A Rock and A Hard Place
Guitar for Beginners Part II
Help Dear Reader
Now see, I meant to write ‘Hello’ but my fingers had other ideas and while I wouldn’t wish to give you the wrong impression, or indeed, alarm you, I have let it stand because perhaps the communal subconscious of which we are all a part is sending a message to one or both of us. Who am I to argue? There are copious things with which I need help. In no particular order:
Deciphering texts from my child which are comprised only of emojis or acronyms that need Googling. Every. Single. Time. Why are we bothering to slave over kitchen tables, I ask myself, driven near to tears in an effort to teach our children fronted adverbials (whatever they are) and digraphs, when within our lifetimes all language will be reduced to ‘idk’ and a skull emoji.
Writing set lists comprised of songs I have been playing for the best part of twenty years. Every time I go to a rehearsal it’s like I’ve never rehearsed before. The same goes for gigs.
Playing guitar. This too I have been doing for over thirty years now but I still panic any time I have to go into a music shop to buy strings or get a guitar fixed. The moment I walk through the door, they smell blood. ‘Would Madam like flat wounds, or phosphor bronze? Twelves or elevens?’ And there I am, breaking into a cold sweat like that time someone from a guitar magazine came to interview me and photograph my guitar collection and asked me about humbuckers and I thought they were talking about some kind of Hillbilly preserve you only get in Kentucky.
If you recall, the title of my last newsletter - Guitar for Beginners Part I - was taken from a story I told during the show at the Palladium earlier this year. It was about a prank my bandmates played on me at a gig on my home island of Jersey. In large part, while funny, the story was about my insecurity, in this instance as a performing musician but it also spoke of the pressure I think a lot of us who have left our home towns feel upon returning.
I went home last week for a few days. It was idyllic - the sun came out, the golden beaches were picturesque, the sound of children laughing in the waves now that school was done for the summer brought back fond memories. In certain parts of the island time has stood still - the bay of my childhood is almost entirely untouched by the hideous developments that blight the main town - and I went to my cousin’s wedding in the same church that her parents were married in, that my grandparents were married in, that my great-grandparents were married in, and that many of ancestors departed from. The Pallot who had been a rector in the sixteenth century might well have looked down upon his descendants and thought plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose.
Unlike some other provincial spots, Jersey is incredibly supportive of anyone who gets off the rock to do something on the national or international stage. Its natives are mercifully unaffected with Tall Poppy Syndrome. Perhaps because the island is so overlooked most of the time - unless the media want a weather event or two cows shagging in front of a monarch - local people are always delighted to hear the island mentioned somehow and nothing I have done in my life has ever impressed my father more than the time he went to the local passport bureau to get his renewed and by mentioning who his kid was had the thing fast-tracked. Literally beaming from ear to ear, he was. (I mean, that was back in the days when I’d just had a hit, now I’d insist he give it a good eight week time window or he wouldn’t be making any flights, to anywhere.)
People are so nice, and so proud, and it hurts. Because when I go back now I feel a bit ashamed that I couldn’t have, y’know, done a sold-out world arena tour called Jersey Cow: The Nerina Pallot Experience and really put the island on the map. I’ve never been on Saturday Kitchen to show them all the things you can do with a Jersey Royal. (Boil it with mint, then slather it with butter, anything else is sacrilege.) If I’d pulled my finger out, I could have been nominated for the best song category in the Oscars and then Henry Cavill and I could swan down the red carpet together and represent and then Amelia Dimoldenberg would interview us and look really, really interested when we told her all about how Jersey has one of the highest rise and falls of tide in the world. See, when anyone back home says something nice and asks me how it’s all going, I can’t answer like a sane person. I’m thinking about all the things I haven’t done that for some weird reason I think I ought to have done to make people happy or proud. But because I am not yet completely insane, I will either answer politely or try to swerve the topic altogether.
It’s why I regularly wish I was an accountant. Nobody is interested in what accountants do for a living, not even accountants. Tell me all about your Excel Spreadsheet techniques, said no-one ever. It must be bliss.
Our home towns shape us and our home towns haunt us, whether we like it or not. We take them everywhere we go.
The other afternoon I stood on the beach at one little bay nestled between the McMansions on that part of the coast, and remembered one day in particular. When we were about fifteen, a friend and I had gone down there to sunbathe when she recognised one of the boats that had dropped anchor. She suggested we swim across to hop aboard for lunch.
