One-Hit Wonders

Stylophone Trabant is – these days – probably the world's leading Rock Star. As lead gobshite with the UK's current (for this week at least) all-time greatest rock band Toad Entrails, he first came to attention on their number 32 hit single – Serving Suggestion.

With its intensely profound lyrics detailing just how to cook some instant noodles, this song seemed revolutionary in the staid and conservative rock music world. Set to a heavy metal version of a traditional Norwegian fishing song, the music was played on an accordion and bagpipes and featured a foghorn solo. So Serving Suggestionwas different enough to the run of the mill chart dross to get the attention of some of the country's most self-important music critics.

Although, these days music critics are no longer as significant as they like to think they once were, back in the heyday of the NME, Melody Maker and the Walsall Daily Advertiser. Even so, these days some people still do occasionally notice there are people who are paid to write about music. It was these music critics and their championing of Toad Entrails as the next big thing which brought Stylophone Trabant and his suspiciously well-filled trousers to the attention of the public. A Public growing increasingly disinterested in the music business and the posturing fools who think it owes them a living, as well as a drug habit equal to the GDP of several combined undeveloped economies.

However, it will be (almost) interesting to see if Toad Entrails and Stylophone Trabant himself can live up to the hype built up around them. They do claim they have nearly three notes of the next single already recorded. However, many are now beginning to feel they will be yet another band to add to the ever-growing list of one-hit wonders in pop history.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Bullfrogs on your Mind

Did you ever...?

Did you ever...?

Did you ever wake up with those bullfrogs on your mind?

….

No, me neither.

Although, I did once wake up contemplating an okapi, but those were different times and the thought of wildlife was never far from our minds. Quite often the talk that morning at the bus stop would be about the mating behaviour of lions or whether blue tits were migratory.

Back in those days, politics was more about ideology than the slight differences of hairstyle and marginal degrees of complete incompetence that these days separate the political parties. Those of my generation can remember the stirring speeches made at the TUC annual conference about the pine marten and the Conservative party's strict stance on migrating wildebeest.

Times have changed now, and it is common for people to have at least one penguin-related app on their smartphone and Feretbook is one of the most popular sites on the internet, not to mention the incredible number of photographs of cats being cute in cute ways. Although, some would argue that cats are not wild animals, those of us though, that have ever tried to bathe a cat will, of course, beg to differ on that score.

Still, though it is a shame about the bullfrogs, despite their ability to construct very intriguing god-games, so if you find yourself with a spare moment, try contemplating a bullfrog for a minute or two – who knows it could had a whole new dimension to your personal philosophy.

Rock 'n' Roll Rebel

Bicuspid Tremoloarm, at first, took very seriously Bert Weedon's advice to 'Play with yourself Every Day', and soon developed the strength in his wrists to have a go at playing the guitar.

Soon, after a mere twelve years of daily practice, Tremoloarm could – sometimes – manage nearly a whole G major chord. Luckily for him, however, it was the age of punk and so musical ability was even more unnecessary than ever in the popular music scene. Unfortunately, though, Bicuspid was the son of Lord Molar Tremoloarm, owner of most of the south east of the Untied Kingdom, which – almost – put a crimp in Bicuspid's claim to impeccable working class credentials, especially when he – at least, initially - changed his name to Steve Wank.

Luckily, however, the punk scene soon collapsed, becoming little more than a form of street-level fancy dress, thus allowing Bicuspid to reclaim his name and to make yet another attempt to learn at least one more of the three chords necessary to be taken seriously as a rock musician.

His next band: The Immanent Tax Returns, did however have a hit single – the almost memorable I dream of Double-Entry, a song penned by Bicuspid himself when he realised that – after all – music was not his first love and that he yearned for accountancy.

However, his traditional aristocratic family looked down on such upstart careers as accountancy, the Tremoloarm's were descended from a long line of court musicians and it was rumoured that Voleskin Tremoloarm a court madrigal singer was the real father of the child that went on to become one of England's - far too many to remember - king Henrys.

So, faking his own drug-fuelled death, by ingesting seventeen packets of Fisherman's Friends at once, Bicuspid Tremoloarm was able to escape the constraints of the traditional rock 'n' roll career and follow his dream to explore the wild, untamed shores of accountancy.

The Consolations of Nudity

Once upon a time you dressed so fine* which, to the minds of most philosophers does tend to undervalue the appeal of nudity, especially to those in the near vicinity of the undressed person – providing of course that the undresser is not too hard on the eye of the undressees nearby. In which case, there could be legitimate health and safety concerns, especially if the undressees all flee for the exits as a panicking mob.

Still, as they say: …..

Well, I'm pretty sure they would say something, after all in situations like this they tend to always have some pithy apophthegm to beguile us with, don't they?'

Smart-arsed bastards....

Anyway, putting that to one side while standing back to admire its rather fetching attractiveness for a moment....

