Bass Guitar at Thirty Thousand Feet 

hen you’re in a plane flying at thirty thousand feet above the surface of the earth, it forces you to think differently. It all changes, everything changes.

Because the sky becomes a different colour. It becomes so dark, it’s like the sky is carved from a solid thing, carved from a dark blue-black rock. It confronts you, challenges you to look at it anew. It’s dramatic. It’s life.

And it’s like you and the colour are alone out here, because it’s not you and the people anymore, like it is on the ground below. Down there, on the ground it’s all ground life, people life, dealing with people life, but up here you escape all that. You look around you now, on the aeroplane, in the quiet, hushed near-silence and you are grateful that it’s half-empty and the seat beside you isn’t taken.

Because then it’s like the people around you have chosen to escape from people as well, it’s a common choice, or a communal choice, and you feel relaxed, and inspired, that you have made a choice that others are glad to make too – you feel reassured about your feelings, your choices, your instinct. ‘I want to escape from people too,’ the others seem to be saying, including Stuart, the bass guitar player a few rows away who’s fiddling with his travel bag in the overhead compartment.

Me and my band spread out over the deserted cabin with as much space between us as we can at three o’clock in the morning at thirty thousand feet.

And because I’ve escaped from the distractions of people, and their claims, I feel I can concentrate on this dark blue coming at me, it’s like it’s some kind of being, on the other side of the glass – it’s like I am passing from the human world over into the non-human world.

Something prehistoric, perhaps, in that it has been around since the dawn of time. The sky I am meeting – it was here, that colour, and that size and spirit, for millions of years before humans walked on the planet. Just think of that. So I am losing myself, communing with something bigger and longer lasting than myself.

As for me? Well, I get to travel a lot. Trains and planes. Lots of planes. So I see the sky on the other side of the glass a lot.

I’m the girl you’ve seen on the telly. My face with its blonde bob and lipsticked lips singing into the microphone. Once my face was kept at school behind a row of desks – now I’m in The Top Twenty.  

When we released our first single and I got famous, I felt I was becoming myself. I was coming home. I was a stream gushing, no – a tank, no, a road, a volcano – I was me. I was someone I didn’t know I was. I was meeting myself. I was opening my own eyes to myself. And I was proving myself to those who knew me just what I could become – to my school friends who dismissed me, I was thinking, ‘Hey, get a load of me now!’

So I felt free for the first time. I was shooting up into the sky. When our first single was out, I was only nineteen. Six years ago – time flies. It was beautiful to think I had my whole life ahead of me. My face in our videos, my face in interviews in the newspaper, my hair and make-up professionally done, it transformed me, and became me, I felt so confident. I could be someone on stage who I never was at home.

Our new single is released next Monday and my glamorised face shall be on the cover of that in record shops up and down the country. I shall be bought by school kids and teenagers in their thousands. There was a nice thought in that, once, to think of all those teenagers united in buying my record.

Because on previous release days when the DJ played it on the radio, I lay on my bed and pictured all the listeners - the people in the cities with the orange streetlamps, the people in the stone grey tower blocks, and the people in the huddled villages behind the dark fields, all of them listening to that same song.

But it won’t feel the same for me next Monday. I loved all that once, but now I’ve met the blue on the other side of the glass, it pales away. Because I know this eternal blue will outlive me, outlast you, this eternal blue.

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