*Track 16
Map Ref. 41°N 93°W - 10th November 2018
Stuart couldn’t easily plot the course of his morning’s journey, from Blumenthal to Wire, via The Matrix, but he fancied Kevin Bacon had more than a little to do with it.
To be more specific; he suspected his mental roadmap may have followed some neurological variation on the ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ theory, first postulated in the name of the American actor. Given the increasing interconnectedness of modern society, its argument ran, every single person, anywhere in the world, could be linked to anybody else through six, or fewer, social attachments. Stuart’s conjecture was that his brain cells might be wired to a broadly similar pattern.
This was a theorem he had been developing since Anne asked a throwaway question, back in Hawaii, around, “how the hell does your mind work?” She had asked this innocently, as a jokey rebuke for his distractedness, and Stuart chose to ignore it at the time. But it had preyed on his mind since. Just how did he make those seemingly random connections that often eked away hours at a time? Seeking to answer this conundrum, he tried applying the deductive principles of scientific experimentation.
When his train of thought started with x, travelled through y, and ended at z, what equation was needed to move between the three? If his morning had begun thinking about Heston in the shower (which was nowhere near as weird as it sounded), moved on via Trinity, and ended with him listening to ‘Nocturnal Koreans’, was it possible, retrospectively, to retrace all the contemplative links that had connected this chain?
It must have been a quiet news day as Five Live’s lead story had featured a homeless man who had brought a Melbourne knife incident to a speedy conclusion by ramming a suspected terrorist repeatedly with an empty shopping trolley, keeping him at bay until the police arrived.
Yet it had been the following item (probably even less newsworthy), an interview with Heston Blumenthal on the relationship between memory and taste, that had first captured Stuart’s imagination. Heston had claimed that any glass of wine, however cheap, tasted smooth if it was sipped while, “picturing someone you love dearly,” yet this self-same tipple became markedly more bitter if sampled whilst, “imagining somebody you dislike.”
Stuart had made a mental note to try the chef’s theory out with a beer that evening, but his cerebric process flow would likely have ended right there, strangled at birth, if it hadn’t been for the reporter’s subsidiary commentary. Researchers in neuro-gastronomy at Columbia University had, he added, validated Heston’s theory, by concluding that, “the tongue may not be necessary for our internal perception of taste,” with such sensation, “primarily being activated by the brain.”
Having reassessed the morning’s evidence ‘scientifically’, Stuart had thus been able to identify ‘neuro-gastronomy’ as the launch pad for his later flights of fancy. This phrase had prompted him to bring neuromancy to mind, which he had mistakenly taken to be the magical practice (from legend at least) of communicating with the dead in order to predict the future. Stuart had always held an interesting relationship with the paranormal; allowing him, on the one hand, to dismiss such beliefs as, “utter bollocks,” whilst simultaneously conceding that they made an acceptable, intriguing plot device for supernatural fiction.
His subsequent Googling of neuromancy though, to understand the concept better, was the point where a degree of chaos theory had entered his deductive flow. Stuart’s aging, faltering mind had, it transpired, simply misremembered the correct occultist term for conversing with the dead. This should instead have been necromancy.
The very first leg of his path from Blumenthal to Wire had thus been a misstep. Neuromancy wasn’t actually a word at all, simply a self-imagined corruption of ‘Neuromancer’, a science fiction novel by William Gibson. Stuart had never read the book, but it must have somehow ended up lurking around the nether regions of his brain courtesy of being the acknowledged source material for ‘The Matrix’ films.
Stuart wasn’t a big cinema goer. He had a huge theoretical interest in the medium, particularly when played out through the refracted minds of his favourite maverick auteurs (from Welles, through Scorsese, to Lynch and Tarantino), and loved a well-argued movie review (especially from Kermode, the Yoda of critics), yet, oddly, this passion fell short of ever really watching any films.