It is time to step back for a moment from the... er.... rigours of philosophy to contemplate something rather less interesting than the possibility of someone in the near vicinity getting their kit off, which makes most philosophers themselves wish they'd spent less time amongst the dusty tomes and more time out meeting people with a disinclination to remain inside their clothing, but still - apparently – according to Boethius there are some Consolations of Philosophy, and he wrote that in prison, so - perhaps - he should know.

So, mind how you go**.

 

*Like a Rolling Stone – The Dylan

** Yes, It is a philosophy pun***

***Sorry****.

****Not really*****.

*****Sorry, that is.

A Strange World

Of course, it does tend to happen a lot while you are not looking. That is the way it is with the unforeseen… or, for that matter, the not seen. There are as we all know forces that lie outside of what conventional physics claim – how else would we explain the sudden coming into being of so many price-comparison websites in what would otherwise be a rational universe?

In the past, people made up religions and political theories to explain all the strangeness. However, since almost by definition, you have to be pretty odd yourself to want to invent a religion or political programme, this rather increased the amount of irrational oddity in the universe, rather than explaining it. This is a bit like making a ‘Reality’ TV programme about the making of a ‘Reality’ TV programme – it just increases the amount of idiocy in the world.

We are all idiots, babe – that goes without saying, even though his Holiness - the Great Bobness himself - went ahead and said it anyway.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of these things.

Anyway, the point – if there is a point – is that we are all more than capable of being idiots by ourselves; we do not need religions or political theories, systems and programmes to do it for us. That is just overkill – often quite literally.

Thursday Poem: Summer Dancing

Summer Dancing

We forget the echo of hollowness.
We forget the sound of truth.
There are only echoes here
fading slowly into silence,
leaving us to wonder,
leaving us to wander.

We do not know.
We do not want to know.
To know is to feel responsible,
to feel the heaviness of truth.

We do not want to be responsible.
We do not want to bear the weight.
We still want to dance
through the summer of love
without the responsibility.

We weave the dying flowers of summer
into our thinning hair
and still do not want to see.

We dance away from knowing
wanting love from an indifferent world
to become children once again.

We do not like these games
the grown-ups make us play.
For if we are children,
we are the innocent and cannot
be hurt by cruel words and cruel worlds.

We can only play and play on.
We can only dance and dance on
as the sunset dims around us
and our long summer afternoon
fades slowly into night time darkness.

Something for the Weekend: Free Kindle Novel – Dance on Fire

Free for the next five days:

Dance on Fire

What do you do when sex and drugs and rock and roll are no longer enough? At one time, Transmission were probably the most famous rock band on the planet. Now, even as they approach their twenty-fifth anniversary they are still up there, one of the top ten bands of all time. However, each of the surviving members of the band feels something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and the rock and roll dream they used to believe in so much has become an empty and hollow routine. Dance On Fire is an exploration of the relationships between the remaining original members of Transmission, and their manager, as the band enters their 25th year together. The novel charts their growing realisation that rock music no longer has any meaning for them, and they are - at best - still going through force of habit - 'We've become our own tribute band.' Dance On Fire is a novel about the shallowness of everlasting adolescence and the vacuity at the heart of the rock and roll mythology.

Extract:

The throbbing beating brain-numbing noise was almost solid enough to touch. The noise used as music in clubs like this was too loud to be music, too primal to be music, too crude to be music; a noise stripped of almost all its possibilities of becoming music. It was music beaten up, raped, buggered, pissed on and left for dead with its lifeblood oozing out of it and running down the drain with each pulsebeat.

Pete loved it now.

He was dancing, with a half-full bottle of Champagne in each hand. Dancing – or so he thought – like a shaman, like a witch doctor. He was the mystical priest of the beat. He was primal too. He was savage. He was base. He was Dionysus.

The lights throbbed and pulsed showing then concealing the smiling, laughing, grinning coterie he - or rather, his recently discovered valid credit card – had gathered. He had disciples. He was the pied piper, the pied pissed-up prankster that would lead his gang of grinning cavorting lovelies to a new, higher paradise.

‘Wsdsd…FGGFvmm…? HGTffvbb!’

‘What?’ Pete jammed his ear up against the mouth of… whatever her name was.

‘XXXXZXzzzzzz! Quuallll! Tits?’

In the briefest of silences in the noise, Pete was sure that he had heard the word ‘tits’. He nodded his head enthusiastically. ‘Tits, yes!’ he yelled grinning down at the items in question. He was almost sure she had only the normal complement, but there seemed to be far more than just two in there. However, she proved his notion of the conventional correct when she whipped her top off and shook both of them in Pete’s face.

‘Yum! Yum!’ Pete shouted, watching mesmerised, as they performed a slow-motion gravity-defining dance all of their own.

The rest of his entourage had now noticed that one of their number had managed to monopolise the attention of their platinum-credit-card wielding sugar daddy. So, in the spirit of good old free enterprise they too decided that a revealing of their own not-inconsiderable assets would be a way of restoring some balance to the proceedings.

