The taxi driver's near-success experience

Unusually, this morning I find myself pissed, freezing, and walking backwards and eastwards down the northside of Oxford Street at 1a.m. looking for a cab home to Chalk Farm. Finally, out of a doorway comes an offer of one, clearly unlicensed, more expensive that I care to admit, but which in my desperation I accept.

Turns out my taxi driver is a musician. A guitarist who, without prompting, proceeds to tell me how a certain reuniting 80s pop reggae band that recently hired him to play guitar on their latest recording, had underpaid him and not treated him particularly respectfully. He is pissed off about it. About these has-beens' attitude towards him. Then as the tirade gathers more venom, he turns on local venues and promoters.

I think he plays me one of the pop reggae tracks on his car's cassette player, I can't remember now. What I do remember, though, is a fairly hissy recording of a synth-pop reworking of Purple Haze, which he plays me that he made back in the 80s. He tells me it caught the attention of someone at Rough Trade back then, but that they finally passed on it. Why? Again, I can't remember. It sounds alright. Or it would have done in 1983. The point is, this is the taxi driver's near-success experience. His moment. The one that he will forever hark back to. The turning point. Many of us mature musicians have one of these. He is obviously very proud of this music, this hissy old cassette is priceless and makes him happy; but he is equally embittered by it, sad and disappointed about what could have been.

Because I'm so pissed, I go into an evangelical one about 'us' mature musicians, and how we need each other, and how he isn't alone, and all that stuff. But the fact is there are so many musicians out there like this guy. With jobs they hoped they would never need. Careers they fell back on. Broken dreams, hissy cassette demos or skipping CDRs.

We sit outside my flat in the cab chatting for a little while, before I give him my cash and my RTYD card, and bid him goodnight. I do hope he signs up.

Toby