Playing in a band is a basic urge for most musicians. They start to think about it, feel for it and seek it out when they’re still in their mid-teens. For some kinds of music – be it orchestration or rock band arrangement - it is the natural form of expression: melody in company.

Getting together to practice, to rehearse and to jam is easy when you’re young. Long empty summers hold endless opportunities for playing, and once homework is done the rest of your time is your own. Lord, the uncounted hours of sitting around with a loose coalition of guitarists, drummers, keyboardists and singers working on arrangements, fiddling around with mixers and amps or just singing the hell out of something – great days.

But by your early twenties time is precious and there are obligations, choices & officially-sanctioned ways of spending time, and the band becomes an intrusion, a childish thing, a “waste of valuable time.”

People’s dreams of stardom in a touring band take second place to finding a house, keeping a job a marriage and family together, and all the things which make for a normal life. Anyway no one you know ever cracked the big-time – a few managed to keep their heads above the water as small-time musicians but, “that ain’t it kid.”

After a bit, life calms down a bit and there’s time to make music, and with time comes inclination. The joy returns and you remember the release of playing and singing and “selling the number”. Because you’re an adult now you realise that you must make time to practice, schedule regular rehearsals and fit in performances between your other commitments.

Unfortunately this kind of schedule only works at an introverted and personal level. It works for you as a musician but it doesn’t work for you as the performer. Because playing and singing to yourself is only half of music. Playing and singing for others - for the audience - is the gigantic other half, and that can’t be handled and managed and scheduled so easily.

Performance is extroversion.
It’s about what the music is and what it does; separate to your private worries and concerns. Music wants OUT. It wants to be loud and demanding and insistent and perplexing and it wants to emotionally blackmail the audience – make it cry and shout and stamp its feet and be swept up on waves of sound and emotion and the pure, sharp scent of music-sweat.

And THAT music demands more of you than just fitting in around a job, a carpool, TV sports and mowing the lawn.

THAT music needs you to get up and go, no matter how tired you are, or hung-over you are, or how wrung out you are about work and bills and the mortgage. THAT music makes your fingers bleed and your throat raw and your back ache and your feet burn. It makes you drive 30 miles in the cold to play for eight people. It makes you play for three hours straight for 3,000 drunks because the other band didn’t show. It makes you do five encores when you’re dripping sweat and completely out of ideas, because the audience keeps on stamping and whistling and calling for more.

THAT music has to be served on its own terms, not yours. But THAT music rewards its own by initiating them into the great mystery – lets its priests stand on the altar-stage and know that they are at one with the Note.

Anyone can pull together a jam session. Anyone can play three or four hot sets at a party or a barbeque. But that’s just music, not MUSIC. The shambolic riot of song and sound and booze and shouting which seems so great at the time is as nothing to the rewards of the well-crafted gig.

True performance is tight and strong and full of silent sound. The band strikes up together, plays together, arranges the notes and the instruments and the voices in a laurel wreath of resonance and holy harmony, ends each song together in a single chord, and strikes up the next with no need for unnecessary talk and chatter because the performance is not about the self but about the great continuum of sacred song which is a covenant between the gods of music, its players and its mortal and immortal audience. These are the sacred tenets of music: unity, melody, clarity and precision.

That’s why only a real, performing band gets to gig at a friend’s wedding. As soon as the musician must serve any purpose higher than personal gratification the music becomes part of a greater rite and must be served, delivered and honoured with the proper obeisance.

And how is the music properly served? Just as I’ve said: practice, rehearsal, arrangement and performance are the four sacred rites of music. They must be performed in the service of the music not of the self, because if the music doesn’t sound good you won’t BE good – no matter what other tricks you pull to get famous, or just to get the gigs.

Music has been worshipped, studied, practiced, performed and administered as rite for centuries. Music has its own gods and goddesses and its priest-practitioners. Even being in the audience can be a sacred act – receiving music as sacrament of some creative, gnostic or ecstatic rite.

Even mass-market music merchants like Stock Aitken Waterman have to serve the music at some point in the process – though its service is more Low Church than High Rite. But there is nothing in the covenant which says music needs to be high art or even good taste. Music belongs to babies and to children and to Goths and to Metal heads and to Opera-buffs and to fans of Jazz and the Baroque, to Gregorian chanters and to screaming teens.

At its simplest all music needs is a backbeat and a hook. Easy, catchy, memorable, repeatable – the qualities of the earliest paeans of praise by the muses; whose name means “memory”.

Euterpe, the "giver of pleasure" is the muse of all music. Calliope the "fair voiced" is the goddess of songwriters and poets, with her writing tablet always at hand. Erato the "lovely" is the muse of love songs and cover bands, and holds a proto-guitar; a lyre.

Melpomene - “the songstress", is muse of, “ya’ done me wrong” numbers while her sister Thalia, the "Flourishing" is goddess to summer hits like “Convoy” and “Monster Mash”.

Terpsichore the "whirler" is the groovy muse, dancing with her lyre, pick in hand, strumming an air-guitar and stomping up a storm.

Clio, “the proclaimer” knows the history of every band, how long a song was on the charts, who left the band, and why, and who replaced him, all the way back to Orpheus. While “heavenly” hippy sister Urania knows every star in the heavens, rock or rockn’roll, and holds the secrets and mysteries of past, present and future.

And the great veiled queen, Polyhymnia, "She of Many Hymns," is muse to the great choir of rockn’roll immortals who have gone to meet their makers. It is she who knows who was truly great and she who separates one-hit wonders from the eternal singers-of-praise.

These ARE the divas of rockn’roll; the queens of soul; the groove-goddesses. When you sing about your lady-love or the girl or guy you left behind you’re singing to THEM. They listen, they encourage, they suggest a better rhyme or a different key and they smile and swoon and shimmy and shake when you hit the mood square-on and rock the house down.

And they are one of the many reasons why playing and singing in a band is important, and valuable, and “an art worth your learning”.

Yes it’s difficult.
Yes it’s demanding.
Yes it’s sometimes more frustrating that fun.
But the rewards are great and valuable at a deeply personal level and it allows you to experience the infinite and the eternal while upright and in company. Sounds like a great deal to me.