Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

AND I CAN’T FUCKING DO IT

I can’t so much as hum ‘Three Blind Mice’ without going off key. I can’t stick to the rhythm of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ without speeding up. I can’t fucking do it.

Bollocks to Salieri and his precious, petulant whining. Maybe it is worse to be able to make music just a bit, but not as well as you would like to. I d love to find out. But I can’t fucking do it at all.

To see friends gathering round a piano and singing ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, ‘Anything Goes’, ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Summertime’, ‘Der Erlkonig’, ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’, ‘Edelweiss’, ‘Non Più Andrai’ – it doesn’t fucking matter what bloody song it is…

I CAN’T FUCKING JOIN IN

I have to mime at parties when everyone sings Happy Birthday… mime or mumble and rumble and grow and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

I’M NOT EVEN TONE

FUCKING DEAF

I’m tone DUMB.

The tunes are there in my head. There they are all right, perfect to the last quarter-tone of pitch and the last hemi-demi-semi-quaver of time. The ‘Haffner’, ‘Fernando’, the Siegfried motif, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Marche Militaire’, ‘Night and Day’, ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’, ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’, ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, ‘Lara’s Theme’, ‘Now Voyager’, ‘Remember You’re a Womble’, even the opening bars of Till bloody Eulenspiegel, I can play them all effortlessly in my head.

Not just the tunes, but the harmonies too, the rhythmic patterns, everything. I find I can usually tell if a tune is in the keys of C minor, D major or E flat major, they are like recognisable colours to me, not a stunning gift, but proof surely that I am not tone deaf. But between what is there in my head and what I can express with my voice or my fingers… there falls a mighty and substantial shadow.

‘Oh, how does that tune from Bonanza go?’ someone will ask, and everybody will clutch their foreheads and screw up their faces as they try to force their memories.

But there it is, the whole Bonanza theme in my head, fully armed, orchestrated entire, perfect to the last trill and triplet, every element complete and perfect, as if played inside me by the Vienna Philharmonic, led by Isaac Stern and conducted by Furtwangler. I can hear it as clearly in my head now as I can hear the mighty roar of King’s Lynn’s rush-minute traffic heading for Swaffham along the A47.

‘Go on, then, Stephen. If you can hear it, hum it…’ Ha! That’s a joke. Hum it. I might as well try to make a car engine out of spaghetti or a well-dressed man out of Martyn Lewis.

If I try, if I really try to render it, to reproduce the concord of sweet sound that moves so perfectly in my head, the sound that emerges will shock and embarrass. I am looked at with reproach and faint disgust as if I’ve done something unpardonably tasteless and unbritish, like farting at the Queen Mother or kicking Alan Bennett in the balls.

I’ve got a voice, haven’t I? A voice that can mimic accents, a voice with a fair repertoire of impressions and impersonations. Why can’t it express musical sounds as I hear them? Why this musical constipation? Why, oh Lord, why?

And why so cross about it? I’ve covered a page with the most intemperate profanities and the most ungovernable rages on this subject, why does it upset me so much? Some people can’t walk, for Christ’s sake. Some people have severe dyslexia or cerebral palsy, and I’m whining about not having a gift for music. After all, what’s so bad about not being able to render a tune?

‘Come on, old fellow,’ the reasonable person might say, ‘we all know what the Mona Lisa looks like. We can all picture her in our heads, right down to the crazing on the varnish and the smokily shaded dimples at the side of her mouth. But which of us can doodle her? We don’t complain, we just shrug and say that we’re hopeless at drawing…, why can’t you say that about not being able to sing?’

Yeah, that’s all very well. But you see music is more than that. Music is social, music begins in dance. Music is actually about joining in. When I moan about swimming or about singing, I’m really moaning about not being able to join in. And I’m not really moaning, either. I’m trying to recapture an old misery and unravel it.

There is a scene in one of my favourite films, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 Running On Empty, where River Phoenix (at his absolute coltish best) arrives at a new school with a new name (Manfield), a new history (made up) and hair dyed newly blond (dreamy). He and his family have spent their life running from the FBI – ‘on the lam’ as they say in America. We the film audience know, but Ed Crowley who plays the music teacher at this new school does not, that Phoenix’s character is an exceptionally gifted pianist. As Phoenix is welcomed into the music class, he sinks down into his seat and Crowley plays excerpts from two musical tapes, one a Madonna dance track, the other a classical string piece.

‘What’s the difference between these two pieces of music?’ asks Crowley.

The class giggles. The difference is surely so obvious.

‘One is good and the other is bad?’ suggests a student.

What a sycophantic creep. We can see that most of the class find the Madonna much more fun than the classical.

‘That’s a matter of opinion surely,’ Crowley says to the sycophant.

Phoenix, trained his whole life not to draw attention to himself, looks around the classroom. We know that he has an answer, but what can it be?

What answer would you give, come to that, if asked to describe the difference between a Madonna track and a classical string quartet?

Ed Crowley turns to this new student.

‘Mr Manfield?’ he asks. ‘Help us out. What do you think?’

There is a fraction of a pause as Phoenix twiddles shyly with his pencil before giving this reply.

‘You can’t dance to Beethoven?’

I like that.

You can’t dance to Beethoven.

And if you can’t dance, you can’t join in.

Music from the ‘ragtime and jazz tradition’ (why do I feel that the word Tradition is taking on the greasiness of the word Community? The ‘gay community’, ‘the divided communities of Northern Ireland’ – the ‘Gospel tradition’, the ‘folk tradition’) all the way through to blues, R amp;B, rock and roll, soul, funk, reggae, pop, ska, disco, rap, hip-hop, techno, acid-house, jungle, Tesco, handbag, trance, hypno and the rest, always keeps its back-beat and its dance roots; its proper home is still the dance floor and the shared experience of adolescents swapping records in their bedrooms. It is public music, it publicly defines an age, it is still dance, now in fact, since the high days of folk-rock and hard rock, it is more than ever dance.