*Track 7

How Soon is Now? - 10th February 2018

It was time for action; for the soul of ‘fantasy football’ to be reclaimed. Time for the purists (or, maybe, the anachronists) to wrest back control from the anoraks. What started out quite innocently, all Baddiel and Skinner’s fault of course, had since grown out of hand; the beautiful game reduced to a set of ugly statistics.

This ‘call to arms’ was just one of the stations Stuart had stopped off at on his latest zigzagging, pre ‘Challenge’, train of thought. Another journey haphazardly connecting random synaptic dots. Seemingly, it was more than his amygdala that was faulty!

Not that Stuart was averse, on principle, to numerical nuances in his entertainment. Neither Elections nor Eurovision would be half as enjoyable without the chance they afforded to scoff at the presenters’ inability to grasp their convoluted scoring systems. But football, that was different; that should have stayed an art, not become a science.

Long before musical mavericks bestrode his stage, Stuart had been similarly beguiled by their sporting equivalents, the true purveyors of fantasy football; Tony Currie, Stan Bowles, Rodney Marsh, even Frank Worthington (restyling his perfectly coiffured hair after each headed goal), plus, above all others, the master maverick himself, George Best. It was much harder to quote recent examples, the professionalism of the modern game having perhaps lost something valuable, but you would have to hand at least honourable mentions to the likes of Maradona, Cantona, and Ibrahimovic.

Few of these characters, admittedly, would ever have stood first in line for any model-citizen awards. Yet all of them, without fail, were entertainers of the highest order. An observation which had then become the cognitive junction, comfortably qualifying under both criteria, where Paul Gascoigne entered Stuart’s reflective equation.

‘Sports Week’ hadn’t intentionally been the departure point for any of this imagery; their reporter had simply observed that the Tottenham v Arsenal match at Wembley, later today, was expected to attract a crowd of 83,000, a new Premier League record. Stuart’s mind had done the rest, until it landed, unexpectedly, on a 1991 vintage Gazza.

Stuart had taken his father, a lifelong Spurs supporter, to an earlier North London derby, the first ever FA Cup semi-final to be played at Wembley. The only tickets they had been able to secure had been in the Arsenal section and, years later, it still made Stuart smile to recall his dad’s frustratedly muted celebration as Tottenham had taken the lead, courtesy of Gazza’s extraordinary free kick.

Right through Stuart’s formative years his father had never stopped banging on about the quality of the Tottenham Hotspur ‘double’ winning side from the early ‘60’s; particularly the long-forgotten virtues of a certain John White, playing at (a now defunct) Inside Right who later, tragically, was killed by lightning. It was clearly a truism though that the apple never fell far from the tree, because ever since that Wembley semi-final Stuart had consistently bored rigid anyone prepared to listen about the, “greatest live footballing performance I’ve ever seen.”

It wasn’t just Gascoigne’s free kick, magnificent as it was, that earned that accolade, it was the way he had orchestrated the entire game. A magician at the height of his powers. Gazza so completely terrorised a notoriously strong Arsenal defence they ended up backing off, the only tactic they could think to employ to avoid further embarrassment from their increasingly futile attempts to tackle a player who, on that day at least, had proven untackleable. There are many things about Paul Gascoigne it is hard to eulogise, but with a football at his feet he became a player without equal.

It only then took a short mental jump, from such sporting ruminations, for Stuart to arrive at Steven Patrick Morrissey. While it was doubtful Mozza ever possessed a set of silky wing skills (hampered by daffodils down the back of his shorts) the Smiths’ frontman would indisputably qualify as a fellow member of the flawed genius society.

What we also knew now though, unfortunately, was even if Morrissey had ever taken up the beautiful game it was far from likely he would have chosen to operate down the left flank!

Stuart had seen Billy Bragg live again recently, the ‘Bard of Barking’ still balancing clever lyrical observation (failing to make the first team, just making them laugh!) with his equally entertaining political polemic, and the gig had come just a few days after Morrissey made yet another set of right-wing, borderline racist comments. The Smiths, as a result, had featured high on Billy’s in-set chat agenda.

The singer clearly felt as conflicted and saddened by this sorry state of affairs as Stuart did but, befitting such a consummate wordsmith, had articulated those concerns far better than Stuart could have managed.

“What hurts me most,” Billy had explained, appearing genuinely pained, “what I’d really like to ask Morrissey, is how someone who’s written such beautiful words, from an outsider’s view, can now be spouting such hurtful, vindictive bile?” It had been an opinion hard to find fault with.

As an optimist by nature though, Bragg had ended his rant by encouraging any Smiths fans in attendance to continue treasuring those early songs; to carry on celebrating the messages of hope he still felt they contained.

With Stuart judging he must, by now, have finally reached the cerebral terminus of his morning’s excursion, completing a circuitous journey from ‘Sports Week’ to ‘Bragg’, he felt compelled to test out Billy’s theory. After an appetiser of ‘This Charming Man’, Stuart chose The Smiths’ eponymous debut album as his main course; a chance to study Morrissey’s lyrics with more care, and closer inspection, than he had for years.

