*Track 6

The Big Country - 10th January 2018

There still seems some debate over who first claimed, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.”

With his passenger asleep, and a motorway devoid of scenery, Stuart’s mind (as was its wont) had taken another walkabout.

The saying, he remembered reading, was most often attributed to Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra, a 1950’s baseball player, turned coach in the ‘60s, renowned for the regular malapropisms that littered his post-match interviews. Yogi initially denied he had ever used the ‘déjà vu’ line (whilst happily taking credit for, “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over,”) only to reclaim ownership of the phrase once its popularity started to grow.  Any fair assessment of whether Mr. Berra was simply an unreliable witness though, or a genuinely unsung Wildean wit, became even further confused by an infamously contradictory statement he undoubtedly did make. Somehow managing to both confirm and deny his own reputation, simultaneously, Yogi had once maintained, “I really didn’t say everything I said.”

On the other hand, whether original or not, Stuart had indisputably just said to a now awakened Joe, “it’s like déjà vu on Groundhog Day,” as they pulled into Watford Gap services, breaking their return journey to Heathrow with a mirror image of the comfort stop they had made back in December. The time had arrived for Joe to return to Ohio for spring semester. How effortlessly, Stuart reflected, they had slipped into referencing time according to some alien academic calendar.

“You’re wrong,” Joe countered, “it’s neither of those things. We’re travelling in the opposite direction, we’re six motorway lanes apart, and it’s a month later!”

“No need to be a smart-arse,” Stuart persisted, “I wasn’t just talking time and location. Haven’t we just spent another hour discussing obscenely rich people? Where’ve I heard that before?”

Joe had finally woken up, around Leicester, as Five Live was running a story about Jeff Bezos, explaining how his worth had just risen to an astounding $106 billion off the back of a surge in Amazon’s stock price, an understandable market reaction to the company’s stonking, barely believable, 89% share of America’s festive online sales. This improvement in Bezos’s fortunes, quite literally, had seen him breeze past Bill Gates to take over as, “the richest man on the planet.”

“You have to admit though, it’s true what I said,” Joe continued, rehashing his updated entrepreneurial argument, “you can forget Brian’s $4 billion, that’s loose change for Jeff. Two hundred Ronaldo’s worth, now that’s a proper fortune, and all in twenty years. Just shows, some ideas really are worth more than others.”

Anne had chosen to remain at home, having long held an aversion to airport partings, but as they resumed their journey Joe began to tuck into her remote contribution to their road trip, a lovingly prepared (if way too large) packed breakfast. If you looked carefully, Stuart thought, you could probably still detect tear stains on the greaseproof wrapping.

With the station’s rolling news agenda now starting to repeat itself they agreed to switch to musical accompaniment. Control over the iPod sat with his copilot, but to Stuart’s gratification Joe, unprompted, had chosen to play his dad’s ‘Best of 2017’ playlist. Despite being largely preoccupied on his phone, only now giving any thought to organising a lift home in Columbus, Joe kept chipping in as certain songs piqued his interest:

• The National’s ‘Day I Die’ and QTY’s ‘Dress/Undress’ both elicited similar, “who’re these? I like this,” responses,

• Declan McKenna’s ‘Brazil’, managed to up Joe’s critical ante though, with, “that’s the best one yet, reminds me of the World Cup,”

• Billy Bragg’s ‘Full English Brexit’ fared even better. Its cleverly nuanced lyrical plea: to not simply denounce why some had voted Leave, but to understand instead how they felt disturbed by change, and thought nobody was listening, prompted a good ten-minute, browser free, political debate. Just as Billy would have wished, but,

• Most satisfying of all was Joe’s response to Findlay’s ‘Wild & Unwise’, “this is great, not as good as her other one though, what was it, ‘Your Sister’? Brilliant words that.” Stuart had long argued the subtle, jealous implication behind, “your sister is not your sister, I’ve seen the way you kiss her,” made it one of the 21st century’s finest lyrical couplets. It was heart-warming to hear Joe replaying this assessment, his mission hadn’t been in vain!

By the time they were parking at Terminal 2, Stuart had begun to realise how their playlist byplay, and the discussions it prompted, served as a poignant reminder of all the conversations; on music, sport, business, life in general, he would miss having with Joe over the next five months. There was no time for dwelling on sentimentality however, they had arrived at Heathrow deliberately early with work to do.

They still had more than four hours before Joe’s scheduled take-off, on United Airlines 12.34 flight, but had agreed this was the only practical way to get around the inconvenient timing clash between Joe’s pre-booked return date and 2018’s first ‘Challenge’ deadline. Running according to plan, they should be well set in a quiet corner somewhere, fully armed with tea and toast, ready to logon at 9am. Anne, as self-declared head of family logistics, had, in addition to despatching Joe with a good week’s worth of fruit, yoghurt and sandwiches, got up before they left, “to make sure Dad remembers the laptop. You won’t be solving much without that.”

