Day 743 Livn’ t’ dolls ouse.

21st August 2019

I was sitting on the patio dunking my ginger nuts in my cup of tea, a pleasurable experience, and no doubt will make my reader snigger.

This is the first time I have sat outside with nothing much planned, taking in the view and not feeling guilty. Sure, there are a few job that have to be finished, but today is a rest day.

My friend Dave’s head appeared above the array of flowers at the bottom of the garden. The layout is almost perfect, the cottage is protected by the flowers, and the meandering path give different views as you ascend. The disadvantage is, I have more steps and longer to walk when I carry up my shopping, but that’s a small price to pay for that inconvenience.

I have known Dave for many years, we ran a small recording studio together in the eighties and later in 2000’s.

I had uncovered some old cassettes with copies of music from our various clients over the years. One in particular was a guy named Mushroom Mick. He was well-known as “the worse busker in Bath” a title given to him by a local trader who complained to the council about the noise. This story was picked up by the local paper and TV station.

We had just started the studio, so we thought it might be good publicity to get him to record a song that he had written to prove to his critics that he wasn’t as bad as he was made out to be.

I remember Dave saying “he can’t be that bad”, words that would come back to haunt him.

We tracked Mushroom Mick down, and made him the offer to record one song free of charge.

I knew from the very start we might have bitten off more than we could chew the moment he opened his mouth. He had a strong Bolton accent, that in itself difficult to understand, but he also had a lisp, and pronounced stutter. The combination of those made it impossible to decipher what he was saying.

We couldn’t back down now, the publicity machine was in motion, so we had to deliver.

We arranged a date, and waited for the experience to begin.

The day arrived, Mick and his entourage descended upon us. He had pulled together a group misfits and vagabonds from every dark corner of Bath, and they were there in Dave’s house ready for this historic session.

We had taken the precaution of locking away anything of value, I was concerned about my gold crowns, so I decided to not open my mouth too wide.

The session started with a run through of the song, at the end of which both Dave and myself looked at each other in horror, our thoughts were exactly the same, he was the worst busker in Bath, and possibly everywhere else.

First things first we had to tune his guitar, it was a battered old thing held together with tape and unmentionable substances. The strings were a mixtures of steel and nylon, it might have been better with baling twine, but we did the best we could.

The band did their best they could to track their parts, every so often Mick would say something intelligible, stuttering like a machine gun to his Scottish girlfriend who we couldn’t understand either.

At one point we joked that we should get a Polish interpreter.

The day was long and tiring, we must have recorded and re-recorded the song a thousand times trying to get a good version that we could work with. Eventually we called it a day, and the group packed up their instruments and faded into the night.

We both surveyed the wreckage of the day, we were both exhausted, but the song “Livin’ in a dolls house” was going round and round in our heads for the rest of the night.

We must have put in over a hundred hours to polish this turd, we eventually asked another musician to overdub different guitar parts over it. Finally we were able to present Mushroom Mick with his song on CD.

It was heavily edited, very little of his guitar was included, but he was over the moon with it.

We did a radio type interview with him, asking if he liked it. To this day, and We have both listened to the tape many times, we still can’t make out what his answer was, but at the end of the tape I had added “That’s easy for you to say”.

This event has given us so much uncontrollable laughter, but at the end we gave him something that nobody else would give him, the chance to be heard.

PS On a sad note I read that he had died in December 2010, but we are left with a great memory that we will never forget.