*Track 11 (continued)

“What time limit are we working to this month then?” Anne enquired as she joined him right on cue.

“I’m sticking with two hours again, should be good enough, even for a Sunday,” Stuart replied, “there’re five hundred places up for grabs, from six hundred competitors, that’s good odds, over 80% going through.”

“Woah, what’s this bit about Phase Two?” Anne had just got there, a few seconds after Stuart.

“I know, especially the ‘expect changes’ warning, that’s a bit scary. Guess we’ll find out soon enough, presuming we get through. No point worrying until then.”

“So, what about the rest of it?” Anne asked, having completed her first scan.

“Well, ‘Challenge 40’s a big jump, from ‘31’ last month, but I’ve lost the will to try working that one out. Suppose the most striking thing here is my music theory seems to have jumped right out of the closet.”

“What do you make of the artists then?’, Anne’s acknowledgement she was deferring to a fellow team member’s specialist subject.

“Well, it’s a bit FM heavy. The sort of garbage we get on the radio in America, driving to Joe’s matches. There’re a few outliers though; you wouldn’t hear much Sinatra, Traffic, or Turtles, and definitely no Spiritualized or James, they’re the real odd ones out.”

“But what do you think we have to do?” Anne cut to the chase, aiming to prevent Stuart’s summary from wandering off into a musical vacuum, “is it relevant how they’re set out in pairs?”

“That was my thinking too. I’m guessing we need to find some middle ground between each pair of acts. Maybe they’ve recorded songs with the same title, or they’re on the same label?”

“Let’s split them up,” Stuart then suggested, more pragmatically, “I’ll take the top five rows, you take the bottom four, let’s see what we can find. Twenty minutes?”

“Google, Wikipedia, and Spotify, here I come,” announced Anne as she moved away into a different room to get her allotted research underway.

Reconvening, as agreed, just before 10.30am, neither could honestly claim they had uncovered a whole lot. Stuart reported back his findings first:

- “Van Halen once cited Rod as a big influence, and they’ve both recorded for Warner Bros, but that’s about it,”

- “Drew a complete blank on any links between The Beatles and Whitney. Couldn’t help feeling a bit smug about that,”

- “Sinatra and Fleetwood Mac both featured high on a list of greatest break-up albums, and they’ve also both recorded for Warners. But more interesting, early Fleetwood Mac were actually signed to Reprise records, which Frank set up,”

- “Nothing really on the next one. I didn’t know Spiritualized were the last band to play The Hacienda, but I’m fairly sure Earth, Wind & Fire never did,” and,

- “On my last one, Dylan and Wacko Jacko both sung on ‘We Are the World’, which Jackson co-wrote, and they’ve both recorded for Sony.”

This update clearly lacked anything inspirational, but they agreed Anne should still complete the exercise:

- “You didn’t give me the easy ones. Traffic are impossible to Google. If they formed today, they’d need a web friendly name, like Chvrches. All I found was that Steve Winwood’s ‘Higher Love’ took over at number one from ‘Papa Don’t Preach’,”

- “Had the same issue searching James, but they’ve both been signed to Mercury. Otherwise, all I got was Bowie named himself after James Bowie, of the knife fame,”

- “Once I got past all the Ninja Turtles stuff, the only link was a band called Filter who’ve released covers of songs by both groups,” and finally,

- “I had the opposite problem with Foreigner and Chicago, they’re both so well known for soft rock they end up on loads of the same sites. They’ve even put out a joint ‘Best Of’ album.”

But that was it. There wasn’t even enough meat on these bones to qualify as slim pickings.

Anne beat Stuart to the obvious summary, “don’t think there’s much here, just a few people on the same label, and there are only a few big ones anyway. We haven’t found any proper connections. Do you agree?”

“Afraid so,” Stuart reluctantly admitted. “The one that still worries me is song titles, where it seems impossible to cross reference a search across two acts, but my instinct tells me we’re heading down the wrong track. If there were any significant links between these we would have found more. On the positive side, it’s only taken us half an hour to drive into a brick wall.”

“How do we reverse out then?” Anne asked, hoping Stuart had a fully scoped, ready to implement, Plan B.

“I’m not entirely sure. But when we’ve ended up down blind alleys on the ‘Challenges’ before it’s usually where we’ve tried being too clever for our own good. Not literal enough about what the clue’s suggesting.”

“And what’s that then?”

“Maybe we got sidetracked by them being artists, assuming middle of the road referred to something in their music, but what if that’s a deliberate red herring? We could try treating them just as strings of letters, maybe it’s as simple as needing to find the middle point of each?”

And, amazingly, it was.

If you counted the spaces within the artists’ names as another character, then the precise middle point of each act’s name translated as follows:

Rod Stewart = T, and Van Halen = H.

The Beatles = E, and Whitney Houston = gap.

Frank Sinatra = S, and Fleetwood Mac = O.

Spiritualized = U, and Earth Wind & Fire = N.

Bob Dylan = D, and Michael Jackson = gap.

Madonna = O, and Traffic = F.

David Bowie = gap, and James = M.

The Turtles = U, and Aerosmith = S.

Foreigner = I, and Chicago = C.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Another film Stuart disliked, but it was obviously the correct solution. The translation flowed perfectly, and the outcome it uncovered generically linked the full list (even if, pleasingly, Whitney Houston simply represented a void). All that time they had spent looking for a more convoluted explanation the answer had been staring them right in the face.

“Better get it entered then, we’re sorted. In less than an hour.” Anne concluded.

Having completed the required solution mechanics, successfully, Stuart next established that they had qualified within the first hundred ‘Challengers’, the first time they had beaten that motivational benchmark.

As Anne left, to busy herself with more mundane, but probably more productive matters, Stuart realised he felt perversely cheated. While the remaining five hundred ‘Challengers’ still had the single minded pursuit of a qualification place to distract them, he, if he wasn’t careful, could end up getting sucked back into the ubiquitously irritating Donald and Kim soap opera.

To ward off any such withdrawal symptoms, Stuart decided to revisit (and reconsider) the new warning message unveiled in ‘Challenge 40’. The prospect of entering a Phase Two, he reasoned, and the suggestion this would bring changes, could make this an opportune moment to re-examine their list of solutions to date.

Surely the competition’s second half would, at some stage, bring an expectation that these needed to be linked together, not forever remain a random list of disparate words and phrases. He added ‘The Sound of Music’ to the existing running list, kept in his ‘Challenge’ journal, but the annoying image this invoked, of Julie Andrews’ singing nun, didn’t help deliver any divine inspiration:

VOLTAIRE

ALPHA

PALATINE

PILLOW FIGHT

COLETTE

CHAMELEONS

BERLIN

DYSLEXIA

INCUBATION

DOLPHIN

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

Each time Stuart repeated this futile exercise, there was always one solution that unavoidably seemed to draw his eye. Pillow Fight. Something, in some dark corner of his mind, continually teased there was further meaning to this odd man out phrase, beyond the Spotify revelation it was the title of more than ninety obscure songs.

Even if he were right though, this suspected linkage was staying stubbornly hidden in the cerebral shadows. However hard Stuart tried he couldn’t drag it out into the light.

And then, suddenly, a realisation hit him.

Having completed today’s task, this was no time for agonising over potential problems to come. They should be celebrating their success. He needed to put into practice what he had been preaching earlier, to take another lead from his wise Aussie friends.

Stuart stopped perusing his answers list, forgot all about pillow fights, shut down his computer, went to the bottom of the stairs, and shouted up to Anne, “fancy Sunday lunch at the pub?”

###

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