“Don’t trust me then?” Stuart had responded but, before the words were even fully out of his mouth, he recognised the gaping open goal they presented.

Anne had slotted away her chance with clinical, Michael Owen like precision, “what, the man who flew to Brazil without his World Cup tickets.” It was a fair, unarguable point. Thank God Charlie had been travelling out a day later, he thought, not for the first time. He made a cheap and efficient courier.

###

As he had resolved back in December, Stuart had been trying hard since to make more sense of the growing, yet seemingly nonsensical, set of outputs collected from the ‘Challenges’ so far. He was a big believer in simplicity and had always advocated a clear ‘problem statement’ could move you a significant way towards a solution. “What is it you’re trying to solve?” had been one of his oft-repeated business mantras, one which, surprisingly often, had proven hard to get answered. Applying such a discipline to his ‘Challenge’ reassessment exercise had though resulted in an even longer list of questions than expected:

1) Why is the whole thing titled ‘Challenge 69’, a fundamental question he had almost forgotten?

2) Can any further evidence be found online yet to shed more light on what the competition is all about?

3) Why did the ‘Challenges’ begin at number two, and could any logical sequence be uncovered to explain the full order that had emerged since, i.e., 2, 4, 7, 12, and 14?

4) Was there a trend to the types of ‘Challenges’ set so far? A single cryptic clue, a riddle-me-ree, a word-search, a number/letter challenge, and finally a longer cryptic quiz. (Before he had even finished this disparate list Stuart had mentally discounted any real value that might come from it, other than maybe revisiting his previous throwaway thought about subscribing to ‘Puzzler’ magazine.)

5) Why had the successful ‘Challenger’ threshold started at 7,800 (from 23,484 registrants), and was there any discernible rhyme or reason to explain its descent since, i.e., 7,800, 6,600, 5,500, 4,500, and 3,300? And finally,

6) The big one. Could any link be established between the ‘Challenge’ solutions to date, i.e., Voltaire, Alpha, Palatine, Pillow Fight, and Collette (or more correctly Colette)?

Stuart had spent a good week working through each of these questions logically, one by one but, in all honesty, had made little significant progress.

Initially surprised that it had taken him almost four months (after a Google search on day one) to revisit such a basic question, Stuart had spent a largely uninformative couple of hours searching for any further meaning behind the ‘Challenge 69’ epithet. There was the sexual position obviously, but nothing to date indicated anything carnal was afoot here so he had quickly ruled that out. Then he questioned if 69 might refer to a year and had looked back over the key events of 1969. The first manned moon landing stood out, but there appeared no detectable link between this event and any of the questions or solutions to date.

Stuart had uncovered a couple of ‘69’ musical references. There was a song by Deep Purple with the same precise title and, more loosely, the better known ‘Summer of ‘69’. It would have been nice to discover these ‘Challenges’ were straying onto his specialist subject, but he had been forced to dismiss the former as mere ‘smoke on the water’, and for the latter had ultimately reasoned that no sane person could possibly have built such a complicated construction on foundations as shaky as Bryan Adams.

More ‘69’ dead ends followed, each of which Stuart had to reverse back out of; a Murakami novel, Bill and Ted’s number (from their ‘Excellent Adventure’), the astrological sign for Cancer, the atomic number for thulium, and the Taijitu symbol (from Chinese philosophy). Each of these lines of research led nowhere, although one nagging doubt had prompted Stuart to call John, an old friend and work colleague who, sadly, could quote ‘Bill & Ted’ line for line, to check whether the film made any references to pillow fights (quite possible) or Voltaire (surely not)? This had drawn another predictable blank.

The only real shaft of light in a period spent delving into the dark had been a discovery that ‘Challenge 69’, despite itself eschewing any extended web presence, had finally limped onto the social media stage. Unsurprisingly, given Stuart’s ineptitude in such matters, it had been Joe who had found and joined a newly constituted ‘Challenge 69’ Facebook group with just seventy-seven members (presumably all ‘Challengers’), a mere fraction of the 3,300 individuals who remained ‘in the game’.

The sheer existence of this group ultimately proved more revelatory than any specific insight it subsequently yielded. The majority of the group’s members appeared to be UK based, although there were some outliers in Australia, Singapore, and Costa Rica, along with a couple of US ‘Challengers’ (based in Baltimore and Boston) who Stuart hoped were getting used to their 4am starts!

