Requests

Eleven years. Forty songs. Give or take. You learn the arc. Dinner set, soft, nobody listening. First dance, whatever they've picked, which is mostly one of about six songs. Then the uncles. The uncles want the seventies. Then the friends come out and they want what was on the radio when they were twenty-one, which moves forward a year every year, and I'm still playing it. Then the last twenty minutes, which is always the same three songs because they are the three songs that make people put their arms round strangers. I play keys. I sing the harmonies. I do the talking between songs because Mike won't and Shelley's too honest. And every Saturday, without fail, somebody comes to the front of the stage with a drink and a face like a favour and asks for the one we don't do. It's a different song each time. That's the thing. There's no point learning it. One week it's a Springsteen B-side. One week it's a Punjabi wedding song I'd need a week and a dhol player for. One week a woman held my arm and asked for a song by a band I'd never heard of because it was her sister's favourite and her sister wasn't there any more, and I had to say no to that, in a marquee, with a reggae version of a pop song thumping behind me. I say the same thing. "We don't have that one, sorry, but pick anything off the list and we'll get you dancing." It works about half the time. Last month, Chesterfield, a golf club. Nice room. Around ten a lad of about thirty came up during a break. Suit jacket gone, tie round his head, the full works. "Can you do 'Wichita Lineman'?" A slow one. A hard one. Mike looked at me over his amp with the eyes of a man who has never in his life played "Wichita Lineman" and wasn't about to start in a golf club at ten o'clock. "We don't have that one, sorry, but pick anything off the—" "It's for my grandad." He nodded across the room. Old fella in a wheelchair by the cake table, paper hat, half asleep. "He used to sing it to my nan. She's gone. He's not really with it any more, most days. I just thought."

Right. I know the chords. Everyone who plays keys in a pub knows the chords. It's the string bit, the little answering line, that nobody can do. Shelley knows the words, because Shelley knows every word to every song ever written, it's her one true gift. I said, "Give us the start of the second set." We did it with keys and voice only. Mike held his guitar and didn't play it. Shelley sang it low and I did the string line on the organ setting and got most of it. The dance floor was empty because it was the start of the set and nobody dances at the start of the set. The grandad didn't open his eyes. But about halfway through, his hand started moving on the arm of the chair. Just the fingers. In time. The lad stood next to him and didn't say anything. We finished, and then we went straight into the seventies for the uncles, because that's the job. Forty-one songs now. Give or take.