Tim Dowling: My band is making a music video – but I can’t play or act | Life and style

I I’m in a lifeboat station on the south coast, standing under the stern of a Shannon-class rescue ship, wearing a borrowed fishing sweater and holding a banjo. There are lights on me and I’m very much at sea.

My band recorded a Christmas song to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and we are here to do the music video. As usual, the shoot involves a group of young people ordering a group of old people to do mildly humiliating things while they film them, like a nursing home scandal drama set to music.

Behind the lights there is a small group of RNLI volunteers, their families and friends. They’re dressed in festive knitwear and have Christmas lights hanging over their heads, even though it’s November. The effect is a little confusing, but that’s not why I’m at sea.

Traditionally, Christmas songs are recorded in humid studios in midsummer by musicians in shorts. This song started even earlier: I’ve received emails discussing the arrangement dating back to February and raw recordings on my phone from March. At some point a rival version emerged – with a completely different melody – which we all thought was a huge improvement until, after a three-week break, we heard the two side by side and decided the original was better.

We were still tinkering with the song at the end of August – by this point I had already heard it several hundred times – but the banjo part, which I had recorded sometime in April, remained mostly intact, and that’s the reason I stopped See am: It was so long ago that I can’t remember how to play it.

I should emphasize that I don’t really need to know how to play it since we’re miming it to a backing track. I just have to look like I know how to play it. But that raises another problem: I can’t trade. The only way for me to give a convincing impression of someone playing a song is to know what the song sounds like. And I don’t do that. I sneak up on the guitarist who is standing right in front of me.

“Can you just turn slightly so I can see your fingers when you play?” I say.

“I think they want me to look in that direction,” he says.

“Then can you show me what you do in the second verse?”

“Okay, everyone!” says the director. “Stand ready to leave again.”

The crew has already filmed a static wide shot covering the entire band and the lifeboat behind us. Currently they’re focusing on individual members while we keep pretending to play through the song. They will reach me at some point.

There’s a pause while they adjust the lights. I walk towards our trumpeter, who is standing to my right.

“At the end of the first chorus,” I say, “is it A flat or F minor?”

“I’m only halfway in,” she says.

We do another take. I watch as the cameraman urges the violinist, who perfectly recreates the bowing of his role, even with a lens on his face. Now I sound like I’m playing the version of the song we abandoned six months ago: the notes clash horribly with the recorded playback.

I try to remind myself that it doesn’t matter. What’s more important, I think, is that when the camera finds me, I don’t have an expression of panicked desperation that would conflict with the emotional undertones of a Christmas carol about lifeboats. I practice a look of calm confidence and completely lose my bearings.

At the beginning of the next playthrough, I close my eyes and try to feel my way into the song. As I open it, I realize it’s my turn. The camera angles at me from across the room and approaches my right hand. As I play a series of false notes in time with the music, the camera pans to my face – the face of a man trying to use a chisel to remove a stripped screw from a door frame.

Then suddenly it’s over. The director says cut, the gathered crowd applauds, and the people around me start eating cupcakes. I think: you missed your chance to get this right.

It wasn’t until I later saw the final cut of the video that I realized how unfounded my fears were. I only appear fleetingly, there are almost no shots in which both hands are visible at the same time, and my pained expression could easily be mistaken for determination. Actually, I should have been more worried about my hair.

In any case, I feel saved.