For a social media forum this group’s messaging was spectacularly uncommunicative. Whatever questions had been raised, many mirroring Stuart’s list, the overriding tone of response from fellow members/Challengers was guarded, and could more accurately be described as evasive. In truth this was no community of equals, looking to help each other, more a loose alliance of rivals desperate not to reveal any detail that might reduce their own competitive advantage. Joe had promised he would, “keep an eye on it,” when he was back in college, but Stuart wasn’t holding his breath.

Despite priding himself on being good with numbers, Stuart had made no progress either on the two elusive sequences, and doubted whether Einstein, or even an Enigma enabled Turing, could have fared any better. After many wasted hours, with a huge degree of frustration, he had to concede that both the scattergun numbering of the clues and the jerkily dropping success threshold remained exactly as they first appeared, quixotic and entirely random. He was still sure there must be a story to be found here, but for now it was one staying stubbornly untold.

An even longer stint, days frankly, had then been spent analysing the life out of the five ‘Challenge’ solutions. A considerable effort that brought no joy. There appeared no supportable link between Voltaire, Alpha, Palatine, Pillow Fight (the clear odd man out), and Colette. Putting all five into a search engine had returned just a single entry where they all appeared, ‘The Complete Crossword Reference Book’, which, Stuart had to conclude, was a finding as self-evidential as it was annoying.

Without wishing to disappear into another numerical black hole, Stuart had next theorised he might achieve more joy by breaking the five answers into more manageable chunks, twos and threes seemed the most logical, and then investigating these subsets in isolation. If, for example, he could find some link between Voltaire and Colette then he might be able to use this finding to regather the remaining solutions around it, everything suddenly revealed in a newly cast light. This had sounded great in principle but proven an unexpectedly painful ball ache in practice.

Five variables yield ten unique sets of three, plus another ten lots of two. Investigating twenty different combinations, at half an hour apiece, had turned into a good couple of days work (especially for someone out of practice!) Some took even longer as Stuart got lost down innumerable Google wormholes. A mammoth logistical exercise which, retrospectively, hadn’t justified the effort employed.

His ten ‘answer combinations’ of three had yielded fractionally more joy, more believable linkages, than the complete set of five, but nothing you could genuinely call sustainable. Certainly nothing that passed the benchmark Stuart had set himself of helping to regroup the outliers. It was, again, becoming increasingly hard to infer these ‘Challenge’ outcomes were anything more than a totally unrelated list.

Reviewing the sets of two had proven even less helpful, simply demonstrating that you can virtually always find a way to draw together two variables. For instance, while it is historically difficult to find any direct link between Voltaire (who died in 1778) and Colette (who wasn’t born until 1873), Stuart had still managed to find a comic book character (in a series called ‘Girl Genius’) named Colette Voltaire. Such close specificity between any single pair of solutions however almost inevitably ruled out the remaining, unincluded options. In this example, there had been no characters called Alpha or Palatine in ‘Girl Genius’, and no evidence of any pillow fights either!

Stuart had simply ended up with pages of notes in a journal linking two or three of the ‘Challenge’ solutions. He felt too emotionally invested to discard these completely but doubted they would ever prove of material value. He had discovered nothing that put him on the front foot for the ‘Challenges’ ahead, in truth he was barely still standing.

The only productive output (in a loose, Stuart like, definition of the term) he felt able to claim afterwards, from days spent wastefully, was a great new playlist he had dreamt up during his regular much-needed research downtime, to help soften the repetitive strain of failure. The list featured music from his favourite New York bands.

To Stuart this had always been the most fascinating of musical cities. You could forget Nashville, New Orleans, and Detroit and, despite needing to tip a metaphorically appreciative hat to London, Liverpool, and Manchester, simply needed to accept that nowhere but New York could genuinely compete for such a title.

He still held an entirely unreasonable grudge, twenty years on, that Anne had once insisted they walk past the still open CBGBs, on the opposite sidewalk, on the basis that it, “just looks too seedy,” (which was surely the point!) He had only realised later her reluctance, in the early days of their relationship, may have been justifiably bred by an unspoken annoyance at his insistence they stay in The Chelsea Hotel. “Just think of all the history,” Stuart had reasoned, ignoring The Chelsea’s obvious shit-hole unsuitability for a romantic break.

All those pointless days spent down unproductive online rabbit holes, developing a whole series of un-linkable linkages and nonsequential sequences, had at least delivered what Stuart considered a measured, near perfect New York top five:

5) QTY – There was no need to restrict this to a retro list, with plenty of great new New York music still being made. QTY, as a prime example, had recorded one of Stuart’s top albums of the previous year, especially the glorious track ‘Rodeo’.

4) Television – When CBGBs ruled the musical world, ‘Marquee Moon’ was its ultimate soundtrack. Tom Verlaine’s drawl, about the thin world between his bones and skin, couldn’t sound more New York if it tried.

