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I’ve lost count of the number of times that a bedraggled backpacker has turned up on my doorstep with an old bag held together with duct tape, an out-of tune guitar missing the E string and a scratched Jeff Buckley CD. And every now and then, when all the planets are in alignment, one of them turns up that can really play. And by that, I don’t mean a couple of Nirvana covers and some Fiona Apple thrown in for the ladies. I mean that they sit down, close their eyes and pour sounds of out this instrument that make you want to take off your shoes and dance in the dirt under a full moon.

Being in London there’s precious little space left for dirt, but last week there was a full moon, and something in the cosmic jigsaw puzzle must have fallen into place because there was such a guitar player staying in my hostel. He was sitting on the front porch, playing along to whatever tune was running through his head when he was joined by another guest – a harmonica player.

Now. The guitar is all very well and good. It’s an attractive instrument; sleek and rounded in all the right places with one long, elegant arm reaching out languidly like a French woman lying on a chaise lounge. But the harmonica. It’s not pretty. It’s not sleek, or stylish or elegant. It’s squat, stubby and cold. It takes a heck of a man to make a sex symbol out of a harmonica. But, like I said, the planets were all lined up and expecting a show – and we couldn’t fail to deliver, what with the barefoot dancing guitar player and the warmed-handed harmonica man.

They started out slowly, feeling their way around each other, testing the water (or air waves, as it were), neither wanting to over power the other, observing the tightly woven international code of Jammers’ Etiquette. Gradually, as they became used to each other, the human courtesy gave way to something more instinctive and un-measured (regulated). The music flowed back and forth between the two of them, pitching and tossing on those waves, hard and defiant but then coyly dancing back into itself, like smoke re-inhaled between a woman’s red painted lips.

It was magic. We stood out in the road, needing to be under the sky, to feel the moonlight on us. I was frustrated by the concrete and asphalt – we should have been a shack somewhere on the edge of swamp. Bullrushes growing up through the holes in the floor, three legged chairs perched manically around an old wooden box being used as a poker table. Whiskey poured by a one eyed prostitute.

And so that night in London, the home town of all that is cool and ssssslick, we danced in the road, all barefoot and closed eyes, heads thrown forward, humming along where we could. We stamped out feet, clapped our hands, whooped, hollered and really, really lived.

Story by Jess Greatwich, Manager, Astor Quest

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