You are probably familiar with the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation”, the idea that you are within six steps, or “six handshakes”, of everyone else on earth. When I first came across the idea I realized that my quickest route to the 7.9 billion other people on the planet is through the church hierarchy. I have met Archbishops and Cardinals. They knew me well enough to remember my name, and that puts me one step away from the Pope. From there you can get to figures in authority (clergy, royalty, politics) in pretty much every country and then within three steps you can get to everyone else.

More recently I have been thinking about musical degrees of separation. If you have played music with other people, how many steps will it take you to get to every singer and musician on earth? How many steps before you get to Elvis Presley, Jimmy Page or Bob Dylan? I figure that being one step from the Pope gets you around the planet pretty quickly. Who, in musical terms, would get you easily to every other performer on earth? Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr would be a good start. If you played music with either of them you would have over 60 years’ worth of connections to performers across the globe. Ringo might be the better option. He has played with so many different bands, and on so many sessions, that he must be connected to an even wider network than Paul.

I have been thinking about this more than usual because I have been playing with far more musicians this year then ever before, for reasons explained in this piece. In that piece I mentioned going to a music night in Harlesden and meeting someone I was at school with. He is a far more accomplished musician than I am, and has played far more often over the last 30 years, even when he was working full-time as a psychiatrist in the NHS. As a musician he goes by the name of Slim. One of his more notable performances was at Ronnie Scott’s nightclub in Soho, playing keyboards for Allen Toussaint.

I knew some of Toussaint’s work, especially on a couple of US #1s: he wrote “Southern Nights” (Glen Campbell, 1977) and produced “Lady Marmalade” (Labelle, 1975). But there is so much more, from his early days in New Orleans right through to his death in 2015. He produced “Venus and Mars”, the 1975 album by Paul McCartney and Wings. It’s possible that Slim has played with Paul McCartney too, but if not he is only one step away, having played on stage with Allen Toussaint.

Earlier this month Slim joined my son and me on stage at the Dublin Castle in Camden Town to perform a couple of numbers. During the summer I bought my son a cajon, that box-shaped percussion instrument that you can sit on as you play. You’ve probably seen them. We have rehearsed enough to get up on stage and play as a duet (me on guitar and vocals). Slim joined us on bass, and our favourite barmaid Paula joined in on vocals to complete an under-rehearsed quartet. We ran through Slade’s 50-year-old Christmas #1 (“Merry Christmas Everybody”) and “Mad World” (the Christmas #1 from 20 years ago). It was fun. It also means that my son is now one musical step away from Allen Toussaint, and just two steps away from Paul McCartney. That’s pretty good going for someone who has only appeared on stage a handful of times.