By this time, Pete was already seeing double – if not triple – the sudden avalanche of naked mammaries bouncing and undulating for his delectation was almost too much for him to cope with. He stopped his cavorting and took a step back.

Unfortunately, his backwards motion brought him into contact with the almost full pint held by one of a group of young men. The men were already feeling more than a touch aggrieved that this bloke – at least old enough to be their father – was monopolising so much female attention seemingly through the mere fact of being significantly wealthier than all of them put together.

‘Oi! Cunt. Watch it.’

Pete heard and turned. He grinned. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s getting a bit crowded in here isn’t it?’ He gestured behind him towards the undulating mammorial tide that was threatening to engulf them all.

‘Are you taking the piss?’

‘What? No.’

‘Hey Jimmy, this old cunt is taking the piss, as well as all the birds.’

Jimmy and the rest of the gang began to circle around Pete. Even in his befuddled state, Pete could recognise that things were beginning to get ugly. As the circle closed around him, he could see the girls edged out one by one. But still the first punch to the side of his head took him by surprise.

Pete staggered back into the men who had moved around behind him. They pushed him forward once more. It was over twenty years since Pete and Johnny had to fight their way out of an Austin bar. Since then Pete had not had to raise a fist in anger. Despite this, he knew he was easily able to handle half a dozen or so blokes who were probably over twenty years his junior. He raised his fists, noticing that he still held the two – now empty – champagne bottles.

‘Hmm… useful,’ Pete Muttered. He could feel that his mouth was already starting to swell up. He raised the bottles and took up a martial arts pose.

There was a whirling blur and the man directly in front of Pete collapsed. One of the topless girls took his place. The way she was swinging her lethal looking handbag around her head caused all the young men to turn in her direction. They gazed, mesmerised by her breasts and the slow, almost, leisurely way they developed independent orbits around her upper body.

Two more of the men fell, handbagged from behind be Pete’s tribe of vengeful amazons. Pete lowered his bottles and just stared as the gang fell one by one. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete just noticed the handbag bouncing off the shaven head of one of his attackers and heading towards him.

‘Wat…!’

There was pain. He fell. It went dark.

*

Available here: UK or here: US

An Essential Rock Band

Corrugated Transfat released their first single, on the incredibly hip Tosser label, way back in the mists of 1977, a time when all the hip young things were trying to persuade everyone, including themselves that punk was the thing of the moment. Despite arriving on the scene at the same time as punk, and releasing their first three singles on one of punk’s most iconic record labels, Corrugated Transfat were never really a punk band. For example, their lead guitarist Trim Understeer, knew which way up to hold a guitar and – despite the rumours to the contrary - their drummer, Crude Undertakings, never once tried to eat his own drum sticks.

That first single, Petrol in My left Ear (Baby) was totally ignored by the record-buying public, thereby forcing the music journalists trying to prove their street-cred into branding it an instant classic, the one single of the year everyone who regarded himself (this was, of course a totally male thing) as a serious record collector needed to bite off his own granny’s left leg to get hold of.

However, despite a significant increase in the number of suddenly semi-ambulatory old-age pensioners, the record never got the chart success the more deludedly-fashionable of the music journalists wanted it to be. This only went on to prove to them that they were right, for the only thing better that chart success to a hip journalist on the music papers was a complete lack of chart success by those they championed.

Not long after, Corrugated Transfat, split up due to the perennial ‘musical differences’ when their bass player, Torquewrench Portakabin, got a proper job with a leading accountancy firm, thereby instantly making the band the name to drop when reminiscing about the punk era with other similar overweight middle managers and sales reps pretending that ‘yeah, like I was there, man’.

Tired of Being Alone

[….]

I recognised the sound: I Fought the Law by The Clash. I had been a teenager when punk hit the music scene like a fist in the face, and I was still there to see how quickly it became an empty parody of itself just over a year later. Now it had become nothing more than golden oldies, just another hairstyle in the ever-lengthening history of Rock 'n' Roll. It seemed as though the outrageous had become commonplace, mundane with outrage itself out of date and worn out. No-one had the energy to be outraged any more, hardly meriting a paragraph unless it was a slow news day.

Guy marched up to where I sat and bowed formally. I stood up and Guy took me into his arms. We waltzed sedately around the half-empty dance floor completely out of step with the frantic beat of the anonymous disco tune the DJ played. As people turned to stare, I noticed Julia and Anne sitting side by side, as we twirled around the dance-floor, laughing as they watched us.

Guy tried to tango. I could not hold him as he bent backwards in my arms. We fell to the floor. I stood and held out my hand to Guy. He pulled me back down onto the floor. Then he rolled and stood up, tottering backwards into a pair of serious dancers. They glared and moved away. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the dance-floor trying to make a roll-up as the strobe light flickered.

