*Track 3
Someone Who Cares - 10th October 2017
Prejudice may lurk behind many disguises, Stuart mused, but a shark costume surely had to be something of a first.
The proverbial slow news day, a torpid Tuesday maybe, had seen today’s third item on Breakfast TV feature a man in Vienna fined €150 by the police for refusing to remove the head of his shark suit. An on-the-spot charge levied, over zealously you would suspect, because the offender’s promotional garb had contravened Austria’s newly introduced ‘burqa ban’, a law that aped similar controversial restrictions imposed by several other European countries, led by France.
The wording of this legislation extended to any full-face covering, theoretically avoiding any accusation of religious bias, although perhaps, it might equally be argued, seeking to mask its true purpose? Our unnamed perpetrator had, “refused to take off any part of his comedy costume,” (prompting Stuart to ponder if there could ever be a seriously intended shark suit?), arguing that it needed to stay fully intact for him to effectively promote McSharks, a local electronics store. As a result, the Viennese police judged, the ‘shark’ had fallen foul of their new law. A few cyclists wearing scarves, to avoid the cold, had also been fined, undoubtedly demonstrating, in the eyes of Austrian legislators, that their new ban could never be considered, as some critics had been cruelly suggesting, in any way Islamophobic.
A story already dripping with more irony than a Euripedes play had still found room for a final unintended punchline. One Stuart couldn’t help being amused by despite the depressing bigotry of such laws or, worse still, the nakedly cynical excuses trotted out to camouflage their racist nature. The final quote from our shark man, to explain his actions, in what Stuart really hoped had been a meditated historical barb at such authoritarian, frankly fascist, practices was that he was, “only doing my job.”
Tuesdays were another of Anne’s workdays, so with no one around to rant to about such idiocy, and conscious solitary haranguing really might qualify as a form of early onset madness, Stuart chose to draw a veil over burqa banning, put the subject into purdah, and move on. Today, as if he could forget, marked another month, another ‘Challenge 69’ deadline.
Anne had left him a message on their chalk board, “good luck at 10, call if you need my help AGAIN.” Her gently mocking capitals at the end were a nice touch, but also served to reinforce Stuart’s determination to fly solo this time, to successfully complete October’s mission alone. It had taken him a while to calm down last month, following Anne’s unauthorised, precipitous punt on her ALPHA solution, but he had to concede eventually that his exasperated, “what if you’d been wrong? We’d have been down to one chance,” had been a largely unjustified, certainly superfluous, complaint. Anne’s answer had been correct and secured them safe passage to the next ‘Challenge’.
His check on the website’s counter straight after Anne had unveiled her ‘Congratulations’ message confirmed they had been around the 550th contestant to successfully pass ‘Challenge 4’, so comfortably placed within the top ten percent. September’s totalizer had though taken less than thirty-six hours to reach its reduced 6,600 cut off, response times presumably accelerating as a shallower pool of ‘Challengers’ demonstrated a greater commitment to the cause. The site’s upfront messaging to, “be warned it may take some time,” had implied ‘Challenge 69’ was destined to become a marathon and this seemed to be mapping out in practice. Albeit an oddly constructed marathon with long periods of inactivity punctuated by a series of short sprints. They might be getting through the competition’s early heats comfortably for now, but Stuart could already foresee a time when their steady Farah paced approach may need replacing with some more explosive Bolt like quizzing.
Nothing more had yet appeared anywhere online regarding ‘Challenge 69’, its carefully crafted closed community structure seemed to be functioning perfectly. With no signposting on the direction the quiz setters intended taking their remaining contenders next, or indeed why, there had been little Stuart could do over the last month except wait. All he had go on so far were two unexplainedly even numbered clues (presumably today’s ‘Challenge’ would be number six) that had then generated two equally disconnected solutions VOLTAIRE and ALPHA. A largely fruitless web search attempting to find a link between these answers had yielded just an OK (if intensely repetitive) electronic dance mix titled ‘Alpha’ by a group named Voltaire, released on some obscure Parisian label, which didn’t help at all.
Stuart had a gut feel these ‘Challenge’ outcomes must eventually prove more than just a random set of quiz solutions, but even if his assumption was correct it was still nigh on impossible to start identifying any connection from just two variables.
Thankfully the overly familiar strains of ‘Hoppipola’s instrumental section, being used (or more pertinently overused) as the background music for the next news report, proved enough to distract Stuart from any further unproductive agonising over the paucity of his ‘Challenge’ research. Instead, the tune suggested a new musical theme, another list for consideration. His favourite instrumentals. Unlike ‘Hoppipola’ though, now routinely misemployed by advertisers and programmers alike as an instrumental imposter, Stuart’s selections would need to be proper examples. Ones with no words. Strangely, for someone as obsessed with lyrics, he had always had a soft spot for a good instrumental. The ability to infer a mood or feeling to a listener effectively without the crutch of words was an admirable song writing skill. His quickly compiled top five were all, Stuart would argue, exemplars of this fine art:
5) ‘Elegia’ by New Order – written by the remaining band members as their tribute to Ian Curtis, the song’s haunting beauty matching this brief perfectly. An extended seventeen-minute version could be found on YouTube.
