Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands by Will Carruthers

Author:Will Carruthers [Will Carruthers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571329984
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Monkey Grinder’s Organ

The queen doesn’t carry any cash either. That’s why they call them royalties.

Ancient musician wisdom

The final straw had come, as final straws must, towards the end of things.

I received the royalty statement that I hoped would pay off my debts. Having already spent the cheque I was yet to open, I tore the envelope, removed the contents and quickly scanned to the bottom line. I was left quite confused by the figure I found. It said, in fairly plain figures: £0.00.

Which seemed a little on the light side to me.

There was no royalty cheque.

I looked through the accounts again.

It was a reality I did not want to accept, and so I continued turning the sheets of paper looking for the real payment figure, which I had fondly imagined might amount to slightly more than nothing.

It was a grim truth that dawned on me and, in many ways, I wished it had still been dark so that I could have pretended that what was looming out of the light was not what it appeared to be.

Perhaps, in a way, I had been doing that for quite a while. That optimism will get you every time.

There were accounts attached to the statement and, in desperation, I started going through them. They seemed a bit wonky. I’d seen accounts before, and these didn’t seem to be like other accounts. I grabbed a calculator and started doing some sums. The more sums I did, the more things started moving around. Apart from the fact that my royalty statement was for £0.00 which, with the benefit of experience, I now realise is not that strange at all, it seemed that some of the (admittedly rather sparse) lines of figures didn’t add up, even when I had totalled them up three times. I finally came to realise that whoever drew them up must have been horribly overworked, or something, because there were a few glaring and obvious errors that even a half-sharp Saturday boy with a glue habit and a hard-on should have noticed.

I made a phone call to a friend who had more experience with this kind of thing, and arranged to show the wonky and possibly deranged accounts to her.

‘Umm,’ she said, thoughtfully, after looking through the papers for a while. ‘These figures don’t really add up, and they are quite confusing.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Whoever drew them up must have been up all night doing them and maybe they accidentally forgot to pay me. It’s a simple oversight and I am only a bass player. These things happen, you know. It’s tough at the top and we have all been working quite hard.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is probably what happened. Have you shown these to the rest of the band?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I intend to, because it seems obvious to me that whoever drew these up is probably in need of some help, and I want to help them get it.’

She nodded and so did I. There had to

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