‘Al Green: Tired of Being Alone,’ I muttered to myself and looked up as Julia held out her hand and pulled me to my feet. We danced slowly, seriously, close together. I let my cigarette go out as Julia rested her head on my shoulder. Slowly I danced us towards the doorway.

‘I need a drink,’ I said as we danced out into the corridor.

‘Okay.’ Julia let me go. ‘Are you glad you came now?’

‘Yes. I'd forgotten how good a night out could be.’ I frowned as I saw Robert engaged in yet another serious discussion at a table near the door. I turned away towards the bar, hoping he would not notice us.

Robert waved at Julia, gesturing for her to come over to his table. She waved and shook her head. Robert shrugged and resumed his conversation with his union cronies. Someone else I didn't recognise waved at Julia; she waved back once more.

I fought my way to the bar and brought back two pints. Julia was in conversation with someone else I vaguely recognised. Eventually, I remembered her name was Jennifer and I’d seen her at the house a couple of times with Julia. I presumed she was studying Politics too.

I handed a pint to Julia and lit the remains of my roll-up. Julia put her glass down on a nearby table and pulled my tin from my pocket. The two girls chatted together as I leant back against the wall and looked around.

The differences between the first year students and the others were not so obvious any more. The nervous awkwardness was almost gone. Only a few stood, or sat, stiffly on the periphery with nervous hands, seeking sanctuary from others' eyes.

The lights flashed twice and Julia turned to me, raising her eyebrows; I nodded and gave her my empty glass. She and Jennifer headed off to the bar together, chatting all the way.

‘Have you done the essay?’

I turned. Steve, a classmate from my tutorial group, looked up at me blinking nervously behind the thick lenses of his black-framed glasses.

‘More or less, just writing it out neatly. I'll have it done tomorrow sometime,’ I said. ‘Is yours finished?’

Steve nodded and looked around. ‘I don't see you in here very often. You're usually with some girl. The one that meets you sometimes, after the tutorials.’

‘Yes, Alison. She's gone home for the weekend,’ I said.

Julia returned and handed me another pint. Steve blinked across at Julia. I could see beads of sweat on his top lip. He muttered something, gestured vaguely and wandered off.

‘Who's that?’ Julia said, leaning closer to me as she watched him walk away.

‘That's Steve. He's a bit on the nervous side. He sits in the corner in tutorials and never says a word, always terrified of being asked a question.’ I watched him disappear into the crowd at the doorway. ‘The sad thing, though, is that he is the smartest one in our group. We could do with his help sometimes. It took three weeks for him to build up the nerve to say hello to me…. So, by the summer he may even speak in the tutorials.’

‘That's a shame,’ Julia said. ‘I wonder what made him like that?’

‘Being one out of only three in his school to take A levels,’ I said. ‘In some places a little bit of knowledge can be very dangerous. I went to a school similar to Steve's. I've seen what can happen to kids at those places.’

‘What sort of things?’

I pulled the sleeve of my shirt up and showed her the scar: long and jagged, from just below the shoulder to an inch above the elbow, twisting from the outside of my arm at the top to just above the crease of flesh on the inside of my elbow.

‘That was for wanting to keep my Geography homework to myself.’ I pulled down the sleeve.

Julia stared at my sleeve as though the scar was still visible through the material of my shirt. Over the other side of the room, I could see people being herded out by the bar staff.

‘Come on, drink up. I think it's time to go,’ I said.

‘Was your school really like that?’ Julia said, still looking at my arm as she drank.

‘Yes,’ I said. From the age of eleven, I had been interred in a school notorious throughout the local education authority. It was infamous even for the viciousness of the girls' netball team. I remembered once meeting a girl at a party who had played netball against my old school. Much later that night she showed me the scar that ran for six inches up the inside of her thigh. The scar had the shape of an arrow pointing to the place where I was keen to go, nevertheless, I paused to kiss along it in a kind of awe.

The girls at my school had been the granddaughters of the small, pale, hard-faced and broad-backed retired miners who now raced pigeons and grew vegetables on their allotments. Allotments that were already subsiding into the underground tunnels they had dug many years before. Their granddaughters had inherited the small stature and hard faces of the miners, while developing large aggressive breasts that were more terrifying than erotic. Before I moved away, I occasionally saw some of those girls I had lain awake at night trying not to stain the sheets over during my early teenage years. They seemed to be suddenly decades older with sagging faces and breasts, each one with several wild children of her own.

I had escaped Empire Street School with only one small scar on my chin as well as the long one on my arm, and two CSEs: Geography and Mathematics, which suggested only a career in cartography. Instead, I spent a year at the local Technical College, amongst welders and car mechanics, and came out with four O levels. ‘It was nasty, it was violent and I got out as soon as I could.’

Julia looked at me closely and then nodded. She finished her drink, and put the glass down on a table as we walked out of the bar.

