Music has been a lost chord

PAV’s PATCH:

ONE of my great unrealised ambitions is that of playing a musical instrument, though it’s not for want of trying.

I’ve made several attempts to learn. It’s just that I’ve never got very far.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that I just wanted to be able to perform, to bang out a tune. But if you go to formal lessons, they start trying to teach you all the classical stuff and, to be honest, take all the fun out of it.

After all, I don’t imagine Eric Clapton learned guitar from a follower of Segovia. Didn’t he get everything from Bert Weedon’s “Play in a Day”? And did you know that Bert’s 90 now?

Anyway, my first stab at a musical instrument was in 1966 when I was sent to Miss Mayers, a Dukinfield institution, to learn the piano. I went every Saturday morning and it was the first time I met posh kids. They all paid for a term at a time by cheque while I stumped up two half-crowns and a threepenny bit every week.

I wanted to be another Russ Conway, but far from tinkling “Side Saddle”, I was given any number of classical pieces. And I hated the practising. I wanted to be kicking a football, not sitting at the piano. This was 1966!

Five years later I had a bash at the trombone at school — and you should try getting one of those on the No 30 bus of a morning. I had great hopes and even had a Dymo label made for the case which stated: “Michael Glenn Mill Pavasovic, the King”.

I lasted two lessons. “It’s like spitting a tea leaf off the end of your tongue,” the teacher kept saying. All I could manage was a passable imitation of flatulence. The instrument was taken off me.

Around the same time, I tried to master the guitar using an orange box my sister brought back from Spain. I got nowhere. After all, how do you play “Layla” on a holiday souvenir? I did manage a few bars of “Happy Birthday to You” but the strings hurt my fingertips.

A friend of my parents gave me a violin — I have no idea why — and of course there was the usual primary school attempt to play the recorder. I really don’t know why Miss Jones encouraged us all to buy one because she never helped us play.

I finished with a tin whistle when I was 19. I must have driven Mrs Long mad next door with my attempts to play “The Church’s One Foundation”. But that was all that was in the instruction leaflet.