How I Ended Up Playing A Piano Accordion in an Empty Tube Train
Somebody once said that “a gentleman is one who can play the bagpipes, but chooses not to”, and I think that probably holds true for the piano accordion, too. It’s one of those instruments that only really works well in two places, and they are:
a.) The Amelie soundtrack.
and
b.) A raging inferno.
Why I happen to own one, then, is a mystery even to me. Even more of a mystery is that I can sometimes manipulate its horrific bellows in order to make a sound. Sometimes it makes a nice tune, and sometimes it makes a noise like a goat giving birth, and frankly it’s pot luck as to which emerges. I tend to roll a dice and hope for the best. Usually, I don’t had much need to play the thing, but I’ve been enlisted to play in a band of sorts with some friends who (perhaps unwisely) think they need a piano accordion. To give them credit, it actually sounds really nice with the guitar and the piano when I’m not cocking up the arrangement, or accidentally hitting one of the buttons on the side wrongly.
For those of you who have never had the privilege of carrying a piano accordion a long distance, consider yourselves lucky. They are a very strange shape, and there is literally no container on earth (other than, I suppose, a piano accordion case) that you can put them in. I found myself embarking upon a train journey a couple of weeks ago with a piano accordion slung across my back. You bump into things a lot with something like that. You bump into people and apologise profusely, before being roped into conversations about why you have a piano accordion on your back. You bump into doors as you go through them. You rather worryingly clonk the accordion to a level where you’re not sure if it’ll play, and secretly pray to the gods that it won’t.
Carrying the accordion on the tube is a completely new circle of hell. There is no dispensation for special treatment - on the tube, you could be carrying a euphonium, dressed as a rhino, whilst on fire and not be noticed. All the novelty disappears to be replaced by “a man is hitting me with something, I say fellow, remove him from the train”. Imagine my glee, then, my unrestrained elation, when I found myself on a train with only two other people down the other end of the carriage. And come the next station, they got off, leaving me along in the carriage.
This was one of those times, I thought to myself. I could either sit in silence, and regret it in the future, or I could play a piano accordion in a deserted tube train, between Edgeware Road and Marylebone.
So I did. And I enjoyed it. I played the Amelie theme. It felt strangely melancholy, until the dice of fate came up unfavourably and I made the goat noise.