Things started out OK. ‘Hand in Glove’s story of ragamuffin pride, told with self-deprecatory sentiment, seemed to support Billy’s ‘be trustful’ hypothesis.

But then, sadly, trouble started to kick in.

Stuart, with a heavy heart, began to find sections, heard through a retrospective ear, where concerns started to creep in. ‘Miserable Lie’ contained an exhortation for others to stay with their own kind (while Morrissey would stay with his), and then, worse still, if you listened without the ‘irony’ they had assumed at the time, ‘Still Ill’ contended that England ‘belonged’ to the singer and owed him a living!

Surely not, Stuart sighed. They had once sung along so heartily (and innocently) to those very lines.

In the end, Stuart decided, Billy had to be right. His Smiths reassessment exercise may have proven worryingly troublesome, but he wasn’t prepared to let some ageing dogmatist (even if it was the singer) ruin the excitement he and Charlie had shared listening to the band’s first Peel session back in their Ealing garret rooms. Nor the exhilaration felt at those early Smiths’ concerts at the Electric Ballroom, the Lyceum or, most memorably, Ken Livingstone’s ‘Jobs for a Change’ festival at City Hall.

If nothing else, trashing such a wonderful legacy wouldn’t be fair on Johnny Marr. Perhaps Mozza should just listen to his own advice, from ‘What Difference Does It Make?’, and realise the unacceptable consequences of heavy words lightly thrown.

###

Unwilling to stomach any more Morrissey, certainly under this new cantankerous incarnation, Stuart decided to banish such thoughts and consciously dragged his attention back to a consideration of the here and now.

There were few downsides to retirement, in Stuart’s view, but if pushed he could admit it sometimes had the potential to downgrade weekends, make them less special, less anticipated than they had been when tethered to the corporate grindstone. This was surely a false argument though, akin to claiming you can’t appreciate feeling pain free unless you have been injured or ill first?

With eighteen months’ experience under his belt, Stuart knew he would happily carry on shouldering the yoke of more mundane Saturdays and Sundays if this prevented any return to 5.30am weekday starts.

There was no such need to worry today though, this was no ordinary Saturday. Showered, breakfasted, and fully prepared, Stuart now had just an hour left to fill before ‘Challenge 69’s seventh round, however it might be numbered, was due to unfold. It was hard to believe he had now been living with this (whatever ‘this’ was) for six months, albeit experiencing it on an intermittent basis.

Stuart found the competition intellectually stimulating (they all did), with its race against the clock element adding an intoxicating sense of peril. Undeniably these ‘Challenges’ also brought frustrations, requiring their competitors to operate in a dense, unexplained fog, but he had learned to live with that. Indeed lately, having failed with his New Year’s demystification resolution, Stuart had started to develop a growing admiration for whatever (or whoever) lay behind ‘Challenge 69’. Operating in today’s ultra-connected world it was increasingly hard to remain enigmatic, yet they (for the want of a more informed pronoun) were achieving such a state. Effortlessly.

Aware another hour was too long to simply wait, to twiddle his quizzical thumbs, Stuart backtracked on his earlier declaration of a ‘Morrissey free’ zone and conceded there might yet be a little more Smithsonian juice to be squeezed from his earlier reflections.

That GLC festival for instance (coincidentally featuring Billy Bragg on the same bill), the one where they had met Ken (with a grainy photo to prove it), had been a highlight of their gig going heyday. They may have packed in a lot of concerts in Sheffield, but a move to London had both heightened their opportunity (with endless NME listings) and increased their motivation (through salary enhanced beer funds). If he checked, Stuart was confident, this period would likely prove the most densely populated section of Charlie’s gig list.

Running ahead of himself, like watching a favourite film you had seen too often, Stuart already understood where these reflections were heading, and knew they would inevitably arrive at the precise point (in place and time) where, in his recollection, those salad days had ended.

He could never remember the band involved, but en route to their traditional post-concert pint, crossing a road in Hammersmith (Stuart could still visualise the junction), Charlie had chosen his moment to proudly, if a little sheepishly, announce he was getting married or, maybe, about to become a father. Ridiculously, presumably some form of dissociation, Stuart could never remember which of those two life events had been involved, though adding the detail wouldn’t alter the outcome.

It hadn’t really been the end of anything (indeed for Charlie it was an exciting new beginning). Their concert going largely carried on unaffected, yet Stuart had never, following that ‘incident’, been able to continue regarding this as one single continuum. Instead, he unavoidably split it into two; a phase of pre-announcement innocence followed by one of post-declaration maturity.

Stuart had never shared this gig-going tipping point theory with anyone, it would be a hard subject to broach (certainly with the man in question), and had long ago accepted that it demonstrated an entirely selfish, bordering on childish, perspective. But he had also managed to understand, eventually, that this was, in itself, exactly the point!

