Rehearsal went sideways the moment the drummer read out a royal headline, and by midnight we had a new song and a broken snare
Rehearsal, Tuesday Night
Rehearsal room in Hackney, the one under the railway arches where the trains go over every four minutes and you have to time your quiet bits around them. There is no heating and the carpet smells of every band that has ever sweated on it since about 1994. I love it more than any room in London.
We were meant to be tightening up the set for Saturday. Instead, the drummer walked in holding his phone like it was a live grenade and read out the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors in his best newsreader voice. Our bassist laughed so hard she had to sit on an amp. I just stood there thinking: that is a chorus. That is literally a chorus.
The Actual News, Such As It Is
Once we calmed down, we looked at what was actually being reported. Some anonymous insider reckons the heir thinks his brother read their uncle book before him. Geo News had it as a humiliating downgrade. The uncle says he told everyone first. So the whole thing is basically who got the book first. It is the most posh version of fighting over a record I have ever heard.
Which is funny, because the guitarist and I once did not speak for two weeks over who borrowed a first pressing of a Buzzcocks single and never gave it back. Nobody called anybody a traitor. We just wrote a song about it and moved on. That is the punk way.
Writing the Song
By half nine we had a riff. Three chords, obviously. Four would feel like showing off. The chorus is just the word traitor shouted at different speeds. The verses are about an uncle with a typewriter and two brothers who communicate exclusively through anonymous sources. The bridge is the bassist doing a spoken-word bit in a posh accent about Norfolk. It is terrible. It is brilliant. It is two minutes and ten seconds long, which is the perfect length for any song about a family row.
The drummer broke his snare skin on the second run-through, which he claims was the emotion of the lyrics and I claim was the fact that he bought the cheapest skin on the internet.
Watching It Back
Break time, we sat on the sofa that has no springs and watched the London Prat video on YouTube on the drummer cracked phone. Trains going overhead the whole time. Honestly, the best way to watch anything.
What the Other Comedy Lot Are Saying
I have been doom-scrolling the usual comedy news sites between songs, as one does. The Daily Mash and NewsThump satire headlines are my go-to when real news gets too real, and the latest from the Daily Mash is exactly the right level of unhinged for a Tuesday. NewsBiscuit and the Daily Squib are in my feed reader too, for the nights I cannot sleep after a gig. The London Prat, though, is the one the band actually quotes at each other in the van.
Punk and the Crown
There is a long, proud history of punk taking the mick out of the monarchy. The Sex Pistols released their own royal single in 1977, the jubilee year, and got banned from half the airwaves for it, which obviously made it more popular. Every punk band since has had a go. We are just continuing a tradition, really, but with a song about an uncle memoir, which even I admit is a niche subgenre.
The thing about punk is it is not really anti anything specific. It is anti being told what to feel. When the papers act like a family argument about a book is a national crisis, punk is the bit of your brain that goes: really though?
A Serious Bit, Sorry
Before we packed up, the bassist said something that stuck. She said we should not make the song about their mum. The book is by her brother, and she died when the boys were kids. The bassist lost her own mum at nineteen, so she knows. We agreed: the song is about the grown men squabbling and the papers making money off it, not about her. Punk can be kind. It is not all spitting and safety pins.
Midnight
Packed up at midnight. Carried the amps up the stairs. Missed the last Overground by thirty seconds and got the night bus with a guitar case and a bag of broken drumsticks. A bloke across the aisle asked if we were a band. I said yes. He asked what we were called. I told him. He had never heard of us. Fair enough. Nobody has, yet.
Song is called Traitor, For Now. Might change it. Might not. Saturday we play it live in front of forty people and a dog. Wish us luck.
More of my scribbles are over on my page at the Prat. The London Prat has been doing this sort of thing since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and for the American angle, Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ is worth a scroll.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