I sat on the cloakroom bench, rolling a cigarette, as Julia fished her own coat out from under a deep pile of coats that had been hanging up when we first arrived. Julia put her coat on and I handed the cigarette to her. I began to roll another. I put the cigarette into my mouth and shut the tin.

There was a dull thud and a curse from further up the cloakroom. I opened my tin and began to roll yet another cigarette. I finished rolling it just as Guy came over, rubbing his head. I held out the cigarette to him as he sat down next to me.

‘So how many times is it that you've forgotten about the low doorway?’

‘Seven, no six,’ Guy said and rubbed his head again. ‘Can you hang on a minute? Anne's gone to the toilet. Oh, and we have a couple of bottles of wine back at the house. Interested?’

[….]

[Extract from: Hanging Around Until: A novel]

High-rise

[….]

After the rehearsal, they adjourned to The Pit. Stan went off with Cathy and did whatever it was he did when he was running the place.

Matt seemed quiet and thoughtful, again.

‘What's the matter?’ Spike asked him.

‘I'm just wondering what my parents will say when I tell them what I'm going to do.’

‘They can't stop you though, can they?’ Jenny said. ‘We are all over eighteen, our own bosses.’

‘It's not that simple though,’ Matt said. ‘It was bad enough when I said I didn't want to go to university.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Spike said earnestly as she reached for Jenny's hand. ‘There seems to be this plan, this blueprint: school, university, good job, mortgage, wife, kids, retirement, grandchildren… death. Step out of that and… well, they just don't understand why I… why anyone, would want to. Any deviation from the accepted plan and it all spells disaster. The end of the world as they know it.’

‘I can understand it, though,’ Johnny said. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘When you think of all the stuff our parents and their parents and so on, had to go through: wars, depressions, unemployment, no NHS and all that… I suppose a stable – even boring - life seemed like perfection to them.’ Johnny shrugged and hid his face behind his glass, taking a long drink.

Everyone was silent again for a while. Jenny was the first to speak. ‘So, do you agree with Matt's parents then, Johnny?’

‘No.’ Johnny said. ‘I think that you ought to grab at - with both hands - any chance that comes your way. I'd rather regret doing something; take the risk of seeing it all go tits up, than to regret not doing something because I let the chance slip by me. But I can understand their cautious attitude, in a way - that's all. But, it's a middle-class way of looking at things, and I'm working-class. The working-class way is to grab it now, with both hands, before they notice and take it away.’

By the time The Pit closed, they were all pretty-well pissed. They staggered out into the dark night, heading for home. Pete, Matt and Johnny saw Jenny and Spike to their door, offered several helpful suggestions as to how the girls should spend the rest of the night, and then headed on up the road.

At the top of the hill were three blocks of flats, standing together like some giant's henge on the brow of the hill.

‘Hang on,’ Johnny said. ‘We - my family - used to live in the middle one. Come on, I want to show you something.’

Matt and Pete were cautious, knowing they were out of place. But Johnny strolled in as if he owned the whole block. The lift to the top floor was slow and rickety.

Pete was more than relieved when the lift finally got up there and shuddered to a halt. He had regular nightmares about lifts that failed and trapped him.

Johnny led the others around the corner and up a small flight of steps to a locked door. Pete felt a shiver of relief run through him as he turned to go, but Johnny grinned and held up a key.

The wind was cold and strong. All Pete could see were stars and the low darker shadow of a high wall. He felt relieved to see the wall; his knees were already a bit shaky from the realisation that they were nineteen stories from the cold hard ground. Pete had always been terrified of heights. His reticence about leaving safety of the doorway meant the others were across the other side of the roof by the time he had gathered the courage to follow them.

‘Oh shit! Shit! Shit!’ Pete could not take another step. There was a sort of window in the wall. It was a long narrow strip of toughened glass, as tall as the five-and-a-half foot high wall. He could see the bright lights of the town far below distorted through the pebbled glass. He froze, unable to take another step closer to that window. He looked around. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fucking Fuck!’

Johnny was kneeling on top of the wall, pulling Matt up beside him. Matt scrambled up the wall and they stood together side by side on top of the wall, looking down. A moment later, they were both pissing over the edge.

Pete stepped back into the doorway and lit a cigarette, expecting - at any moment - to hear the screams as Matt and Johnny fell to their deaths. A short while later they were back inside, laughing and joking together.

Johnny looked into Pete's eyes. ‘You should have come with us. There is nothing like the feeling that you are pissing on the entire fuckin' world.’

Pete shrugged, trying to appear casual. ‘I didn't need one. Maybe next time,’ he said and headed off towards the lifts.

‘No, this way,’ Johnny said. ‘It’s party time!’

‘Wha…?’ Pete shrugged, stubbed out the cigarette on the concrete floor, then followed Johnny and Matt.

For some reason he didn't quite understand, Pete didn't find the stairs as terrifying as the roof, or as scary as the lift. Despite the possibility of being able to look down and see the banisters curling down and down and down - like some graphic representation of vertigo - on one side, he felt no real fear. On the other side - the wall side - there were a couple of small windows on each landing, but Pete found he could get past these without feeling a need to glance out and terrify himself.

