He doesn’t have the key and doesn’t know when to come in…

I recently bought a banjo. A five-string, Countryman closed-back affair which for the last fortnight, I have been plunking and flailing on through the long dark night of the sofa, much to the consternation of Dec the dog.

Well, I say ‘bought’. What actually happened was a sort of enactment in fiscal terms of a banjoist joke (how do you tune a banjo? A hatchet; there are millions more). I was keen to buy a rather lovely Gibson 335 copy (Radiotone, originally a Czech brand  but made, as everything is nowadays, in China) and the Facebook seller decided to include a banjo in the deal. He threw it in. (What, you mean he just threw it…)

And I’ve always wanted a five-string. To add – and the truth will out – to the four-string and the ukulele banjos that adorn  my study walls.

The truth is, I’ve got bit of a history with banjos. The first album I bought, aged 10, with my own money, was called Banjo Jamboree, a now-collectible compilation featuring bluegrass legends like Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and the Clinch Mountain Boys. To be honest, at the time  I thought banjos and guitars were pretty much the same thing, and as guitars were the coolest pieces of wood and wire on the planet, banjos must also be wonderfully hip. How wrong can a poor boy be? It did not compete with my pal Stewart’s Hendrix LPs.

But I think too there was a very early imprinting of banjoism, courtesy of my father’s Uncle Robert, a mysterious figure in our family about whom I learned more in the last weeks of my dad’s life than in all the previous decades. My dad lost his father very young in a Lanarkshire pithead accident, and Robert became hero, mentor and guide. He ran a chain of newsagents and tobacconists in the Falkirk area, sometimes having to deal, especially during World War Two, with some extremely…difficult people. In the last week of his life dad told me that “Robert used to sleep with a gun under his pillow.” And he played the banjo.

Did I, as a very small child, hear Great-Uncle Robert playing the banjo? I don’t know. I do have his banjo though, the four string that has  sat mute and unplayed on a mantlepiece for the last half century or so. I’ve never tried to get a tune out of it.

I have had a go at the ukulele banjo that belonged to my wife Susan’s Aunt Ruby. It has an interesting history, as did Ruby, who was once, with said uke, an entertainer aboard the Anchor Line ships running between Glasgow and America.

The five-string that arrived with the electric Gibson has kind of taken over my musical life. I have started listening to banjo music, including the wonderful and more than somewhat strange album Banjoland, by original member of the Incredible String Band, Clive Palmer. It’s English banjo, not bluegrass, and much loved by the likes of Billy Connolly, who has always been a banjo player and an exceptionally good one.

It’s true to say that the banjo is a divisive instrument, and that like the bodhran, that hand-drum it closely resembles, someone’s insistence on playing it in diverse company can cause, well. Friction. The thing is, a banjo is loud. Mistakes made on a banjo will be audible to all.

Like the bodhran, the banjo has ancient origins, though the instruments came to modern prominence by different routes – a version of the banjo from Africa to America on slave ships, the bodhran to Ireland as ‘the poor man’s tambourine’. Tambourines go back to the Biblical middle east.

And yes, I have a bodhran. It was made for me in the Black Isle by the legendary Iain Macdonald, and comes comp[lete with some goat hair on the home-cured skin. I always remember picking it up at the same time as two witches from a local coven arrived to commission some ritual drums. How very Black Isle…

Have I ever played either the bodhran or the banjo in public? No. And I do not intend to. Unless I’m made an offer I can’t refuse. As old acquaintance Carol Laula told me last week: The definition of a gentleman is someone who can play the banjo, but doesn’t.

I will however make an exception for another old friend, JJ Jamieson of the band Bongshang…have a listen to them here…

Or indeed Gary Peterson and Hom Bru.

And there’s this…illustrating the great secret of the five-string banjo: It’s tuned to an open G chord, and is thus very easy to play…badly.