When I was growing up, I always wanted to be in a band. The problem was that I was a teenage oboist and no one – apart from maybe Bach – wants an oboe in their lineup.
I had been tricked into taking home a lonely oboe from the school instrument cupboard after the music teacher told me with a straight face that it was “a bit like a saxophone”. I honked on its cursed double reed for five years and gave up just as I had started to make it sound quite nice. It was the late 90s and I was interested in boys and Britpop and wanted to be snogging on the prom in Morecambe after school, not playing in a woodwind ensemble.
Decades passed and I accepted that maybe I was only ever meant for the baroque. Then I married a bassist and mentioned one day that I’d always wanted to play the ultimate 80s instrument: the keytar. When I was young there was a cartoon called Jem and the Holograms, about a record company boss called Jerrica Benton who wore special earrings which, when rubbed, turned her into the “truly, truly, truly outrageous” Jem, a punky pop star. Jerrica’s neat blond hair turned into a shaggy pink mullet and suddenly she was the lead singer of the Holograms. With boring blond hair and the sort of safe face people ask for directions, I loved the idea of a cooler alter ego, though I fancied myself less as the frontwoman than as Jem’s sister, Kimber, who sometimes had a keyboard strung around her neck like a guitar.
I forgot I had even mentioned it until Christmas came around and I was presented with a huge, badly wrapped box containing a cherry-red keytar. We had fun playing with it for a few days and then it sat idle through a difficult few years as we tried and failed to have children. Towards the end of that painful period, my husband joined a band fronted by two younger women, Mia and Laura. They soon became close friends, and it was as if we were living in full colour again after a period in black and white.
Infertility can be a lonely business, with every pregnancy announcement a dagger to the heart. How refreshing, then, that Mia and Laura had no interest in having children. The band was their baby. While most women I knew went part-time to look after their offspring, Laura worked a four-day week, devoting Fridays to making music.
I found their attitude exhilarating, the perfect tonic at a tricky time. Like many of the involuntarily childless, I worried about dying a lonely death, conveniently ignoring the fact that care homes are full of residents whose children are too busy or selfish to visit. Mia and Laura plan to buy a “mansion” with other childfree friends as they age, forming a mutually supportive community with which to grow old disgracefully.
Sometimes people come into your life at exactly the right moment. While old friends busied themselves with potty training and playgroups, we had two new playmates. They never had to go home early to relieve the babysitter. They had no interest in the Gina Ford baby-sleep method, the lottery of primary school places or how to manage a toddler’s screen time. They spent their free time making art and having fun and I was thrilled to be a part of their world.
This summer, their keyboard player, an archaeologist, announced that he couldn’t play a gig because he had to go on a dig. Cometh the hour, cometh the keytar. Did I fancy standing in for him on a few songs? Yes I did. We played on the roof at Big Hands, a celebrated Manchester dive bar, and I felt as if a whole new chapter of my life was opening up. Within a few months I had fulfilled a long-held ambition to crowdsurf and the future seemed bright, not dark.
There are still moments of sadness for the path I never had the chance to take. But with a keytar strung across my chest, everything is more fun.
