#hungry for...

The piano. Ohhhhhh the piano. I’ve spent a large part of my life sat at one. And I think I might be obsessed. ‘But why the piano?’, people will ask me, ‘why not the guitar?’. And it should be easy for me to answer that question. But it’s not. I guess I’ve never really sat and thought about it. Why do I love the piano so much? Well, here we go…

Some of my earliest memories are visiting my grandmother’s house and seeing her play the piano. Now this piano wasn’t any ordinary piano, this was a Pianola. A pianola can play itself. These were invented in the late 19th century and I guess in some ways were the predecessor to the the Gramophone. You put a scroll in the top and pump the pedals on the bottom, and it would play a song without touching the keys. Seemed like magic like when I was kid. And it fascinated me. And when my grandmother decided to offer my sister some piano lessons, I begged to have them instead. ‘Only if I can have your swimming lessons’ my sister said. Sounded like a good enough deal to me. So each Monday evening, my grandmother and I would drive down to Bognor Regis to meet this cool old lady who would often bake me apple cakes, as well as teach me the piano. I don’t know if it was the apple cakes or the piano, but I immediately fell in love with it.

But as I grew older I grew tired of the lessons, and it became something far more personal. A place I could escape. Relax. Every evening I would get home from school and I would play the piano for a couple of hours. Just improvising, making up chords, experimenting with melodies. There was so much freedom, there were no rules. It became a  sanctuary from the frustrations of school and growing up in the suburbs. And there were so many different sounds I could make. I started listening to Elton John and Leon Russell. I was fascinated by how they used the piano to make songs. Then kind of working backwards, I discovered artists like Ray Charles and Mose Allison and Jerry Lee Lewis. It wasn’t long after my 13th birthday that I started writing songs myself.

There’s so much romance to a piano. So much beauty. Just the way the black and white notes are arranged along the keyboard. It’s so simple, is so innocent. That is until you take the front board off the piano, and a factory of hammers and strings are revealed. The engine of the piano. It all seems so confusing at first, but quickly you notice a pattern. And it’s a beautiful pattern. Some pianos take many months to make, some pianos have taken years. But you’ll never find two pianos that sound the same. Each has their own personality, their own sound. And pianos get grumpy. They like to be kept in the same place, and looked after. If you move a piano too often or you don’t tune it enough, it will refuse to play well. And they especially don’t like temperature change.