This was a problem he put down to attention span. Ideally Stuart could concentrate fully for around forty-five minutes (perhaps driven by the length of an album?), which he could just about push to an hour for TV shows. But with most films lasting ninety minutes (or two hours plus these days) he usually found his mind wandering well before any denouement.
There were honourable exceptions; ‘Citizen Kane’, ‘Godfather 2’, ‘Blue Velvet’, and ‘Reservoir Dogs’ would always qualify (as his earlier directorial list had suggested), and his earlier neuromantic error, ‘The Matrix’, made another strong candidate. Stylistically, Stuart thought, particularly with regard to its two lead characters, Neo and Trinity, this might still be the most visually striking movie he had ever seen.
This, in turn, explained the next backtrack-able stage of Stuart’s neural chronology; a leap of imagination from ‘The Matrix’ to one of its lead actors, Carrie-Anne Moss, as the aforementioned Trinity. Unlike her co-Canadian co-star Keanu Reeves (who had already experienced box office success with the ‘Bill & Ted’ films, ‘Parenthood’, and ‘Speed’) Moss had been cast as a relative unknown and, even more surprisingly, had singularly failed to leverage her subsequent global fame to secure more leading roles.
The ‘Matrix’ trilogy remained, by far, the highest grossing movies the actress ever made. She had been quite happy afterwards, it appeared, to take supporting roles in smaller cinematic releases and return to her TV career. The only time Stuart could recall seeing Moss since the ‘Matrix’ series ended, in 2003, had been as Shia LaBeouf’s mother in ‘Disturbia’, a reimagining of the old Hitchcock classic ‘Rear Window’.
If he stuck with straight lines of consciousness, Stuart’s next logical step might have thus involved Hitchcock, or perhaps diverted slightly to James Stewart or Grace Kelly, but it had been this juncture where his abnormal amygdala gate-crashed the perusal party. Conscious there remained time in hand before this month’s ‘Challenge’, Stuart had subliminally, almost now by tradition, concluded he should play some music to help calm himself for the stressful task ahead.
Even then, it would have made more sense if this monthly Pavlovian juke-box reflex had jumped directly to Rihanna’s ‘Disturbia’, but instead, through a ‘Rear Window’ in Stuart’s consciousness, his brain had short circuited and thrown out an alternative, cinematic song selection; ‘The Other Window’, a track from Wire’s third album ‘154’.
So, in a slalom-like synaptic summary: Blumenthal/neuro-gastronomy had led Stuart to neuromancy/necromancy, deviated off to ‘The Matrix’ (featuring Carrie-Anne Moss), turned back on itself to ‘Disturbia’/’Rear Window’, before finally zig-zagging to ‘The Other Window’/Wire.
Having successfully retraced his morning’s diversions therefore, Stuart had been able to conclude, using a new variation on the strict principles of Baconian theory, that he had managed to take Heston down to the Wire within ‘five degrees of obfuscation’!
###
Wire’s ‘154’ would always be a record Stuart had a soft spot for.
The album completed a sentimental triptych, alongside Buzzcocks’ ‘Different Kind of Tension’ and Gang of Four’s ‘Entertainment’, their covers sharing a remarkably coherent set of modern art imagery, as if they somehow belonged together. While he would never be able to recall the precise purchase details for any of the remainder of his record collection, Stuart knew for certain that he had bought these three LPs, as a job lot, from Record Collector in Broomhill, Sheffield, at around 2pm on Friday 5th October 1979. This was the day he left home (never to return).
After his mum and dad had driven away, Stuart was left at his new hall of residence, pretending not to feel lonely or tearful. Having gathered himself, realising he needed to get on with things, he had figured there could be no better way to celebrate his new-found independence than with a trip to the nearby shops to buy some music. Stuart couldn’t remember now if he had also bought himself a pint, at one of the pubs he would soon come to know as the Broomhill Five, but retrospectively he hoped he had. Adding a beer or two, alongside his album purchases, would definitely have entailed, “starting as he meant to go on,” in spending his student grant.
