*Track 5

Get Up and Use Me - 10th December 2017

“Ever heard of Brian Chesky?”, Joe suddenly enquired, having previously seemed fully absorbed by a combination of phone and breakfast.

“No, who does he play for?” Stuart replied, an instinctive response to Joe’s question, such an opening gambit usually heralding his son’s latest online scouting discovery. Some left-sided, Moroccan midfielder from Monaco maybe, or a youth prodigy from Preston, whichever player Joe had today decided Man Utd needed to buy. If ‘transfer rumours 2015 to 2017’ were ever to qualify as a valid Mastermind subject, Stuart reasoned, Joe could walk it!

“He’s not a footballer. He’s richer than that. $4 billion he’s worth,” Joe was holding back on the detail, enjoying the advantage it gave him.

“Eight Beckhams then, eight Cristianos, or four of each,” Stuart replied, referencing another of their conversations, from a couple of days ago on the way back from Heathrow. Joe had uncovered a list of sporting stars, ranked by their net worth, which had declared that Golden Balls (now apparently a pecuniary possibility!) and Ronaldo were the joint richest footballers, worth half a billion dollars each.

Joe paused, his gaze betraying a calculating look, not quite the cash register spinning eyes from the cartoons, but you could see where they got the idea from. He might be a maturing twenty but wasn’t old enough yet to resist the temptation to get one over on Dad. They had always regarded mental arithmetic, particularly probability and statistics (often in relation to betting odds), as an evenly contestable battleground.

Joe’s math completed (another strange Americanism, just where had that s disappeared to?) he revealed his workings, “$4 billion makes Brian worth Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, and Beckham all rolled into one. Not bad, eh?”

“Well good for Brian, I’m sure he’s very happy, but I still don’t have a clue who he is.” Faced with a straight choice of two, a boat race bet, Stuart had made the wrong call with football. Clearly this morning Joe was concentrating instead on his parallel passion, getting rich quickly, ideally with as little effort as possible. He seemed to believe his business degree, especially one from a US university, could simply be swapped upon graduation for an entrepreneur’s passport, and off he would go.

“All you need is one idea,” was Joe’s latest mantra and Stuart had needed to learn how to strike a delicate balance, applauding his son’s ambition, supporting his dreams, yet making sure these were pursued with a healthy helping of pragmatism. Whoever Brian Chesky turned out to be, Stuart was confident he had worked a lot harder for his $4 billion than Joe imagined.

“Well, you ought to know,” Joe continued, warming to his subject (and his subterfuge), “you’re making him richer.”

“Why, does he own a pub?” Anne chipped in, with perfect comic timing, her intervention taking them both by surprise.

“No,” Joe replied, spotting an opportunity to eke this out even further with a widened audience, “in fact, now you mention it, it’s you not Dad who’s lining Brian’s pockets.” Leaving no comedic gap this time, no chance for Stuart to respond to Anne’s pub jibe, Joe carried straight on, “every time you rent out the apartment you pay Brian 3%, and as far as I can tell he doesn’t have to do much in return. See, told you, all you need is an idea.”

So, there it was, the much-discussed Mr. Chesky turned out to be a joint founder, now CEO, of Airbnb and surprisingly, given his complete absence of profile, was reckoned by Forbes to be the world’s next richest entrepreneur under forty behind Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook cronies.

Joe wasn’t quite finished yet, he had one further ace up his sleeve, garnered from the online news story he had been reading, and was determined to play it. Luckily for Stuart though his fire had now turned to Anne, as the owner of their Airbnb business, “you should really know his name Mum, what if you had to make a complaint?”

“What’ve I got to complain about,” Anne replied, so delighted to have Joe home for Christmas she would happily play along with his game, for however long he chose to string it out, “you need to think, while Brian’s getting his 3% who’s pocketing the other 97?”

Joe surreptitiously passed his phone to Stuart, revealing his source, an online scare story listing the letting company’s most horrific complaints. He knew Joe well enough to spot him homing in, like a laser guided missile, on the report’s controversial headline, “what if you rented an Airbnb place, like you’ve done before, and found a rotting corpse in the garden? Who’s gonna sort that out if you don’t know Brian’s number?”

“Fair enough,” thought Stuart, “that probably is a level of complaint where the CEO would need to get involved!”

Content he had made his point Joe returned to his phone, and as Anne slid a large plate of bacon and scrambled egg across the table towards him started to devour the next part of his multi-course breakfast. Stuart’s regular remonstrations about the doubling of their grocery bills whenever Joe was back home had once more changed category, seamlessly moving from jest to reality. At 8am however this was a good four hours earlier than Joe’s normal meal reservation, brunch (verging on lunch) being the norm, but having become fascinated by everything he had heard about ‘Challenge 69’ he had dragged himself out of bed early to join in. Today’s would be a family effort.

