The Minutes

A tour diary entry, en route to Hebden Bridge, on the last day of Summer.

I wake up and it’s raining hard. The Met office has issued an amber alert, with a “month’s worth” of rain due to fall today. It’s a travel day, which when referred to by anyone not in the business as a day off, is met with a stony silence. Four and a half hours in the pouring rain up the M62 is not my idea of a day off. But it’s my first non-performing day in 8 days straight, so whatever it is — if it includes sitting down for a chunk of time and just listening or thinking — I’ll take it.

There’s an old saying about tour life: it’s the days off that kill you. I used to take this to mean that the questionable pursuits crammed into those brief windows of R&R would take their toll on your liver, relationships, and general wellbeing. And there were times in the early days when that was true. Now I think a non-performing day has its own dangers. I want to stay only in the bubble of the show. Just as my fingers harden and form callouses to protect me from abrasive guitar strings, my mind has formed its own protective barrier. A seawall against the minor insults dished out daily to all of us. Insults like parking tickets, technology that refuses to work — and offers neither excuse nor remedy — and clothes that at any given moment are somehow inappropriate for the British weather. I don’t want any of that stuff creeping into my thoughts.

 I won’t relax properly until this tour is over, and I don’t want to. It’s not stress. It’s readiness. An alertness. Every bit of me is primed and ready. I don’t want my mind to slow down too much, and I don’t want to let any opportunity to improve the show go by in a day off reverie. It is not a hardship to feel this way. My enjoyment and satisfaction comes from endless tweaking of the set, finding ways to say things, patterns of show that I know I can’t repeat, but want to be able to recognise and use if I need to. I don’t ever know how a show is going to go exactly, and I don’t always need a map, but I’d like to be able to steer from time-to-time. And for the rest of the tiring days to be worth it, I want that time on stage to be golden. My time. Our time.

When performers say they’re only happy on stage I used to be suspicious. It connotes a corresponding despair out of the spotlight. But if you only have one thing to do — entertain an audience — then the clarity that can occasionally descend is a beautiful place in which to dwell, if only for a short time. In good moments it can be like watching yourself from above, things flow and happen without premeditation. My fingers, feet and vocal cords find their mark and for a split second I can actually listen to the songs as if sung by a stranger. This is also a dangerous thing to notice. The bum note or forgotten lyric is sudden penance for daring to think this nirvana is within your control.

But I am happy on stage. This version of me. The one who against his introvert nature dares to stand up and face the opposite way to everyone else in the room. It’s a place where the songs can be freed from their prison of zeros and ones, plastic and memory — and for a night — be made new again. Hung delicately on the silence of an audience’s expectations, then put away again until next year, like melancholy Christmas decorations. There are writers who say they don’t like writing, but enjoy having written. Similarly with performers. The moment of peace after a show is worth the public trauma. To those people I say, find a way to enjoy the minutes of the day while they’re happening. Life lived looking in the rearview mirror isn’t a safe way to travel. 

Although on this particular travel day, I’m doing a lot of looking in the rearview mirror. I’ve seen two articulated trucks aquaplane already, and it’s not what I can see ahead that scares me — as they drift balletically into my lane — it’s the unseen enemy. The one close behind, stalking us all.

Driving is my thinking time. I rest my voice, listen to podcasts and books. When I say listen, I mean a part of my brain is sitting at the top of the stairs listening to the adults below at their dinner party — and because I know I’m safe — my eyes study the road while my mind travels elsewhere. Is it strange to find George Orwell’s 1984 so comforting? Or to travel the length and breadth of the country playing my songs at night, while learning about the precise anatomy of whales during the day? I’m certain Melville also had ADHD. In Moby Dick his mind doesn’t so much wander as run headlong into the next random thought. Perhaps that’s the reason I love him. Whatever it is, this book seems to eat up the miles, like a blue whale swallowing krill. I get that a commute can be dull. I get that needing to be somewhere against prevailing weather and traffic is stress-inducing. But if I didn’t like driving, the hyper-focus, the constant stimulation balanced by the dog-out-the-window excitement of simply being in motion, then I’m in the wrong job. The minutes are where life happens.  

So as a month’s worth of rain sprays up against my windscreen from passing drivers, on whom German engineering has bestowed a divine sense of invulnerability, those of us in Slovakian cars proceed with more caution. I wonder if the definition of a month’s worth of rain is changing as we speak. Just as the phrase ‘unseasonable weather’ no longer has any meaning. Are there other month’s worth of things we could enjoy, or endure, depending on what they are? I’ll have a month’s worth of sleep please, but can I take it tomorrow morning ? Can I have a month’s worth of anxiety about saying the wrong thing after a show, but get it out the way in a day? Preferably a Tuesday in January? I’ll also take a month’s worth of applause, but can I have it randomly when I find a clean tee shirt, or parallel park on a curved road? If there’s a corresponding silence at the next 27 shows, I can live with it. I was never playing for applause anyway. It’s the awkward moments where an audience doesn’t know what to do — and I don’t know what to say — that I live for. When it all hangs in the balance. The infinite spinning coin. When we are all of us riding the silence. You don’t get that with Netflix. 

I’m lucky to still be doing this. I’ve stopped feeling angry and failed in recent years, and now at 55 many things could be for the last time. I’d better enjoy them. So if nothing else, on a travel day, I can take stock a little bit. This tour has been great so far. Each night different, each night special. I feel that I’ve been working towards something like this my whole life, and that maybe some of you coming to the shows have been on a similar path. I don’t mean that the fates have dictated we all end up at my show — as if it’s a baseball diamond in Iowa — but rather that we’ve all been walking our own careworn paths to arrive at this place of acceptance, and hopefully some gratitude. Together for the last 24 years. Sometimes we drift out of sight of each other, but that’s the nature of a life. The rise and fall of the oceans, or our individual roads.

Tonight I’ll try to get to bed before 2 am for a change, hoping for some sleep, and to doubtless dream about the show. But two weeks into the tour, just as the last day of summer comes to a sodden end, my body clock is now firmly on STAGE TIME. Whether I want it to or not, my adrenaline will spike at 8:45pm and my fingers start twitching. Which is why I’m writing this now. To try and head that energy off at the pass.  If there’s a stage manager at the shows, I’ll usually get the 5 minute call. If it’s a fancy theatre, it can be a disembodied voice from the green room intercom. Five Minutes, Mr McRae. Five minutes may not seem long. But if the minutes are where you try and live, you can fit not just a month’s worth, but a whole lifetime of gratitude into them.

Written in a service station, en route to Hebden Bridge, The Trades Club, September 23, 2024. It was raining so hard I had to stop. And continued later that night in The Townhouse Hotel. It was still raining as I fell asleep, imagining myself at sea, in a storm.

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