3) Velvet Underground – The explosive mix of Reed, Cale, and Nico, with an added, arty Warhol catalyst, rightly became legendary. Has any song ever started more subversively than ‘Venus in Furs’ repeated references to shiny boots of leather?

2) Talking Heads – In 1976 the fledgling band had secured a CBGBs residency, with two shows a night supporting Television. Now that’s why time travel would be useful!

1) The Strokes – A surprising number one maybe, but if anyone ever uttered the phrase, “New York band,” then the inevitable image this conjured for Stuart was these guys playing ‘Someday’ or ‘Last Nite’ (or better still both).

While Talking Heads may have narrowly missed out on climbing to the crown of his Big Apple tree, Stuart reflected, if he ever got around to patenting his definitive ‘maverick musician’ checklist it would be hard to imagine David Byrne not ticking all its essential boxes:

• Talented yet quirky, verging on demented, songwriter. Check,

• Unusual but engaging stage presence. Check,

• A body of work able to withstand close, possibly nerdish, scrutiny. Check,

• Fascinating back-story. Check, and,

• A unique, genre altering, contribution to music. Double check!

From the moment Stuart first heard Byrne’s bold Gallic protestations in ‘Psycho Killer’ (the “realisant mon espoir …” bit) he had been captivated. Even when translated back, “realising my hope, I throw myself towards glory,” the line still worked perfectly, both poetically and prophetically! Such early precocious, and surely unrepeatable, genius was then maintained right through Talking Heads’ debut album ‘77’, repeated in its follow-up, the delightfully aptly named ‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’, before marching fearlessly forward into ‘Fear of Music’.

Talking Heads, maybe inevitably, did become a bit duller after those first three albums (while frustratingly more successful). You could still rely on David today though for some weird lateral thinking, even if it was now more likely to pop up in prose rather than music. His quasi-academic tome ‘How Music Works’ expounds a fascinating, if predictably contentious, viewpoint on its subject matter, but more than any of David’s latter-day output Stuart enjoyed the sheer incongruity of his ‘Bicycle Diaries’ journal (alliteratively, yet accurately, described on its jacket review as a “post-punk Palin.”)

The dominant image of David Byrne, in Stuart’s mind’s eye, had remained a fixed 1977 version. One eternally caught flying over ‘The Big Country’s Midwest farmlands, forever failing to understand the people seen below, forced to accept he would never, “do the things the way those people do.” Somehow moving that long imagined, dislocated outsider forward a further thirty years, only to rediscover him (in ‘Bicycle Diaries’) still pontificating obliquely and subversively, yet now doing so as he cycled round Buenos Aires, simply served to cement David’s already immaculate maverick credentials.

It also helped that Stuart had always, however ridiculous the notion, drawn parallels between Byrne’s passage through life and his own. Not the born in Dumbarton bit obviously, but David’s subsequent journey; from a rural childhood in Maryland, onto art college in Providence, Rhode Island, only to emerge (full preppy-ness intact) at the heart of a famous New York cultural explosion. This surely had echoes (if, admittedly, far less public ones) in Stuart’s own journey; from a tiny Cambridgeshire village, via University in Sheffield, to an even bigger cultural shock moving to London post-graduation, on a miniscule salary. Both were examples of continually expanding horizons, absorbed via a ‘small-town mentality’ lens, becoming the making of a life.

He and David were surely kindred spirits you could argue, virtually brothers. Even if Stuart had never owned an outsized suit!

###

“Surely you didn’t need that?” Stuart queried, as Joe polished off his generously portioned Wetherspoons’ sausage bap with relish. Its purchase had though, along with a big pot of tea, successfully secured them a secluded spot for the next two hours.

“It’s ages ‘til lunch on the plane,” Joe replied, inadvertently highlighting the potential risk his departure time might start to impinge on a still unsolved ‘Challenge’ (or should that be the other way around?) This was a security gate they may have to cross, if or when they came to it.

At least Stuart had managed to wrest back control of the login process this month, having successfully argued Joe would be better placed, and considerably faster, at cutting, pasting and communicating the wording to Anne, which they had promised to do as soon as practically possible. The success of December’s family affair meant it was an approach Stuart had agreed to replicate, albeit requiring a new virtual twist. The jury was still out however on the question of whether they should consider widening participation further. The Albert Hall remained un-booked for now.

Feeling peer pressure from Joe’s immaculate prior performance, Stuart made sure to time his logon as precisely to 9am as possible, revealing an extremely long, wordy ‘Challenge’ which Joe quickly denounced as, “more cryptic crap,” even as he was starting to get busy on his family facilitation function:

###

(To be continued, at 9am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 15’ 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.)