I was outside having a quick
cigarette in between sets at the Guitar Bar last night when a disheveled looking
man who appeared to be in his mid-forties approached looking for money. People looking
for spare change is something you get used to, and I’m sorry to say it is
something you become cynical about so you categorise everyone together in the ‘it’ll
be spent on booze and drugs’ file and ignore their pleas. The worst offenders
are the “I need 65p to get home to Leicester” brigade, although when you
consider that it costs 2.20 to make a single journey across Nottingham by tram,
travelling to Leicester is a bargain. I was once asked when coming out of a
shop if I had a ‘spare’ cigarette, so I made him wait until I’d removed the wrapping
and counted them all before apologising that there were twenty in the packet
and therefore I didn’t have a spare one.
Anyway, this guy last night
was different from the usual people who just ask for money, he offered to sing
me a song. I realised that the chances of a homeless person knowing that I was
a champion of undiscovered music and the only person connected to the
Nottingham music scene who would give an honest appraisal of his song were
remote, and I didn’t want a homeless person humiliating himself by singing for
his supper in front of me like a court jester. Not really wanting to give him
money I gave him a couple of cigarettes and he seemed quite happy with that. As
he turned to leave he asked me my name and I told him, then he told me his;
Whycliffe.
I didn’t recognise him as it
is such a long time since his name has been bandied around the music business.
Whycliffe was a Nottingham musician in the days before there was such a thing
as the Nottingham music scene and has a sad story. There might be those who don’t
even recognise his these days, which should act as a cautionary tale to anyone
connected to the music business in Nottingham. The man asking for money once
toured with James Brown and enjoyed a moment of chart success; he also went out
with a pre-surgery Danni Minogue. When I returned home from the gig I turned on
my computer and Googled him, the most recent article I could find was an interview with Leftlion from 2005, by which time he was already a homeless
nearly man singing for change.
This got me thinking about how
he has been allowed to get into this situation, would this treatment be
afforded the likes of Jake Bugg or any of our musicians? I considered a
charity/tribute gig in his honour to raise a bit of money for him, but then
wondered if that might not be so helpful when you think about it. It would be a
quick fix but not a decent solution. The idea of a benevolent fund for
Nottingham artists came to mind, something that will help rather than throw
money at the problem.
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