Bashing Pianos Through an 8-inch Hole

My participation in a British piano-bashing contest

I’d never heard of such a thing. I was visiting the United Kingdom for a business meeting back in 1994, in the relatively remote backwater of North Devon. While sampling local beverages at an ancient thatched-roofed pub, I was invited to participate in the next day’s annual May Day piano-bashing competition. Having never heard of such a thing, and always eager to try new foods and experiences, I quickly agreed. I have long wanted to share this crazy true story with my readers, and today is the day.

Americans are not as common in rural parts of the United Kingdom as they are in cities like London or Oxford, and so the novelty of being a Yank in King Arthur’s beer-drinking court in North Devon, England, was an automatic invite for the piano-bashing event. I was also a regular gym-goer at the time, so I figured I would be up to the physical challenge.

Contrary to its unfair reputation for endless rain and smog, England generally has lovely weather – not too hot or too cold, and no mosquitos or deer ticks! The winter is dreary and gray, but the rest of the year offers many blissful Goldilocks days, like May Day 1994’s piano-bashing celebration promised to be. It was a beautiful British spring day in scenic North Devon.

Armed with a pick-axe, a 12-pound sledgehammer, and as many hearty pints of local bitters as our late-morning stomachs desired, our four-man team (three Americans and a Brit) gathered at the town center as hundreds of locals collected (beers also in hand) to observe this annual piano-degrading spectacle.

A pick-up truck had been driven into the town square, and seven pianos were plunked around the area. The rules were simple – each 4-man team was to destroy their assigned piano and push its pieces through an 8-inch hole cut through a sheet of plywood in the side of the pick-up truck. The seven teams went one at a time while all watched. The team with the shortest time won. All pianos lost.

Even here in the States, old stand-up pianos are a dime a dozen on Craigslist. They fall out of tune, keys are chipped, family children destroy them, or they were never worth much to begin with. They are extremely heavy and can be a real bear to move. A lot of that relates to what I learned about soundboards in the course of destroying our team’s May Day piano.

The key to winning a piano bashing contest is not brawn but smarts – pianos were selected by lot, and the winning team chose a piano with a weak soundboard. Cast iron shatters easily with a 12-pound sledgehammer, but even a pick-axe can’t diminish a solid, multi-plywood-layered soundboard. Soundboards don’t split like logs, and no saws were provided. It was the soundboard that stymied the slightly intoxicated ¾-American piano-bashing team of which I was a ¼-member.

Of course, I manned the 12-pound sledgehammer. As any gym-goer will tell you, training muscles for one purpose does not always translate well for another – I could bench-press nearly 400 pounds in 1994 (before I got sick with Lyme Disease), but when I swung that sledge, my muscles were unaccustomed. I tweaked my neck on one of the first swings in my first-ever assault on a piano. I kept going, but so did the neck spasms.

After humbly losing the piano-bashing contest to our amused British audience, we resumed the beer consumption, which temporarily relieved my neck pain. We had indeed completed the task, though – every single piece of our ill-fated piano went through that 8-inch hole while we laughed at the absurdity of the game, and the onlookers laughed in their turn at our awkwardness at the task.

“You must come again and compete next year, mates!” Of course we all agreed, though we never did.

Truth is very often much stranger than fiction. Old pianos may as well be obliterated by human ceremony before being recycled or landfilled. But the real value of my British piano-bashing experience was cultural, and unforgettable. The people of North Devon did not come together to dispose of pianos, but to celebrate their human community in a unique, good-natured way.

Perhaps we Americans should get together and bash some inanimate objects into submission together, instead of each other. A laugh at ourselves is overdue.