Albums from Record Collector (which pleasingly remained a Broomhill stalwart today) would have cost around £3 or £4 in 1979, making Stuart’s reckless record outlay a tenner’s worth. Enough for twenty pints of Tetley’s!
According to Discogs however, he could now sell these three albums for over £140. Even allowing for four decades of inflation, his freshman purchases had almost trebled in effective value, making Stuart’s virginal Sheffield shopping spree a fine investment (certainly a better one than the beer).
Beyond any monetary consideration though, these LPs also delivered an unplanned, enduring social premium. Arriving back ‘home’, record bag in hand, Stuart met his first fellow students in the hall corridor, and one of them, having introduced himself as Charlie, had shown an immediate interest in Stuart’s purchases. He appeared to share a common taste in music. Thirty-nine years later he still did.
As is typical for Wire, ‘154’ contains an eclectic mix of songs and styles. Some parts feature strange, maladjusted pop music, as evidenced by ‘The 15th’ or ‘On Returning’s enticing promise of, “an evening of fun in the metropolis of your dream,” while other elements are more challenging, frankly weird. Stuart loved the whole album but, as he was playing it again today, there were, as normal, two tracks he was waiting to hear.
‘Map Ref. 41°N 93°W’ remained the only song Stuart knew with a set of coordinates for a title, which would be intriguing enough in itself, but the way the track maps out (musically and lyrically) manages to pinpoint his all-time favourite Wire moment.
The song’s titular location is, apparently, Centerville in Iowa; a town which Graham Lewis (a geographer with a fascination for maps) chose to represent the poetically licensed, if not precise, middle of the Mid-West. As a similar cartographic obsessive, Stuart had never been able to resist the song’s catchy chorus, with, “lines of longitude and latitude,” continuingly interrupting the singer’s, “train of thought.”
‘The Other Window’ however, one of Stuart’s earlier meditational staging posts, was an altogether more surreal affair. One he had always regarded the album’s centrepiece.
Largely consisting of a hypnotic, spoken word lyric, played out over minimalist electronica, the song starts innocently enough, with Bruce Gilbert’s simple tale of passing time on a rural French train, taking in the views from his carriage window. But then things take a startling, cinematic turn. Replacing this idyllic scene, our observer spots a black horse getting itself tangled in a barbed wire fence, a graphic image that gets even darker as we’re told, “the more it struggled, the more it strangled.”
But the song’s killer line (literally), the one that still managed to disturb Stuart afresh on every listen, is the protagonist’s final reaction to this equine demise, “he turned away, what could he do, the other window, had a nicer view.” Two minutes of perverted ‘pop’ that somehow contain the perfect, nightmarish script for a David Lynch movie.
While most of Stuart’s maverick hall of fame had earned their places individually, Wire seemed, possibly uniquely, to have qualified as an aggregate. Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, and Bruce Gilbert (throwing in drummer Robert Gotobed for good measure) were all separately influential, equally experimental, and to this day Stuart was never really confident who was responsible for writing, or indeed singing, any individual Wire song. Yet, like some musical extrapolation of communist collectivism, the band had become a living incarnation of an Aristotelian truth; the whole length of Wire was greater than the sum of its strands.
This rare cross-band breed, made up of conflicting but complementary inputs, also ensured Wire featured strongly on one of Stuart’s odder categorisations; his list of uncategorizable acts.
In a genre as inherently self-repeating as rock’n’roll, with its limited set of employable tools of the trade, it is always hard to avoid the scourge of comparison. Audiences want to know who an artist resembles; so Stuart’s key criteria for this list was the inability to put forward any sensible comparators. These acts should never sound like anybody else and, just as importantly, nobody else should ever sound like them either:
5) Super Furry Animals – As Gruff himself once put it, “maybe, because English is my second language, I just translate mundane clichés from Welsh, and they sound original.” That might explain a lot.
