Doom Trivia Made an Album. Their English Teacher Reviewed It.

Davies, talking to Tes in 2015, still sounded astonished. A teacher had taken their nonsense, made in their spare time, listened to all of it, and then reviewed it. He named Mr Evans and his colleague Ed Lamont, who ran an arts festival and let the boys perform silly sketches in it, as his best teachers, for reasons he calls almost non-educational: they listened. When Mr Evans left, the band wrote him a goodbye song, which Davies is sure was hauntingly beautiful.

I have been listening to our eldest’s band through the kitchen ceiling since February. It is not the same thing.

The band is called Wet Tuesday. Four boys, a drum kit in our garage and a SoundCloud page with thirty-one plays, twenty-nine of them mine. They have an EP. It has five tracks and a cover photo of a bin.

I decided to be Mr Evans. Friday night, headphones, a pad of A4 and a glass of wine. By eleven I had filled one side and turned over. I had views on the bridge in track two. I had a view on the drummer, who is not my son and whose mother I see at pick-up. I wrote “regrettable” twice and underlined it once.

I should have read the second article first. Ed Lamont’s daughter told Shropshire Live in 2015 that her father, who taught at Thomas Adams for the rest of his career, was late on his very first day because her mother had locked him in the bathroom. “He was quietly outrageous,” she said. The great teachers of Wem, it seems, came from households with a sense of humour. I come from a household with a pad of A4.

On Saturday morning I left the review on our eldest’s desk, both sides. He read it at breakfast without comment, which I took as respect.

On Sunday Wet Tuesday released a sixth track, called Regrettable. It is my review, read out in full by the drummer over a single chord. It has 412 plays. None of them are mine, and it is, by a distance, the best thing they have done.