Los del Titicaca
(High-Concept Art Performance)


I like buskers. I've always found something endearing about the whole concept of people standing in the freezing cold playing bad folk music for hours on end, while pedestrians ignore them. And then there are the dogs. Any busker worth their salt has a dog, preferably an ugly mutt on a tatty piece of string, whose sole job it is to attract children and old women.

My idea was to join the crowds at the Sunday Street Market and try my hand at busking. Hundreds and hundreds of folk tramp up and down Walking Street every Sunday, just looking for ways to squander their cash and waste an essentially boring day. So why not get a piece of the action?

I didn't have a dog, but I did have the next best thing. I had Ollie. Ollie is the kind of chap who is enthusiastic about putting on his socks in the morning, and I knew that the words 'inhibition' and 'dignity' were really not going to be issues. The negotiations went something like this:

"Hi Ollie, I want to busk bad rock songs on walking street and need a partner."
"Do I get to wear a funny hat?
"Sure."
"I'm in, see you Sunday."


I had the vision pretty clear in my mind: two people busking modern rock classics. Singing in bad Spanish accents. Wearing sombreros. Playing castanets and drums. We wouldn't have to learn the words to any songs as we'd just make them up as we went along, and hopefully the lack of any discernible talent would be masked by the vague possibility that what we were doing might conceivably be classified as art.

Sunday rolled round, and it was off to the Walking Street.

Settling down on Ratchadamnern with drums and castanets borrowed from 'real' musicians Sabai and a blackboard filched from The Writers' Club we were about ready to go. We stuck the blackboard up on a chair and chalked on our arresting band name, and quickly thought up slogan: "Los del Titicaca. From Europe! Arrigato". With Ollie perched with massive congas gripped between his thighs and me poised with castanets, the moment was approaching. And then the most fantastic thing happened. A bespectacled farang with an enormous beard and shorts pulled high up onto his gut walked up to Ollie. He looked at the drum, then Ollie, the drum, then Ollie and said "drum, huh?" Priceless. We hadn't even started and already people were confused.

When we eventually launched into the opening number - a kind of remote Basque interpretation of Yesterday - I wailed and clicked my castanets for all I was worth and Ollie thrashed the congo like a man putting out a fire in his pants. People stopped, people stared, people walked on. We finished with a delightfully avant garde ankle bell solo and a really rather daring leap into the air a la Roger Daltry circa 1967. Gathering our breath, we looked out into crowd (well, maybe not strictly crowd - an elderly woman with a grandson or great grandson was frowning at us) and got…nothing. No applause, no delirious screams, nothing. Wonderful!

On we ploughed through a set of classics almost tailor made for busking: Bohemian Rhapsody, Stairway to Heaven, Vivaldi's Guitar Concerto (adapted to the egg-shaker). There was a steady trickle of one baht coins dropping into our upturned tambourine, and Ollie was doing his dogged best to charm the old ladies and kiddies. Then, an apparently sane looking woman stepped out in front of us and dropped a fifty baht note for us. Fifty baht. A beer. We had earned a beer. Incredible.

We closed out with Yellow Submarine and collapsed into the nearest bar. In just over forty minutes, we had made a hundred and eighteen baht. Not bad. Worked out quite nicely to a beer each, in fact.


The reaction from most people had been strangely positive, though later that evening I bumped into an unhappy Frenchman with possibly the most ludicrous moustache ever conceived. Apparently he had been relaxing in his room listening to some "beautiful music" when he was disturbed by our racket. Beaming with pride, I informed him that he had witnessed a 'high-concept art performance' and should really be thanking us for bringing a dash of diversity to his Sunday afternoons. When he started shouting and spraying me with foul smelling fish snacks, I bolted for the door.

So, we came out of it all with a confused American, an irate Frenchman and a hundred and eighteen beautiful baht. Couldn't really have hoped for much more than that, though it would have been nice to get moved on by the police. Still, there's always next time: we're at the discussion stage concerning something involving rubber diving suits, Shakespearean tragedies and the hallowed art of mime.