Johnny was pausing at each landing and opening the stair door, listening intently. They had to go down about half a dozen or so floors before Johnny found what he wanted. Even Pete could feel the throbbing music, from a flight of stairs above, when Johnny opened the door to that floor.

‘Party time! Come on.’ Johnny led the other two down the corridor towards the party. He stepped over an unconscious form slumped in the hallway, picked up the empty sherry bottle next to it, and banged on the door.

As the door opened, Johnny quickly herded Matt and Pete in, waving the sherry bottle in his other hand. ‘Jim invited us,’ he said to the bloke who was holding the door open. The bloke nodded vaguely as the three disappeared into the crowd.

‘But it’s bloody packed in there,’ Pete said uncertainly. The other two ignored him and pushed their way in. Pete sighed and followed them.

They had to weave their way slowly - and delicately - through the crowd. Pete was not that keen on parties at the best of times, but this was rapidly approaching the party of his nightmares. After glancing away, at a semi-naked woman dancing on a table, he lost sight of Matt and Johnny in the crowd.

‘Shit!’ He turned and headed back towards the door.

There was a sudden unintelligible shout and the sound of breaking glass. The crowd between the door and Pete surged backwards, thrusting him through a door into a darkened room. He could hear the shouts of ‘Fight!’ over the music outside the room, then a couple of women screaming.

He stepped back further into the darkened room. He heard sounds behind him. Pete turned and saw several moving shapes silhouetted in the darkness. Despite his relative inexperience, he could still recognise the sounds of people fucking. But whether it was an orgy or a gang-bang, Pete couldn't tell in the darkness. He eased himself out of the room as slowly and as quietly as he could.

There was a smear of blood up the wall by the door. Next to it, a sobbing woman knelt on the floor trying to wipe blood off her hands with a blood-sodden handkerchief. Another drunken woman, who had not yet realised that her cigarette was slowly burning a hole in the shoulder of the distressed woman's dress, knelt next to her muttering slurred platitudes into her ear. For a moment, Pete almost stopped to tell them about the slowly rising smoke. But, after another glance at the blood-smeared wall, he changed his mind.

By the door into the main party room, some malodorous bloke with long hair and a shaggy unkempt beard tried to tell Pete something, grabbing his shoulder and rambling incoherently into his ear. Pete could feel the heat of sour breath on the side of his head as he nodded profoundly, clapped the man on the back, and then headed for the door.

Out in the corridor Pete thought about the stairs, but decided the lift might be - marginally - faster. He pressed the button and stood with his head pressed against the cool metal of the lift doors. Several minutes later, he heard a slow groaning rattle and through the tiny window, he could just make out the dark shadow of the lift's arrival.

The doors creaked open slowly. The snogging couple inside the lift disentangled themselves from each other before readjusting their clothing and stepping out of the lift. Pete squeezed past them and managed to thump the button that kept the wheezing doors open long enough for him to get into the lift.

‘Er… excuse me?’ Pete smiled nervously as the teenage boy and girl both stared at him.

‘What?’ The boy's hands were already curling into fists.

Pete ignored him and faced the girl. ‘Are those yours?’ He pointed to the discarded knickers on the floor of the lift.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said without looking at him. She snatched them from the floor and shoved them into her pocket. ‘Ta.’

‘No problem.’ Pete beamed at the boy and girl as the doors began to close.

‘Pete! Hang on! For fuck's sake - hold the lift!’ Johnny and Matt were racing down the narrow corridor. A bottle exploded against the wall above them, showering them both with glass. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete saw the teenage couple quickly disappearing around the opposite corner of the corridor.

‘Press the fuckin' button - quick!’ Johnny said, falling through the door and pulling Matt in with him.

Pete jabbed frantically at the button. He could see a gang of men heading down the corridor, some carrying broken bottles, others with an ominous flash of metal in their hands.

The arthritically slow doors shuddered to a close seconds before the mob got to the lift. It shuddered again and slowly began to descend. Pete could hear the thumping as the gang took out their frustrations on the outside lift doors. The sound faded away as the lift descended and - presumably - the gang gave up and wandered back to the party.

Matt and Johnny sat on the floor of the lift, trying to get their breath back. They looked up at each other and laughed.

‘Stupid cunt,’ Johnny said to Matt.

‘What happened?’ Pete said, already half suspecting the answer.

‘A girl,’ Matt said. ‘I was just talking to her, and this… this… fucking lunatic… just….’

‘I saw it coming,’ Johnny said. ‘I just managed to grab him in time. Luckily, you still had the lift there. I wouldn't have fancied legging it down all them stairs with that mob after us.’