4) ‘Instrumental’ by The Only Ones – from their epic ‘Even Serpents Shine’ album. It could be argued Perrett’s throwaway closing observation, that his ‘baby’ was just instrumental, should disqualify this, but the track remained wordless in spirit.
3) ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ by Pink Floyd – overly self-indulgent in places without doubt, but the whole thing was wonderfully crazed in ways only Syd’s troubled, genius mind could have imagined.
2) ‘Theme for Great Cities’ by Simple Minds – before his brief reign as king of pop Jim Kerr had seen himself as Glasgow’s answer to Kraftwerk, an aspiration fully realised on this ‘euro electronica’ masterpiece.
1) ‘The Great Skua’ by British Sea Power – a favourite tune full stop, stunning live. This was Stuart’s choice of funeral music, and he might even consider opting for cremation purely to maximise the dramatic impact of the song’s final crescendo.
‘Interstellar Overdrive’s appearance on his list prompted Stuart to ask Alexa to play it from Spotify, and he was delighted to find it every bit as entertainingly grandiose as he remembered. He had always felt an affinity with Pink Floyd, with his High School having awarded a ‘Barrett Prize for Music’ in recognition of the madcap himself, one of its most famous, if hardly academically illustrious, alumni.
A regrettable dearth of musical talent may have precluded Stuart from ever coming under consideration for Syd’s prize, he was reminded, but he had never let this stop him becoming part of the school’s thriving band forming community. He had even provided the odd lyric. This was a time Stuart still looked back on nostalgically, particularly an oft mentally reconstructed crime scene that he had since understood led directly to his lifelong sentence to musical obsession. One he’d been serving ever since with no option for remission. In a sudden, subconscious change of scene, mirroring the opening sequence from TV’s ‘Life on Mars’, Stuart found himself inexplicably transported back through time to the 1970s.
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Rushing to make the planned 12.30 rendezvous, Stuart entered the Art Room. A cavernous yet cluttered space, wooden vaulted, propped at the top of the building, it always felt more like climbing into a cobwebbed attic. Cliché or not this was where the school’s only record player could be found. He joined an expectant gathering of kindred spirits.
It was October ’76, so the music rebounding around these walls as far back as anyone could remember had been unremittingly psychedelic or, worse still, progressive. That Lamb had been lying down on Broadway for too long now, accompanied by far too many Pipers, piping at the Gates of Dawn. Stuart was pleased he had found others who shared these concerns.
They had been summoned here by Mark, bass player in the fledgling ‘On/Off Knob and the Amplifiers’, who now made a theatrical, clearly staged, entrance right on cue. Clutching a familiar Andy’s Records bag, it concealed a freshly purchased single, title and artist yet to be revealed. “This small piece of plastic,” Mark assured his gathered fifth form disciples, “will change our lives.”
Their anticipation heightened as the needle dropped. Following such a portentous build-up the song’s opening spoken line, with its naïve romantic dispute, fell a long way short of the promised revolution. It sounded dishearteningly ‘60s, even Spector-like. But, before disappointment had time to kick in, the remaining 160 seconds of The Damned’s debut single ‘New Rose’ inflicted the precise sense of sonic shock they had all been longing for.
The opening insistent drumbeat grabbed them by the scruff of the neck, immediately followed by an all-out guitar assault, amateurishly played but gloriously so. Challengingly discordant music, like nothing they had heard before, was perfectly complemented by the vocals, spat rather than sung. As the words suggested, this really was something strange, which, as it continued prophetically, would bring stormy waters.
By 12.35, even before the inevitable repeat plays, those present already knew a new truth. Punk had arrived (though they didn’t yet know its name) and music would, truly, never be the same again.
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Returning to the present from such a life defining recollection, as vivid in his memory as if it had taken place yesterday, Stuart was caused to reflect how life didn’t always map out the way you expected it to. He knew, for instance, that ‘On/Off Knob’ never made the big time, that their prophet Mark had instead become a dentist, but none of that diminished Stuart’s certainty those three short minutes, in that dusty Art Room, had sown the precise seed from which his future musical monomania had grown. Four decades later he was still searching out new music, preferably with a similar maverick twist, continuing his endless quest for songs which, as he often misquoted Conor Oberst, held some kind of truth.
