Diary Of A Busker Day 2396 Thursday June 27th 2024 The Square, Winchester.
If you hang around long enough you’ll meet the world and his wife…or at least the friend of an ex-wife of a Beatle, who holds his phone towards me so she can hear me play a song her ex-husband wrote.
I’d just done an hour and a half in The Square and had just finished packing up the bike when a man in a white shirt coloured with hundreds of butterflies on said, from the bench near the museum, ‘I know Pattie!’
‘Sorry?’
‘I know Pattie – Pattie Boyd, she’s a friend of mine. She heard you play While My Guitar Gently Weeps over the phone. She’s in Morocco.’
‘What, really?’
‘Yeah, I mean I know that’s not the song he wrote for her – that was Something in the way she moves, and Eric wrote Layla for her.’
‘That’s right, but I actually do the piano bit for Layla’ (I’m kicking myself because I usually play it after While My Guitar).
What did she think?’
‘She said it was a lovely gift.’
So is he genuine? He certainly seemed so. He was very well turned out, well-spoken, quite flamboyant, very full of himself and VERY theatrical, daarling…and he was very complimentary about the lining of my new Next jacket, and of me – ‘You’re very youthful, how old are you?’ ‘I’m 62.’ ‘Well, you have that…energy, that youthful exuberance.’ (give me a fucking break!)
He says he played keyboards at Pattie’s third wedding, lives in South Kensington to which I replied ‘Wow, posh!’
‘I made a lot of money – I worked hard for it but I made most of it through sponsorship with Yamaha. Being sponsored is how you make the money. Not through talent.’
He’s involved with the theatre – he liked my playing and asked if I’d be interested in doing some work in London. He knows someone who’s doing a musical. ‘I can’t promise anything but I’ll run you by him and see what he thinks.’
I said ‘Well, thanks but you wouldn’t believe how many people say something sort of similar and I never hear from them again. There was a couple having a pizza here about a year ago and they really liked me and said they’d do a feature on me in a Southampton magazine. They said they would definitely do it and they even phoned me three months later saying “Just to let you know we haven’t forgotten about you and we’ll definitely do something soon!” Nine months later…they’ve forgotten about me!
I made sure I got his name – Jason Cussack – ‘Like the Russian’ and he’s here with his mother, who wanted to come to Winchester and has gone off somewhere; he’s waiting for her. I asked to take a photo of him but he insisted I be in it so asked some schoolgirls to take one of us on the bench. I tried to get him to buy a book but he declined, having nothing to carry it in. I showed him my new vinyl album – ‘Oh, my mother’s name is Francesca’ he said, observing the title of the last song on it.
He certainly seems to move in exalted musical circles – ‘John Williams – the guitarist not the composer, told me “it’s not the notes but the spaces between them that count” (mind you, I’ve heard loads of people say this!)
Anyway, let’s see what happens.