4) PJ Harvey – whether judged by her own words, “there’s so much you can do laying words on a bed of music,” or Nick Cave’s, “work as narcissistic and egomaniacal as my own,” Polly gathers all the ingredients necessary for an uncategorizable recipe.
3) British Sea Power – as an online fan site puts it, “the reason I love BSP is they pick unusual things to sing about.” A simple summary, which could surely be improved by adding that the band also find ways to sing about such ‘unusual things’ unusually.
2) Portishead – Wikipedia strives to categorise the band as, “pioneers of trip hop, fusing hip hop and electronica until neither is recognisable,” an attempted description which just screams uniqueness.
1) Wire – described by one critic in 1987 as, “the Van Gogh of post punk,” because, “nobody cuts their ear off, but they make daring, unheralded music while everybody’s attention is elsewhere”. Thirty years later they were still doing it!
Stuart found the Van Gogh comparison apposite. Like Vincent, if you measure Wire’s artistic impact by their influence then it’s way out of proportion to their own success.
Van Gogh only ever sold one painting (for just 400 Francs) during his lifetime, and Wire have similarly eschewed commerciality. Their highest selling single ‘Outdoor Miner’ never even made the Top 50. But neither painter nor band ever allowed such obscurity to detract from their art. Van Gogh, working right up to his death, produced a prolific body of nine hundred paintings, many of which now sell for millions; while Wire (or Newman and Lewis these days, with Gilbert lost to solo electronica) are still busy releasing a steady stream of challenging, absorbing new music.
Stuart decided he could put this opinion to the test (and, in doing so, finally completed his morning’s contemplative cycle) by following ‘154’ with his favourite new millennium Wire record, 2016’s ‘Nocturnal Koreans’. An album where musical diversity and delightfully abstruse lyrics remained the band’s raison d’etre.
The very best Wire songs had always challenged Stuart, made him feel like there must more to uncover, if only he were smart enough to decipher it. And once again, here, he was left feeling perplexed over who (or what) the ‘Nocturnal Koreans’ were, and then frustratingly unable to unpick whatever truth he felt sure must lay within ‘Pilgrim Trade’s labyrinthine lyrics; whose, “sins are forgiven,” and whose, “indulgences gained,”?
Having spent decades failing to untangle Wire though, Stuart accepted it was unlikely he was about to accomplish the task now, in the short time left before today’s ‘Challenge’. So, allowing the album to continue in the background, he switched his attention to the more convoluted approach to quizzing they had agreed to take later.
###
This plan started with Joe’s insistence, off the back of their Hawaiian success, that he wanted to stay involved in the ‘Challenges’ going forward, irrespective of geographical difficulties. “We’re down to the last hundred now Dad, from twenty-three thousand,” he had reasoned, “you’ll need all the help you can get. I can get us linked up.”
This fledgling offer of assistance had then grown arms and legs (and minds) after Joe picked up on the clearly intrigued, “how did it go,” messages that Stuart had received from both Ed and Charlie following their latest qualification. It was high time, Joe had argued, “to get the Budapest band back together,” especially with the next clue scheduled for a Saturday.
To facilitate this Joe had subsequently set up a new ‘Challenge’ WhatsApp group, which the others had willingly signed up to, and his cunning plan had taken root.
At 8.55am today (given they had now left BST behind again), or 9.55pm in Honolulu, Joe was going to kick off a group call through the app; a technical task Stuart had been only too happy to leave with him. Given the contest’s single login/password restriction however, Stuart needed to stay in sole charge of mechanics, and it would be his logistical responsibility later to distribute the ‘Challenge’ details to Joe, Charlie, and Ed as quickly and efficiently as possible post publication.
Stuart confirmed once again (like repeatedly checking if a door is locked) that the preset email, with all their addresses, was still sitting in his Drafts file. It should be a simple job, taking seconds, to cut and paste the latest clue wording and send it out, yet having this additional task to complete was worrying Stuart disproportionately.