The converts’ immediate path from their Art Room had led them to Cambridge Corn Exchange, the local punk Mecca. As its name would suggest this was not a venue designed for purpose and became infamous for terrible acoustics. Not that the new believers cared, they had found their church. Their longed-for musical revolution had arrived, and proved even more chaotic and anarchic live, fulfilling their hankering for a ritual slaughter of pompous prog rock. Stuart couldn’t now remember every group he had seen at the Corn Exchange (if only he had had Charlie’s foresight to start a gig list), but casting his mind back, more than forty years, suggested five performances and, sadly, one no-show that still stood out:
- The Damned, the start of it all. The vaudevillian end of punk but they put on a spirited show, supported by The Adverts, at their most hypnotic when looking through the eyes of a notorious death-row prisoner,
- The Jam rode the punk wave with a mod kink, but Weller was a brilliant, angry frontman of a band that managed to generate unbelievable power and energy for a three piece,
- The Stranglers were darkly mysterious men in black, but blown away by The Only Ones in support, never truly punk (too many guitar solos) but Peter Perrett mesmerised with ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’,
- The Clash exceeded lofty expectations, but it was their warm-up, Richard Hell, who best articulated the disciples’ new sense of belonging. They were truly now part of the (dramatic pause) blank generation,
- Buzzcocks, as headliners, proved punk could still work well with a pop sensibility, following The Slits who, equally, showed how it could happily get by without the slightest semblance of one.
It was unavoidable though, Stuart’s gilt-edged memories of his golden Corn Exchange era (’76 to ’79) would always be tarnished by the one that got away!
In August 1977, harassed and frequently banned by local councils, still facing their Grundy fallout, The Sex Pistols had been restricted to playing pop-up SPOTS concerts (Sex Pistols on Tour Secretly), performing unpromoted gigs under a variety of pseudonyms (the funniest being Acne Rabble). One Friday a rumour had spread like wildfire amongst the initiated. There was no concert scheduled for the Corn Exchange that evening yet reliable scouts, returning from a lunchtime visit to town, had spied tour trucks arriving at the venue. Double Maths had received even shorter shrift than usual that afternoon, their time spent instead excitedly planning for what simply had to be a secret Pistols gig.
Stuart could almost feel again today, a form of time lapsed synaesthesia, the collective disappointment that had later hit the pits of his gang’s stomachs as they had turned off the marketplace, expectantly entering Wheeler Street, only to be greeted by the sight of stalls being unloaded from the back of trucks in preparation for the following day’s record fair. Realisation had dawned on them all simultaneously, anarchy, however keenly anticipated, would not be visiting Cambridge after all.
Stuart had long known this was a story he related far too often, a suspicion confirmed when Charlie, touchingly, had written him a piece for his 50th, the supposed template for an oft discussed book that would review some of the many concerts they had attended together. Ironically, or on a bad day you could suspect sarcastically, Charlie had titled this, “Never Saw the Sex Pistols?”
Predictably, despite such reminiscing, Stuart’s morning was still dragging on. Just 9.15am. With enough pre-Challenge time left to listen to an album he ignored the obvious choice, ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’, and chose instead to honour an authentic Corn Exchange memory by playing ‘Even Serpents Shine’, The Only Ones’ second and, in Stuart’s opinion, best album. This was a rare artifact indeed, boasting an elusive full house of all the elements he had long maintained were requisite for a perfect album:
- Song Consistency – it takes just one rotten apple, one duff song, for perfection to fall, but everything here remains ripe (and juicy), particularly ‘From Here to Eternity’, ‘In Betweens’, and ‘Someone Who Cares’,
- Musical Balance - catchy tunes and musicality alone are never enough. A great album requires a set of songs that feel unbreakably connected. When this works, like here, as each track ends you find yourself already anticipating the next intro,
- Great Lyrics – memorable, mind infiltrating lines are essential, and ‘Even Serpents Shine’ has a bucket load of classics to choose from, all reinforcing the record’s motif of dysfunctional relationships,
- Evocative Imagery – an art lost to the download generation maybe, but a striking album sleeve, consistent with the grooves that lie within, enhances an album’s quality, and ‘Even Serpents Shine’s visually arresting cover delivers accordingly, and finally (paradoxically),
- First Words – as important as a novel’s opening line, to capture the listener, and Peter’s shocking up-front evocation of a woman with a deathly stare foreshadows the whole album’s fatalistic, melancholic tone perfectly.
Stuart had always felt Peter Perrett, another guaranteed member of his ‘Hall of Mavericks’, was an underappreciated lyricist, using simple words put together in ways that betray deeper meaning, yet disarmingly wrapping them in wryly amusing rhyming couplets. It was undoubtedly a minority view, but he had always regarded Perrett’s talent for conjuring vivid imagery, like ‘Someone Who Cares’ shattered dreams leaving irreparable scars, as a sign of true Dylanesque genius.
One of the few punk diktats the non-conformist Only Ones ever stuck to was brevity and with the whole album lasting less than thirty-five faultless minutes Stuart still found there was enough time, as ‘Instrumental’ faded out, to make himself a cuppa and be sat down at his computer, fully prepared, before 10am.
Sitting with pen and paper in hand, waiting nervously for the minute hand to reach the hour, involuntarily evoked some ancient examination room echoes. Maybe he should have brought along a lucky mascot? With no attendant invigilator though, to announce, “you may now turn over your papers,” Stuart simply entered his email address and password to log on as soon after ten as possible. What greeted him, in a now familiar minimalist style, unexpectedly extended his exam metaphor. Stuart’s first reaction was an all too well remembered, “shit, I didn’t revise for that!”
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(To be continued, at 10am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 7’ in the meantime? If you think you have got the answer, then please reply direct to this email post, to keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)