I was at a funeral the week before last. It was in Harlesden, a place I had not visited for over 20 years. The deceased was the sister of an old college friend. I had invited him to something last month but he couldn’t make it. His sister was very ill, and she died at the start of the month. I had met her nearly 40 years ago, in her first weeks at university and remembered her as bright and engaging. I had not seen her for many years.

I have established, on this Blog, a pattern of alluding to the living and being specific about people who have died. In this case I will not be specific about the woman who died. There might be enough clues here for her friends and family to identify her, but not enough detail for strangers to work out who she was. The service was longer than most of the Catholic funerals I have been to. There was a lot of music, and music was a large part of her life.

The reception afterwards was in a nearby pub. I met many people I had not met before, but only spoke briefly to my old college friend, who was there with his wife and one of their sons. They had been to the crematorium (family only) and he was catching up with many of the mourners on his return.

One of the families I met, a father and son, had a musical link to the deceased woman: she had been the boy’s piano teacher. (The boy was born in the same month as my son.) They had not seen her for a few years. Lockdown and illness had seen to that. The boy’s father told me about a weekly music event in the very room we were stood in, on Tuesdays. We arranged to meet there the next evening.

When I turned up, he wasn’t there, and I didn’t know any of the other musicians or the people organizing the evening. I introduced myself to one of the latter, and sat in the corner waiting for things to begin. Someone I was at school with arrived and recognized me. Out of context (and having met him only once in the last 40 years) I didn’t immediately recognize him. When we had established that, yes, I did know who was, and could remember everything he had told me last time we met (which might have freaked him out a bit) we spent the rest of the evening watching, and performing, music. I used the fancy keyboard that he had brought along for the evening and sang, by request, #1 hits from 1979 (“Sunday Girl”), 1962 (“I Remember You”) and 1994 (“Without You”, which also topped the UK charts in 1972). He played a blues number on guitar, and then joined the house band on keyboards. He gave me a lift back to West Kensington in his Uber and I took the tube home from there.

Since then I have been on a mission to see live music, and play live music, as much as possible, in memory of the woman whose funeral prompted that first evening in a new venue. I felt the same way in September 2021, after another funeral (or more accurately memorial service) for someone who had enjoyed singing and performing. Back then many of the places that had been open before lockdown had still not reopened. Some of them never have. I approached many venues in the hope of performing there. Most of them were unenthusiastic. A lot of emails went unanswered. The limited circle of musicians that I knew were still not playing live again. This time round there are plenty of places putting on live music again and making me feel welcome, and I have met a crowd of musicians who play far more regularly than most of the people I have known for years.

In her excellent memoir “Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys”, Viv Albertine, writes about her return to singing and playing live, over 25 years after the demise of her band The Slits: “twice a week I drive three hours to a random pub and three hours home again, to play two of my songs in public”. The Open Mic circuit was good enough for her back in 2008, and it’s good enough for a wide range of talented musicians here in London in 2023, so it’s more than good enough for me. If I had to drive “three hours to a random pub” to play music it might be different, but everywhere I need to be is less than an hour away by public transport. Don’t be surprised if I turn up sometime soon at your local with my trusty Lake Placid Blue Telecaster, ready to play a few tunes.