‘It's just bloody ridiculous,’ Matt said. ‘We were only talking, about Woolworth's as it happened. That girl works there, and my sister had a Saturday job there for a while. It was just one of those coincidences that come up at parties. I couldn't believe that man - the way he reacted! All the time we were running down that corridor - it seemed bloody endless, like in a nightmare - I kept saying to myself: This can't be happening! This can't be happening!’

The lift stopped and they cautiously stepped out into the ground floor. Johnny checked around, but there was no sign of anyone from the party.

‘I think it would be a good idea to call it a night,’ Matt said. ‘I suddenly sobered up back up there, and now all I want to do is go home.’

The other two sombrely nodded their agreement. There was a moment of awkward silence before they split up to go their separate ways.

The next day Matt left the band.

[….]

[Extract from Dance on Fire]

Fire Hose

[….]

‘Aaarrgh! Jesus, fuck!’ Pete leapt out of bed, suddenly soaking wet and cold. Johnny was standing on the bottom of Pete's bed, stark naked except for a bright red bra fastened over his head like a Spitfire pilot's leather helmet. He was aiming a still-dripping fire hose at Pete.

‘Oh, hello Helena,’ Johnny said cordially.

‘Bastard!’ Helena said as she tried to extricate herself from the sodden sheets.

Johnny whipped the sheets away from her. ‘Nice tits,’ he said. He dropped the fire hose and sat on the bed, taking one of Helena's cigarettes from the bedside table and lighting it. ‘Y'know, I wish I'd seen you pair shagging on that table. Not old hairy arse here, of course. But you.’ He leered at Helena. ‘I suppose a quick one, now, is out of the question?’

‘Would 'fuck off' and 'over my dead body' be too ambiguous for you?’

‘Ambi-what? Don't forget dear heart, I'm just a working-class thicko. I don't understand your posh words.’ Johnny stood up and waved his cock at Helena. ‘Anyway, fancy a bit of rough then?’

‘Piss off.’

Pete leapt across the bed. ‘No, don….’ He made a grab for Helena just as Johnny did as she'd asked, all over the bed where she had been sitting. Pete took Helena by the hand and ran for the door as Johnny re-aimed his own personal fire hose.

‘Johnny's coming to get you!’ Johnny cried, leaping over the bed. ‘Come back, Helena. It's only a bit of social justice. I only want to do to you what you upper-class folk have been doing to us workers for centuries.’

Pete grabbed the door and flung it open, dragging Helena out into the hotel corridor with him.

‘Good evening, sir.’ The police sergeant said. ‘We have had reports from the hotel manager here, of a disturbance.’

Pete and Helena were trapped. They stood, naked, in front of the open hotel room door, confronted by the police sergeant, a constable, a WPC and the hotel manager. The two policemen smiled humourlessly at the nude couple as the WPC turned away towards the room just as Johnny pissed through the open doorway.

‘Oh… shit,’ she cried, jumping back out of the doorway and gingerly trying to keep her sodden uniform blouse away from her skin, holding it between the tips of her fingers.

‘Er no… WPC Rogers,’ the sergeant said, trying not to laugh. ‘A misinterpretation of the evidence I would say.’ He looked around the door into the hotel room. ‘Oh, hello Johnny, I thought it would be you,’ he said with a sigh. ‘You know the form. Hold your hands out for the cuffs, and keep that thing pointed away from me.’ He turned to Pete and Helena. ‘I suggest you get dressed, sir, miss… before….’

There were several flashes in rapid succession. Pete turned to see a photographer and reporter at the other end of the corridor.

‘Hey!’ The constable shouted. But the photographer and reporter had already disappeared through the fire exit.

The sergeant herded the entire group back into Pete's room. Helena began to pick her clothes up from the floor as the WPC disappeared into the bathroom, still trying to stop her sodden blouse from touching her skin.

‘I was going to say: 'before the press boys get here',’ the sergeant said. ‘But it's too late now.’ He turned to Johnny. ‘Have you got any idea where your clothes are this time?’

Johnny shook his head. The sergeant turned to the hotel manager and asked to borrow a blanket.

The manager nodded. ‘I'll add it to the bill.’

‘We are going to have to charge you this time, Johnny,’ the constable said. ‘Someone had parked their car underneath where you let that telly fall out of the window. He is not a happy man at all. It was a brand-new Mercedes.’

The WPC came back from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and dropped her blouse and personal radio on the bed. ‘There's also damage to police property,’ she said. ‘He pissed all over my radio, it's completely fucked.’ She turned to Johnny.

Johnny smiled at her. ‘Any chance of a shag? I like a woman in uniform.’

The WPC smiled, and then brought her knee up quickly. Johnny groaned as he collapsed. He squirmed on the floor, gasping for breath and clutching his genitals.

The three police officers stood watching impassively for the several minutes it took before Johnny could speak again.

‘My, my. What happened to you then?’ the sergeant asked Johnny.

‘I… I….’ Johnny looked up at each of the officers in turn. ‘I seem to have foolishly bumped into some furniture while I was too drunk to realise what I was doing.’

