Posted: Oct 11, 2017 4:30 am
Pretentiousness doesn't always have to involve financial outlay. Once a week, after rehearsals with the choir that I sing in, a few of us head across the street to a bar for a couple of drinks before we head home. The conversation is often about music and there are maybe three or four of us who like to impress each other with our knowledge of various musical genres.
We always lose to Fred. Fred is a retired municipal employee who spent a lifetime doing a job that bored him for people that he hated. But every minute of his leisure time for the last 40 years seems to have been spent travellng the UK listening to musicians of every type, but ideally those whom no-one has ever heard of. Fred frequently forgets to respond to important emails, turns up late for every rehearsal and lives in a state of utter chaos. But he can name individual members of some obscure jazz quartet that he listened to 20 years ago in some basement dive in London's East End and he can talk absolute bollocks about the keyboard player's technique, even though Fred doesn't play a musical instrument, and then tell you what other unknown jazz groups that keyboard player went on to play with.
Faced with such a withering, encyclopedic onslaught of useless musical trivia, my own pretentions to know my musical shit simply die and I try to turn the conversation to cars and how to afford a Mercedes Benz on less than £300 a month.
We always lose to Fred. Fred is a retired municipal employee who spent a lifetime doing a job that bored him for people that he hated. But every minute of his leisure time for the last 40 years seems to have been spent travellng the UK listening to musicians of every type, but ideally those whom no-one has ever heard of. Fred frequently forgets to respond to important emails, turns up late for every rehearsal and lives in a state of utter chaos. But he can name individual members of some obscure jazz quartet that he listened to 20 years ago in some basement dive in London's East End and he can talk absolute bollocks about the keyboard player's technique, even though Fred doesn't play a musical instrument, and then tell you what other unknown jazz groups that keyboard player went on to play with.
Faced with such a withering, encyclopedic onslaught of useless musical trivia, my own pretentions to know my musical shit simply die and I try to turn the conversation to cars and how to afford a Mercedes Benz on less than £300 a month.