Still flushed from his relative success (following that false start) in last month’s late-night Yellow Springs’ solo sitting, Stuart felt unsure whether this group approach was a good idea. Without knowing what their revised 9am deadline (factoring in the BST quirk) would have in store it was difficult to argue with Joe’s logic that, “three heads must be better than one,” but he also knew, from the frustrations of a career littered with endless meetings, that not everything was best solved by committee.

While the ‘Challenge’ rules might restrict contestants to one single logon (per authorised email address) they could do nothing, Joe had reasoned, about how many people joined in once the question had been revealed. If this tactic worked though, Stuart feared, as the ‘Challenges’ inevitably got harder, as their competitors worked faster, there could be a temptation to keep adding ever more minds to the mix. If his timetabling projection proved correct there were still another eight or nine months of this to go, inducing a horrifying vision of just how out of control such a process could become.

Like some ‘Big Brother’ scene from ‘1984’ Stuart imagined himself, come August 2018, logging on to ‘Challenge 69’ alone on a large stage, like some weird Garrix/Paxman crossover act, posting the final ‘Challenge’ wording onto large screens all around the Albert Hall, allowing each of his specially invited quiz specialists to get to work on an answer simultaneously.

It was time to banish such paranoia though, to get himself back into a positive frame of mind, and Stuart knew no better way than music. He asked Alexa to play the new Spotify playlist he had created yesterday, he wanted to see what Anne and Joe thought of it anyway. The initial signs weren’t promising as Stuart noticed their shared, poorly disguised, eye rolling as he declared the playlist’s title, ‘Lost Singles ’78 to ‘82’.

Willing to accept the smallest of victories, Stuart regarded it a triumph when his playlist was still running half an hour later. Joe had asked a couple of, “so who are these?” questions, and he was sure he had caught Anne singing along at one point, even if she had denied it. The list was sequenced in reverse order, he had explained up front, from fifteen down to one, though both probably knew him well enough to have assumed that. Neither, unfortunately, seemed any further enthused, nor more convinced, by his exclamation that, “it’s the top five now, this is where it gets really good.”

5) ‘Better Scream’ by Wah! Heat – there is a Teardrop Explodes version of this, but it is Pete Wylie’s song, a debut single he delivers, with its warning of a Judgement Day, like he already believes it’s a classic.

4) ‘Remembrance Day’ by b-Movie – truly a lost song, from a Mansfield band, with its poignant war-time lyrics, referencing flowers caught in barbed wire, swept along by aptly haunting instrumental passages.

3) ‘Time Goes by so Slow’ by The Distractions – a very early, largely ignored, Factory release with an iconic Peter Saville sleeve and an even better plaintive chorus, with the singer unable to comprehend, or accept, why ‘she had to go’.

2) ‘Brickfield Nights’ by The Boys – early punk contenders with the Pistols/Damned, without their success, but this song has the best drum driven punk chorus ever, and its sentiment of ‘days long gone’ now came with an added retrospective twist.

1) ‘Get Up and Use Me’ by The Fire Engines – in Stuart’s head this had always been the perfect discordant pop song, but he had long ago given up on ever finding a single person who agreed.

His countdown was doing OK, better than expected really, from five through to two. Anne had conceded there were some good songs here, unfairly ignored for forty years, and he had piqued Joe’s interest by explaining the playlist’s genesis. Rediscovering these 7” gems had been a welcome by-product of Stuart’s recent quest to catalogue his entire collection on Discogs, and he had gambled that the library’s total suggested (median) value, at over £7,000, would attract Joe’s budding entrepreneurial attention. The tactic had worked.

Joe had been staggered that Stuart’s first pressing copy of ‘Unknown Pleasures’, the selfsame record he had been indoctrinated with for years, was valued at more than £140, (“I might need to keep an eye on that one,” Stuart thought), and he had now requested a running commentary on the indicative value of each single as they moved down through the top five:

• ‘Better Scream’ and ‘Remembrance Day’ were disappointing (people have poor taste) at £3.04 and £2.25 respectively, though Stuart argued this was, “still a good return on the 80p I paid,”

• ‘Time Goes by so Slow’, trading off its Factory rarity status, and that Saville sleeve, showed a marked improvement at £10.61,

• Things really got moving with ‘Brickfield Nights’ though, its suggested value of £16.43 even taking Stuart by surprise …

• … only to be massively trumped by ‘Get Up and Use Me’ at £23.56, proving there must, after all, be some others, somewhere (with, “more money than sense,” according to Anne), who recognised its beauty!