Stuart was confident it hadn’t been a Smiths concert involved (the ‘end of innocence’ came later than that). Never one to let facts become a barrier though, this knowledge didn’t prove sufficient to stop the concluding act of his morning’s internalised, multi-scened drama (while still respecting its no-Morrissey rule) from resurrecting one of its earlier bit part actors, Johnny Marr.

This final juxtaposition was likely suggested by a Mojo article he had read recently on rock’s greatest guitarists. Stuart had thought the magazine’s list too biased towards the ‘axe men’ end of the scale, with Johnny placed a desultory twenty-third, and Tom Verlaine an even more insulting thirty-fourth, forming rare outcrops in an unworthy ‘Mojo’ landscape populated by far too many Pages, Claptons, and Hendrixes.

If you loved singers, and their lyrics, as much as Stuart did, there was a danger of guitarists, especially those of the preening, soloing variety, becoming unwelcome third parties in a marriage. Prepared to make some (infidelity tempting) exceptions though, Stuart now compiled his own list of guitar greats (far superior to ‘Mojo’s):

5) Tom Verlaine/Richard Lloyd – there are no sleeve notes on ‘Marquee Moon’, so nobody really knows for sure who played what? But who cares! Both the title track and ‘Venus’ busted the myth that punk couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be built around guitar.

4) Rowland S Howard – Nick Cave’s anarchic Birthday Party guitar foil. Legendary for writing ‘Shivers’, Howard also left a criminally undervalued solo legacy with his ‘Pop Crimes’ and ‘Teenage Snuff Film’ albums; especially the majestic ‘She Cried’.

3) PJ Harvey – Polly’s guitar work is as often as innovative as her song writing; witness her (on YouTube) out-Nirvanaring Kurt on ‘Rid of Me’. A stunningly sparse, very TV-unfriendly, solo performance (from the Jay Leno show) where she truly was ‘on fire’.

2) Johnny Marr – there are very few guitar moments in pop music to rival either ‘This Charming Man’s jangling intro, or ‘How Soon is Now’s hypnotic, oscillating refrain. Just imagine one person being responsible for both!

1) Andy Gill – it’s hard to play guitar ‘differently’, but Gang of Four’s Gill managed to do so in spades. Take ‘At Home He’s a Tourist’, ‘Not Great Men’, or ‘Paralysed’, and just marvel at how often his innovative ‘angular’ style had been copied since.

(Footnote: Ed might even, for once, sign off on this list, there were few songs he loved as much as ‘Paralysed’.)

A further glance at the kitchen clock, 8.45am, told Stuart it was now, finally, time to switch back out of ‘list mode’ and concentrate on the ‘Challenge’ to come.

Given his impressive collection of other obsessive tendencies, it was unsurprising Stuart was also a completist. After waving Joe off at Heathrow last month he had felt compelled to return to their Wetherspoons’ corner, not just for a pint (although a celebration was rightly in order) but to solve the two unanswered clues.

This had been patently unnecessary, they had already qualified in a creditable ‘top two-hundred’ position, but he simply couldn’t have driven back up the motorway comfortably without knowing. Absent any further time-pressure, it had only taken a little more focused browsing to establish that:

• the missing E was Eindhoven (home of Philips, and their commemorative tower, where the Gender River once flowed), and,

• the N had been Nijmegen (home of four-day marches, a famous bicycle museum, and a suburb called Lent).

Stuart might, in previous times, have agonised over why ‘Challenge 15’ incorporated such an odd mix of British and Dutch cities, and worried whether this held some deep, meaningful clue (if only he could unravel it); but much like a recovering alcoholic he now realised it was important to keep such temptation well out of reach.

To avoid any counterproductive theorising, Stuart had learned to become a committed member of ‘Conspiracists Anonymous’, with Joe acting as his sponsor, helping to keep him on the straight and narrow. Only yesterday he had received a ‘support’ WhatsApp (or more accurately, given Joe’s messaging operandi, a whole string of them):

• Hi

• Been on Challenge 69 Facebook (Stuart was impressed Joe had kept his promise.)

• Everyone on its confused

• No ones got a clue

• So don’t stress

• Chill

Stuart was trying hard to do just that. Regarding the ‘Challenges’ at least; though he couldn’t stay similarly calm about the utter disregard shown for proper punctuation in modern day communication!

Today’s ‘Challenge’ would be restricted to a double-handed effort. It was only 4am in Ohio, so Joe would be in bed (or quite possibly not home yet!); either way he would be unlikely to be in any fit state to make a constructive contribution. Anne meanwhile had tried to feign indifference over the last few days, claiming her enthusiastic participation over the last couple of months had been driven by the ‘Challenges’ becoming, “a family thing, we don’t have many of those left.” But, despite these protestations, she had noticeably started to hang around as 9am approached.

Stuart logged on:

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(To be continued, at 9am tomorrow. Can you solve ‘Challenge 17’ 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.)