. I couldn’t stop them. Later I put them to music.
I’m not making money from doing covers these days apart from the odd dep., or guest gig, because all my musical headspace is committed to my own project. Wynd is the first real musical venture I have created completely by myself, although I now have a band of lovely, brilliant, loyal, patient and talented women around me.
I’m a way off the care home yet, I hope.  If you still have a dream that you have jumped for over and over, why stop? Unless it’s to compete as an Olympic gymnast, or become a surgeon – though I’d never say never- why not? Now you are financially more secure, children are grown and flown, are you going to spend your declining years watching Countdown and visiting Garden Centres? Well, no, not me!
One thing I have decided about me, music, money and melodic coincidences is that popular and alternative music, that is, non classical, new music, really is no longer just the preserve of angst ridden teenagers. While I can write and perform good stuff, I plan to carry on.
Many of us who spent a life in rock still have creativity, still have energy, still have ideas, still have something to say.
I love being a therapist, I’ll probably continue with that as long as possible, and I enjoyed many aspects of being a journalist, I still love to write sometimes too and that was quite a career switch, so, maybe now is finally the time to create the third career, the one I’ve danced in and out of all my life? I won’t be selling a million albums or embarking on a World tour but I and my girls can still have a great time and maybe earn a little money.
Music was certainly my first love. And it looks like it’s highly likely to be my last.
(Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Miles_(musician)) Music Was My First Love 1976.
Hear some Wynd here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=749518831&v=app_2413267546

About RhiannonHill
I have been a professional, holistic psychotherapist seeing couples and individuals for 20 year but am now semi retired, maintaining a small private practice. E-books: Ten Stupid Things That Can Mess Up Your Life and Ten Stupid Things That Can Mess Up Your Working Life available direct from me £5.99 or through my website: www.brightonhovecounselling.co.uk I also have an all women original, eclectic rock band called WYND, I have two children and three grandchildren and I live with my partner Al.
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