Despite this fear of process failure though, Stuart accepted he would be grateful for the additional help. Who knew how harsh this month’s cut was going to be (the fifty percent last time had been brutal)? He had already pre-briefed the widened team on the likely ‘repeat’ clue pattern they should expect (some beefed up variation on ‘Challenge 14’), suggesting they would probably need to decipher a series of clues, to uncover a set of abbreviations, and then combine these to find the overall solution.
###
Stuart used his final half hour to revisit a further review he had recently completed on the numbers and solutions to date. This had, once again, revealed little conclusive (an outcome he was now largely resigned to), but he still hoped, simply by keeping his analysis front of mind, it might just contain something that would help them later.
Numbers: 2, 4, 7, 12, 14, 15, 17, 24, 28, 31, 40, 43, 45, 48, and 56. With just five further ‘Challenges’ expected, it now seemed predestined this was all snaking its way towards the final one being number 69:
Another wasted hour spent amongst the internet’s mathematical hinterlands had simply reinforced Stuart’s view that this list constituted no sequence previously known to man,
He had, briefly, got excited by a theory that the gaps between each ‘Challenge’ number might be another variation on ‘numbers as letters’. The first four differences 2, 3, 5, and 2, had converted to WEB, but the subsequent sequence 12743932382 quickly became a totally unhelpful GDCICWH (or some similarly nonsensical variant), so,
The only real conclusion he could carry into today’s effort was a spectacularly unrevelatory one; that the latest ‘Challenge’ number was likely to be pitched somewhere between 57 and 69.
Solutions: Voltaire, Alpha, Palatine, Pillow Fight* (an extended phrase), Collette* (misspelt), Chameleons* (plural), Berlin, Dyslexia, Incubation, Dolphin, The Sound of Music* (a full title), Dominion, Bardo, Ophelia, and New Horizon* (another phrase). Stuart had paid closest attention to the asterisked items, having decided these formed a more interesting subset of outliers:
Any chance of linking all of these solutions got ever more remote as the series lengthened, and even restricting analysis to his more workable group of outliers had brought no joy,
A follow-up on his initial Honolulu Spotify search hadn’t panned out as he had hoped. There were lots of obscure ‘New Horizon’ songs, but only one which attracted any significant listenership; half a million plays for John Parr (of ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ fame). That surely had to be a dead end, and
Googling ‘New Horizon’ had drawn a similar blank. The only sizeable hit had been a Nottingham based new-age church. While unhelpful from a ‘Challenge’ perspective, this had at least provided a little light relief with a ‘no shit Sherlock’ inducing claim that their faith was, “bible-based and Jesus centred.”
Stuart found himself less disheartened, certainly less frustrated, than he had been when previous attempts at research had failed miserably. He increasingly felt such complexities were simply intended to be unknowable at this stage, and deliberately designed to become unlockable only as the ‘Challenge’ neared its conclusion.
There were only one hundred ‘Challengers’ left (until today at least) and Stuart suspected the other ninety-nine, or certainly the vast majority of them, were still as much in the dark as he was.
Even if he was wrong on this point and some of his competitors had already cracked the code (perhaps those annoyingly quick ‘Super Challengers’), then it still seemed unlikely to Stuart that they could yet force home their advantage. It felt as if any requirement to provide a link between the solutions was being held back to the end.
Stuart’s projected ‘Challenge’ calendar suggested they still had a few months left to catch any ‘smart alecks’ currently ahead of the game. He had watched enough marathons to understand that it was rarely the twenty-mile leader who crossed the finish line first. Allied to this observation was a persistent, if unspoken, resolve that this also still left him time to prove a musical link.
Fast approaching that metaphorical twenty-mile barrier, it was finally time to log-on. Stretching his earlier marathon analogy a little further, Stuart was pleased to have his trusty band of pacemakers gathered back around him, for the next mile at least. This was definitely no time to be hitting any sort of wall:
###
(To be continued, at 10am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 58’ in the meantime? If you think you have an answer, then please reply direct to this email post to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)