Tim Dowling: my banjo is out of tune, and the gig is falling apart

The band I’m in is playing over the weekend: Birmingham, Gateshead, Kendal. They are all venues we’ve played before, but not for a long while.

“Which is good,” says the guitar player as we drive north in the rain. “Because we can re-use all the jokes from last year.”

“Absolutely,” I say. The pockets of the waistcoat I wear on stage are loaded with scraps of paper containing scrawled lines to cover for all sorts of trouble: tuning problems, technical problems, and the wholly unforeseen. I should really swap them out for new jokes at some point, just as I should probably dry clean the waistcoat at some point. But not now – I have enough to worry about.

The gig in Birmingham goes surprisingly well; I am only obliged to dip into my waistcoat pocket once.

In Gateshead I rely on a proven anecdote about a fan called Angela, who in 2022 drove all the way from Aberdeen to see us play in Cambridge, just so she could buy one of our souvenir mugs, which are not available from the website. I know this because her friend approached me in the interval and asked if we could please dedicate a song to Angela.

“Otherwise,” she said, “It’s a long way to come for a fucking cup.”

This anecdote is so well worn I don’t need the bit of paper sitting in my right breast pocket. I’ve told it 50 times over the past two years.

“But tonight it has a special poignance,” I tell the people of Birmingham, “because I’m reliably informed that Angela is in the front row.” And so she is. Everyone cheers.

“Reliably informed,” says the piano player in the Travelodge afterward. “Like you had spies tracking her.”

“I was ad-libbing,” I say. “Anyway, I’ll probably have to retire that bit, because we’re out of mugs.”

On the third morning I wake up with a cold: my head is fogged; my throat is sore. Along with these symptoms I am possessed by an overwhelming sense of doom. Things have gone well so far. It is too much to hope that they will go well one more time.

And so it proves. Within minutes of getting on stage I find myself bewildered and at sea, struggling to remember songs I have played hundreds of times. I make it through the first half without any major errors, but I’m rattled by the cumulative effect of a dozen small ones.

Things go from bad to worse in the second half, after I misinterpret the set list at my feet, so that when the next song starts I find myself not just playing the wrong tune, but holding the wrong instrument.

I can see light at the end of the tunnel by the time my banjo goes badly out of tune in the middle of the penultimate number. Between songs I stop to retune and, when this begins to take longer than it should, I reach into the pocket of my waistcoat and pull out a perennially reliable scrap of paper.

I tell the audience an entirely confected story about creating a new banjo joke using AI. The first part of the story gets a big enough laugh that I decide to dispense with the second part – I’ve already taken up too much time. I put the bit of paper back in my pocket, and the final song begins.

I’m a big believer in never admitting your mistakes to an audience. Chances are they haven’t noticed, and there is nothing to be gained from coming clean. But this strategy has its limits, and I am about to test them.

The last song’s introduction is very spare, dominated by a haunting banjo figure that repeats itself after four bars. The first time it comes round, every single note is wrong. I hear the piano player snort with laughter behind me, but I’m already thinking about the second time round a few seconds hence: I know it’s going to go wrong again.

When it does, the song collapses. The band stops playing. It’s clear I have accidentally tuned my banjo to a different key entirely, and I cannot for the life of me see a way back. As I frantically re-tune in the heart-pounding silence that follows, the guitar player reaches into my waistcoat pocket, extracts the bit of paper and reads out the second part of my joke.

Everyone laughs.

“I came very close to running out the fire exit,” I say afterwards, as we pack up.

“I reckon the audience thought that whole bit was planned,” says the piano player.

“I guess it was lucky I’d left the second part of the joke for you,” I say to the guitar player.

“It was even luckier the whole thing was actually written out on that bit of paper,” he says.

“That’s not luck,” I say.