An piano, a drink, and a bad memory
We were invited to a barbecue at a friends house last night, and after eating too much, and drinking too much, I spied an old upright piano in their lounge. Apparently they had managed to get it from “free-cycle” – the local version of Craigslist, where people list stuff for others to take away.
Needless to say, a few minutes later I found myself perched at the piano stool, with my drink balanced on top of the piano, trying to remember anything at all. I used to play quite a bit when I was young – I never learned to read music, but could play most things by ear if I put my mind to it. I quickly discovered that my head had forgotten almost everything, but somehow my fingers remembered bits and pieces.
One of the women at the party came and squashed in next to me at the piano stool, and we picked our way through chopsticks, twelve bar blues, and a few other bits and pieces – and slowly surely huge globs of memory flooded back through my fingers.
Everybody looked round as I suddenly burst into “Wunderlust” by Paul McCartney in the manner David Helpfgott might have, and moments later there were camera phones trained at us everywhere. A friend from France wandered into the room, and another lightbulb moment occurred – suddenly I was playing bits and pieces from Oxygene, Equinoxe, and Revolutions – I used to adore Jean Michel Jarre. It sounded awful on the upright piano, but it was good fun.
It's almost like somebody has fired a blunderbuss through my memory – I guess that's what 20 years of not playing does. You sit down, your fingers start playing the song, but then you get to a chord change, or a break in the song, and you hit a huge blank patch. You scowl, and curse – “I used to know this...”, but it's no good. And then a minute later it suddenly occurs to you, and you start playing another few bars from the mysterious blank patch. It's very odd.