My inability to ‘join in’

This is an excerpt from 'Moab is my Washpot,' and while the subject and situation are different, the underlying tones are the same. It touched me when I read it those years ago, as it does every time I read it.

...The tribal belonging, the sexual association, the sense of party — these are what popular music offer, and they have always been exclusion zones for me. Partly because of my musical constipation — can’t dance, can’t join in the chorus — partly because of my sexise of physical self, feeling a fool, tall, uncoordinated and gangly.

On the other hand I’m not Bernard Levin. I am not in love with the world of classical music or set upon the intellectual, personal or aesthetic path of a private relationship with Schubert, Wagner, Brahms or Berg. Nor am I a Ned Sherrin, devoted to the musical, to Tin Pan Alley and twentieth-century song. I did well professionally first crack out of the box with a stage musical, but musicals don’t mean much to me. I am not a show girl I fear.

There is no proper way for me to express what music does to me without my sounding precious, pretentious, overemotional, sentimental, self-indulgent and absurd. No proper way therefore to express either what it has done to me over the years to know that I would never be able to make music of even the most basic kind.

I would like to dance. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

I would like to sing. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

I’d like to join in, you see.

Guilty feet, as George Michael tells us, have got no rhythm.

I can play... I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking though fingers, blood dripping from ears. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the notes as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. Playing the piano is not the same as making music.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame

and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.