Everything Breaks

"Do you never miss it?" my friend said in my ear in the interval before Public Sector Broadcasting took the stage in the cavernous Telegraph Building.

We'd been watching the support act Arborist whose sound was marked with swirling keyboards. I watched the keyboardist playing, mirror neurones firing as I observed the weaving in and out as a live performance takes shape.

I played in a couple of bands over the years, keyboards and backing vocals. I ask myself the same question sometimes: do I miss it? In a sense it sometimes feels so distant that it's as if it was someone else's life or a film half-remembered. The faders went down on performing and up on other parts of life.

I had never seen this footage of me playing with The Woodentops at the iconic Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2009. The elements that went into the making of that performance seem dreamlike, especially seeing the stage design as the audience would have experienced it.

Everything Breaks was my favourite song to play, despite the inevitable physical pain that it caused, staying quantised, repeating a single chord phrase over and over again. It's good to remember, and to miss it.

The Woodentops: Everything Breaks live at QEH 2009

[Photo credit Emanuele Gabily, Nantes 2014]