Diary Of A Busker Day 218 2012 Monday April 2nd Winchester High Street Opposite Vodafone, Time: 3:50-6:15pm
I haven’t been playing five minutes when I get my first interruption; a man, mid 60s, wearing a hat a bit small for his head comes up, he has a Scottish accent. ‘Hey! Ah know Helen Shapiro, y’know!’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah. And Cliff Richard – ah know his phone number!’ He then produces a harmonica case. ‘…d’you pley with anyone?’ ‘No, not out here. I just do this solo stuff…(I then give him the ‘not able to play in loud groups anymore’ part of my hard luck story)…’ He ignores me – ‘Hey, I broke both my legs – ah fell from a fourth floor window.’ I’m wondering if he was at the same party as Robert Wyatt was in 1973. I think he finally gets it that I’m not looking for a mad Scots accompanist and he goes off. As soon as he’s gone, ex-cruise musician Mick turns up, sporting a grey suit and black roll-neck. ‘You’re looking very smart, Mick.’ I tell him about the guy who’s just been here. ‘Yeah, you meet all sorts or weirdos out here.’ You’re not wrong there, Mick. He asks if I’ve seen Anthony, my old regular who was trying to learn the guitar, who used to question me every time he saw me but now he rarely stops. ‘I think he’s given up, Mick.’ ‘Yeah, he can’t get his head around the guitar – it’s nothing like a piano (which Anthony can play), they’re worlds apart. With a guitar, you have to MAKE the note – with both hands. With the piano, it’s all there in front of you, isn’t it?’ ‘That’s a good way of putting it,’ I say. Mick usually raves on about some song, usually an old jazz arrangement of something, whenever he sees me. Today it’s Spike Jones’s Flight Of The Bumblebee, which I promise to check out. ‘Okay, I’ll leave you to it,’ he says, ‘I’m going to get a cup of coffee down the road.’ Just after he goes, right on cue, the Scottish guy turns up again, carrying a cardboard tray – ‘Hey, d’ya want some chips?’ he says. ‘No…thanks’, I say, and he goes off again.
Half an hour later Mick comes back and asks if I’ll go back to the place I went to in India last December. I say I doubt it. Travelling around in groups, you always say it would be ‘great to come back’ to your hosts, and they always say they’d love to arrange another visit soon, maybe next year. But ninety nine times out of a hundred, it never happens, never. We start talking about other places – I say I’d like to busk in Paris sometime. When I was there a few years ago, I saw a guy busking with a keyboard and he played Chopin’s famous Ballade in G Minor, Opus 23, in it’s entirety – an amazing thing to hear a busker do. The trouble is the cost of getting there, then some cheap place to stay, but Mick knows somewhere – ‘The Hotel Palm, in Clichy – the red light district,’ he says, with twinkle firmly in eye. ‘Thirty-five euros that was – a night. Very clean, though.’ He goes off to leave me ‘to it,’ again. Then he comes back for a third time, with a shopping bag – ‘Just got this…it was the only thing they had left – a PIE, a steak PIE!’ and he’s off again.
I employ some more of what I’ve been employing quite a lot of recently, namely blatant opportunism. Two girls walk by, one’s wearing a Pink Floyd Dark Side Of The Moon T-shirt. I play the very distinctive four note riff to Shine On You Crazy Diamond which surely ANY proper Pink Floyd fan will recognise…and acknowledge. But no. Completely ignored.
This was one of the longest non-stop playing sessions I’ve ever done; more than 2 1/2 hours. It’s also been one of the worst, financially. In fact I thought I’d made a lot more than what I counted at home.
Earnings: £14.49