“So, we’ve just listened to over fifty quid’s worth of records,” said Joe, seemingly impressed, as The Fire Engines faded out, but before Stuart could make his intended argument, that their true value was infinitely higher, Joe added a deflating postscript, “mind you, that last one was still crap.”

The processing of music in the brain, certainly the emotions it prompts, has been tracked to the amygdala, an almond-shaped set of neurons located deep in the medial temporal lobe. Stuart had long ago accepted he must possess an abnormal amygdala (a pistachio-shaped one perhaps?), its nerve cells simply wired differently, connected in some rare, Davey Henderson appreciative manner. ‘Get Up and Use Me’ was a song he adored, yet Anne and Joe had just hated it, a reaction he was by now resigned to. Even Ed and Charlie, so often to be relied on as a source of solace, had always berated it. Perhaps he should seek Oscar’s opinion, although if, as Stuart suspected, dogs hear nothing in music other than extraneous noise then he would presumably be in the same camp as everybody else!

With Joe’s breakfast eventually over and Stuart’s ‘Lost Singles’ countdown completed they all just got on with other stuff, marking time in their own ways before the 9am ‘Challenge’ appointment. Given the time-period of his compilation, and music’s uncanny ability to transport you back to a different time and place, to evoke old emotions (thanks to the amygdala), it was maybe unsurprising Stuart found himself back in a subconscious Sheffield, in 1981. Falling in love again, for the first time!

Confusingly, though happily enough time had elapsed in between to avoid any consequences, the two great loves of Stuart’s life were both Ann(e)s. He had met earlier Ann, the one without an e, right at the start of his final year and they had been virtually inseparable for the next nine months. In a sequentially appropriate order, it had been ‘Open Your Heart’ by The Human League, immediately followed by Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’, that had proven the playlist’s time travelling catalysts. They had transported Stuart back to a relationship he would always treasure. One, at obvious risk of being cliched, that had played a big part in the making of him.

Stuart rarely thought of Ann these days, he really had no need to. Twenty years with Anne had added so many wonderful facets to his life (so much more than an additional e), but there were still certain songs that inadvertently reconnected certain of his neurons, whether abnormal or not, and brought earlier Ann back to mind:

‘Dirty Girl’ by Eels – not for the obvious, salacious implication of its title (though that shouldn’t be entirely discounted) but because the song tells of a bossy, straight-talking girl with a big mouth. His friends had always thought Ann loud, brash, and opinionated, with a side order of sarcasm thrown in for good measure, and to a large extent she was guilty as charged. Stuart initially found this amusing, intriguingly attractive, but the more you got to know Ann (and he made good progress on that front) the more you realised her ‘dirty’ mouth was largely a front, a defence mechanism, behind which you could find a much ‘cleaner’ heart.

‘Oh Yeah’ by Ash – the best lyrical evocation of young love Stuart knew, with its reminiscences of being ‘taken over’ at the start of a long summer. This was seasonally suspect, as he had met Ann at the beginning of a winter, but it had undoubtedly been a start, unlike any he had previously experienced, and she had incontrovertibly taken him over, and finally,

‘Louise’ by The Human League – actually, just a small part of this one, the verse where the girl leaves on a bus, after a chance meeting, her parting smile (mis)interpreted as a sign of enduring passion. First love has a unique depth of its own, but the sheer heartbreak, when it crumbles, is unfathomable. Unfairly, Stuart’s keenest visual memory of Ann remained the wave she had given him, partially seen through tear glazed eyes, as the bus pulled away from outside her house after she had told him it was all over.

They had both known the relationship needed to end, but that hadn’t stopped Stuart being as inconsolable when it did as he had been ecstatic in its early, heady days. They had continued to write letters for a while, people still seemed to back then, the last rites of a fondness they would always share. When his mum had died later that year it had been Ann who seemed to best understand how he felt. Amongst the usual well-meaning platitudes, the only bereavement consolation Stuart could still remember to this day was an almost poetic line from one of her letters, it had simply read, “at least this time I know why I’m crying.”

For the record though, Ann without an e couldn’t stand ‘Get Up and Use Me’ either.

Raised from such thoughts, which diplomatically he had better keep to himself, Stuart was reminded by Joe, as if he needed it, that ‘Challenge’ time had arrived. Approaching 9am they all seated themselves at his desktop, like latter-day virtual Waltons gathering around the dinner table.

Joe had established command of the keyboard, explaining that avoiding Stuart’s glacial, two-finger typing, “might make all the difference.” They got nowhere, as expected, with their planned test run at 8.55am (just to confirm they had avoided November’s timing issues successfully), and employing a pre-set countdown on his phone Joe logged in precisely on the hour to reveal the latest conundrum:

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(To be continued, at 10am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 14’ in the meantime? If you think you have got the answer, then please reply direct to this email post, to help keep the ‘challenge’ open for other readers.)