When I woke up the bus was silent, the engine dead. There was no driver at the wheel.
I pulled on my boots and brushed my teeth and scratched my head and opened Google Maps and tried to figure out where the hell we were. We seemed to be in a lorry park somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester. That was something. We were supposed to be in Manchester.
I stepped off the bus and looked for an escape. Men larger than I circulated in high-vis but seemed disinclined to show me the way out. Eventually I spotted Tony, a 60-something guitar tech, wandering the perimeter. He shepherded me to the exit and we trudged up the Oldham Road in search of a café. We found a cup of impressively undrinkable coffee and a sausage sandwich and he told me about the custom pick-ups on his Telecaster. I pretended to know what he was talking about. We plodded back to the bus and the sole flapped off my boot and it rained in the way it does in Manchester. I’d recently turned 39. This wasn’t part of the plan.
The last time I had been in a room with Tony was almost 20 years earlier, though neither of us knew it at the time. A friend had taken me to see a band he liked at The Fleece in Bristol. They were touring their second album. ‘They’re called Hope of the States,’ he’d said. ‘They’re meant to be the new Radiohead. Sort of histrionic post-rock. They’ve got a violin player.’ I didn’t know what ‘histrionic’ meant but I knew I liked the music. It was the kind of stuff an indie-adjacent 20-year-old who liked to feel things – those things being ‘emotional’, ’sophisticated’ and ‘a little pretentious’ – was drawn towards.
Three years had passed since they’d signed a million-pound record deal with Sony. While recording their debut album The Lost Riots, the guitarist, Jimmi Lawrence, killed himself in the studio. Somehow they battled on with the tour that followed the album’s release, and the contracted second album, but a trauma of that immensity was, it turned out, impossible to transcend.
Not long after the show in Bristol, they split up.
A few years later, recently graduated and trying, after a fashion, to establish a career somewhere in the food milieu, I was scrolling the Quietus, as 20-something pseudo-musos were wont to do in 2010. There I found a quietly unhinged piece written by the Hope of the States singer, a careworn and disillusioned Sam Herlihy, that managed to elide McDonalds, Bryan Ferry and a sushi-eating contest with Jonny Borrell in Tokyo. I didn’t entirely follow it but I liked the writing and being a deluded dreamer, I emailed him to ask if he would consider collaborating for a night at my supper club in Holloway. We used to do the occasional evening with artists, photographers, authors and so on. I thought a post-rock-themed dinner might be fun – Mogwai Pie, Sigur Rosti, 65-day aged beef – and Sam seemed interested enough in food perhaps to consider getting involved. ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ might be a fair summary of his response.
Six months later he emailed again, suggesting we go for a drink. ‘My wife says I was quite rude last time,’ he said over a beer in The Jerusalem Tavern. ‘She said maybe we should meet. I don’t have much on right now.’ My self-esteem being what it was, I was flattered by this offer of friendship from someone who was, if not quite at rock bottom, certainly within touching distance of it. He’d gone from fronting a major label-signed band to working in Starbucks.
