In my fortieth year I was going to be in a band. And I was going to be unfuckable.
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.
We started cooking together. We’d talk various levels of nonsense, or listen to bands I was uninitiated in or oblivious to – Boards of Canada, Do Make Say Think, Low, Labradford – in comfortable silence, or listen to podcasts before that was a normal thing to do. Sometimes I’d make him watch the cricket. We started our own podcast. We opened a restaurant together and it went very well – awards and extraordinary reviews and, occasionally, ever-elusive profit. We opened another restaurant and it was a fucking tragedy – the very definition of a difficult second album but instead of setting fire to a record label’s lucre, we burnt our own cash and our friends’ investments. We opened a sandwich shop and that went OK, and then COVID happened and then another sandwich shop and then Liz Truss and Russia and the cost of living crisis and, and, and. And last year we sat down and acknowledged that not only was business pretty abject, but we were absolutely miserable. And the only way was down.
One afternoon, amid this maelstrom of depression and anxiety and liquidation, Sam said he was reforming the band.
‘The band you said you’d never, ever, do again?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Is this a midlife crisis?’
‘Probably.’
‘Everyone’s in except for Ant. So we need a guitarist and piano player.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘You need to be able to play the piano, dude.’
‘I can play the piano.’ I said. I could sort of play the piano.
A week later, to my surprise, he brought it up again.
‘I spoke to the guys. If you want to give it a crack you can. It would suck if we never saw each other again. Can your small hands reach full octaves?’
One expression of anxiety was swiftly replaced by another. I spent the following days and weeks and months at the piano, a guitar wedged between my gut and the keys, playing and replaying every HOTS song I could find on Spotify – and several new ones Sam had written – section by section, bar by bar. A couple of tracks involved attacking the fretboard with a screwdriver to create a screeching, wailing, ethereal sound somewhere between a violin and an ambulance siren. I’d grown up playing Dylan and Jeff Buckley. This was new. The lift into the set opener’s chorus was a fully amped-up seven-fret glissando from which there was nowhere to hide if I screwed it. You can’t imagine the number of bad dreams this incurred.
I’d always regretted dropping the piano as a kid but now it really felt like a terrible error. Several key moments in early single The Red, The White, The Black, The Blue required my piano part to take the song into the chorus via an extravagantly baroque chromatic descent played over several octaves. I practiced those bars until my joints ached. My wife and kids were remarkably patient.
When I wasn’t rehearsing the songs, I was listening to them. In the car, on a run, half-pissed on the Tube, I was mainlining Hope of the States. Some years ago all the chefs at our restaurant got tattoos that read ‘MYU’ – ‘Make Yourself Unfuckable’ – not, as might seem hilariously apt, in the erotic sense, but in the spirit of being so very on top of everything that nothing but an act of God could derail them. In my fortieth year I was going to be in a band. And I was going to be unfuckable.
The first show in Manchester went inconceivably smoothly. I think I had the time of my life, though it’s possible that I blacked out from nerves. We went on to Glasgow where there were minor blips and inconsistencies. And then we travelled through the night for two shows in London which, though the band is from Chichester, felt like a homecoming of sorts. Out of the woodwork came forgotten friends and fans, one-time restaurant staff members, even their old label boss. For the one-time fanboy who’d found himself in the right place at the right time it was surreal enough.
For the rest of the band, however, something more transcendental, something ‘supernatural’, as Sam called it, had occurred. Just as the final months of our lives as restaurateurs were grim and traumatic, so too were the last days of Hope of the States. They decided upon and announced the end at Reading Festival in 2006 before they’d even told their label. We gathered astonished staff together and tried and failed not to cry. All of us said ‘never again’.
And yet there they were – and somehow there I was alongside them, with them – in Tufnell Park nearly 20 years later, with 500 sincerely ecstatic, emotionally invested, entirely bananas fans who thought they’d never see this weirdly cult band of misfits play music they thought they’d never hear live again. I’d helped dig Sam out of a tough spot nearly 15 years ago and now he was repaying the favour. A midlife crisis has never been so cathartic.
A couple of weeks later, Sam and I stood outside the Coach and Horses in Soho and he asked if I might join the band officially. I tried to play it cool, unaware that he was secretly filming the exchange and that my expression entirely gave the lie to my nonchalance. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I say, grinning like an idiot. Whether this is a midlife crisis or a magnificent pivot from a couple of failed restaurateurs who had hitherto been specialists at pirouetting off a cliff edge remains to be seen. Could be both, I suppose. Maybe I’ll get myself that custom Telecaster with Mojotone Broadcaster Quiet Coil pickups. Cheaper than a sports car.