The yacht was further out than it looked, and by the time we clambered onto it, I was freezing. My friend did indeed know this family, who lived in one of the nearby McMansions reserved for the tax exile population, but I did not. They welcomed her warmly, and then appraised the drowned rat friend standing behind her.
‘And who are your parents?’ the mother asked me.
‘Never heard of them,’ she said when I told her, giving me a look somewhere between pity and hostility. I took this as my cue to leave. I hate being cold, but I hate being somewhere I’m not wanted even more and I swam back to shore as fast as I could.
At the time, I could not articulate what I was feeling, but it is one of those memories that at any moment I can conjure up in perfect detail. I can remember the yellow swimming costume I was wearing. The beaded bracelets on my wrist that I would spend lazy summer days making. The battered deck shoes I was so attached to waiting for me on the beach. The relief when I wrapped my sun-warmed towel around me as I sat down to wait for my friend to return.
Did I think in that moment, I’m going to show those people? No, I don’t think so. But I think I made the decision that I would do something about my idle daydreams. I don’t know about you but I’m an in for a penny, in for a pound sort of gal when it comes to dreams. I do not look at the largesse of the world and think that’s for other people, no: I think that’s for any of us who want it, with a bit of gumption. Why not? Why should it be someone else’s birthright to enjoy all that the world has to offer? Why should any of us have our nose pressed up against the shop window of life?
I’d be brilliant at being rich, properly rich I mean, the kind that has its own jet and Oprah Winfrey on speed dial, really brilliant at it. There’d be none of this sitting on charity committees to get people who don’t have much money to donate to it, I’d just use my own dosh. Your cat’s sick and you can’t afford the mahoosive vet’s bill? Don’t worry, just send it to me! Can’t get a deposit for your mortgage even though you haven’t eaten an avocado since you were eleven and you don’t even have a telly? I’ll give you it. I’d be so good at being properly, filthy rich that I’d buy back all of the reclaimed land on my home island just so I could knock down the absolute shit they’ve built on it and turn it into a free fun park for the local kids.
I reckon all of you reading this would be too. Way better than Peter Thiel and Elon Musk combined. But it’s because we’d all of us be so much better at being billionaires than the dickheads who actually are, that it is unlikely to happen.
If this was someone else’s newsletter, this would be the time to trot out that platitude about us all already being rich anyway and how grateful we should be for what we have already and look, I don’t disagree. The fact that you and I have access to the internet and, on a very basic level, are not actually dead so we can fill our boots with cat memes or whatever turns us on, is very definitely grounds for gratitude. For example - and here let me return to the poetic ways for which I am renowned - today I have Gratitude for Latitude this weekend. It’s such a great festival and I feel incredibly lucky to have been asked to play it - and the main stage no less - and to be able to take a small string section as well as the band. It’s going to be wonderful, and there are so many gifted performers who would give their right arm to get a slot on it that I realise as someone many years into their career it’s no mean feat to be on the bill at a major UK festival.
But - and at the risk of repeating what will become a theme in the next few weeks - I have regrets. And the truth about regrets is that they are not about lamenting what has or hasn’t happened to us, they are about lamenting the things over which we ourselves had control. Or things we didn’t realise we had control over. I could gloss over all of this, and finish with the platitudes but I’d rather be honest. It’s because you are one of the things in my life for which I am profoundly grateful that I owe you such candour.
Otherwise, what’s the point? A cursory scroll through the timelines that pass for society these days can leave us numb with niceties. It’s all very well to read the myriad posts reminding us that once we master our minds, we can master anything. Putting that into practise in real life is some of the hardest work you or I will ever do. Happiness - whatever that means to you - takes concerted effort; it is the project of a lifetime. Like a skittish butterfly, it will only come to settle on your shoulder if it senses your nonchalance.
Adulthood is not a fridge magnet, I’m sorry to say. It is a mix of the wonderful and terrible, and mostly the just doing okay. And that is why I will never be CEO of Hallmark.
Still, if I had to burn every platitude in existence and be left with just one, it is this: Never Give Up. That one? That one’s set in stone.
Never give up, my loves.
With love to you all,
Nerina xxx
Such a wonderful news etter thank you. Sorry I can't make weekend hope all goes well.
Lovely newsletter as always. And delighted to see that pic of a rock I found down Westward Ho! eight years ago finally had a use 😃