Last Friday’s Busking for Cancer boat party aboard HMS Belfast rekindled all the burning questions surrounding an unfathomable phenomenon, which has haunted my existence since my early teens.
Give an average man, kitted out with average clothes and an average personality, a guitar and immediately they are transformed from wallflower to Adonis so fine they plummet Casanova to the ranks of Quasimodo.
And as a hot-blooded female, I have an inbuilt and overbearing desire to straddle each and every one of them. Even the new wave of plaid-clad social degenerates, who have so far come into contact with only one vagina, and that was from the inside out.
However I have discovered the exception to this steadfast rule - the one and only glorified cover-singer, Newton Faulkner, whose head looks like a pre-school pupil has hollowed out a lump of wax, carved a face in it and lit it up with a tea-light.
Complete with an ego big enough to eclipse the sun, not even a vintage Fender Stratocaster once strummed by the late Jimi Hendrix can inject as much as a hint of mojo into this ginger lovechild of a mutant pumpkin and a Playskool Gloworm.
Delivering a painful rendition of Massive Attack’s Teardrop, he defied the unwritten law of the unconditional attractiveness of “man with guitar,” producing not even a faint tingle in the nether regions. And that’s coming from a girl who would have had a pop at Jarvis Cocker in his prime.
After three years on the scene Newton should be at his peak and aiming even higher. Instead he is still lost amid a line-up of part-time musicians who’re just out for a bit of extra-curricular Friday-night fun.
But he doesn’t let this deter him. Playing to a 100-strong audience he made failed attempts to emanate an air of arrogance reminiscent of Jagger and Morrison, but without the talent or charisma to match. The crowd, comprising has-been rockers, the friends and relatives of preceding acts and one prune-faced woman who claimed to be 33 years old, fuelled Newton’s unfounded egotism by demanding he play covers of other well-known classics. And so he did. Badly.
The time will come when the failings of Newton are realised, and he must sell his Argos-bought guitar down the local car boot sale, along with all his compact discs and make that long-overdue trip to the job centre.
"And that’s coming from a girl who would have had a pop at Jarvis Cocker in his prime."
ReplyDeleteIn his prime? I still would.