‘Yes, my thoughts exactly,’ the sergeant agreed.

‘How much this time?’

Everyone turned at the sound of Stan's voice.

‘It's gone beyond that, I'm afraid… sir,’ the hotel manager said.

Stan glanced at the manager, then ignored him. He walked over to the sergeant. The sergeant was standing in the middle of the soaking wet hotel room, next to where Johnny lay on the floor. The PC and the WPC stood behind them. The WPC was now wearing a Transmission tour t-shirt Pete had given her.

‘Is that true?’ Stan said to the sergeant. The sergeant nodded.

‘In that case,’ Stan said. ‘How much would I have to pay you to drop him out of the window?’

‘I'd do that for nothing,’ the WPC said.

‘I’m in love!’ Johnny said, reaching up to kiss the policewoman's hand. He groaned and then curled up into a ball on the soaking wet carpet. A moment later, he was snoring soundly.

[….]

[An extract from Dance on Fire]

Teach Me Not to Care

‘You bastard!’

It isn't easy to look up in terrified guilty shock while a naked woman is sitting on your face, but Pete tried it. His physical reaction to the sound of Helena's voice threw the woman off him. She landed in an untidy heap on the far side of the bed - luckily for her the far side, away from Helena.

Pete had discovered by then that Helena had a habit of throwing things. She was usually and dangerously accurate too.

‘I… I… I….’ Pete instinctively shielded his genitals with his hands and crossed his thighs.

‘Who the fuck is the little tart?’ Helena yelled. ‘She looks like that bitch who did the make-up for the album cover!’

The woman down by the bed peeped over the side, like a nervous sentry in a trench.

‘Sharon? No, it isn't her. This is Cindy, her sister.’ Pete didn't know why he said it, but the pedantry felt like a small victory. He pulled back the sheets from the bottom of the bed, revealing another woman curled up in as tight a ball as she could manage. ‘This is Sharon. And she is not a tart.’ Pete almost gave in to the urge to stand up and gather the sisters to his side like some Victorian gentleman protecting the virtue of his daughters. He could feel a self-justificatory anger growing inside him at the way Helena had destroyed their innocent afternoon idyll. ‘Or a bitch.’

Helena stood there, her mouth opening and closing slowly, but making no sound. Not attempting to throw anything, or shout or scream, just seemingly stunned, shell-shocked and defeated, she turned and strode out of the bedroom.

A moment later, the front door slammed. The sisters began to gather their clothes, avoiding eye contact with Pete. He lit a cigarette.

‘You don't have to go.’ It was a half-hearted gesture.

‘I think we do,’ Sharon said. ‘Things like this don't work when they get too real.’

Pete sat, watching the sisters dressing. It was suddenly as impersonal as a changing room. He felt ridiculous, sitting there - still with half a hard-on - while the sisters brushed their hair and straightened sleeves and hems.

They were ready to go finally. They looked at each other, then at Pete.

‘Well,’ Cindy said.

‘I'm… we…. ‘ Sharon glanced at Cindy before turning back to Pete. ‘We… we're… sorry. We only meant to have a bit of fun - that's all.’ She shrugged helplessly. Sharon took a step towards him, paused, and then changed her mind. She turned and left the room.

Pete looked up at Cindy. She smiled and shrugged. ‘I….’ Then she turned and left.

Pete must have sat there for a while. It was dark when he finally came back from wherever his mind had wandered. He could see her silhouette in the doorway. He didn't know how long she had been standing there.

‘You are a bastard.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I ought to walk out. Fuck off. Leave you and never come back.’ She walked towards him. ‘I'm going to regret doing this. Not now, later.’ She walked right up to Pete, bent down and kissed him, deeply.

She pushed Pete back onto the bed. Her clothes felt rough on his naked skin.

‘I'm sor….’

‘Don't try to apologise,’ she said. ‘We both know you don't mean it.’

‘But I do love you.’

Her sigh seemed loud in the darkness. ‘You really believe that, don't you?’

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘No, you don't love me. You don't love anyone or anything. That is half, more than half, the attraction.’

‘What is?’

Helena was silent for a moment or two as she slipped her clothes off. ‘You don't let anything get close, do you? Even now, at a time like this, I get the feeling that you are not here on this bed with me. I see you over there, in the corner watching. This is probably going to be another one of your bloody songs.’

‘But… so why did you come back then?’

‘I don't know. Maybe part of it is seeing if I can break through to that place where you live.’ She sat up. ‘Maybe it is envy. Maybe I want to see the world as you do. Maybe that is why I chose the camera. It puts distance between me and the world - separates me from it. When I look at things through the viewfinder, they are not so close. I can't touch them, they can't touch, get at me. I feel safe. Maybe I want you to teach me how not to care.’

[An extract from Dance on Fire by David Hadley]

Lion Tamer

After a couple of hours of sweating, they had cleared enough space to get the gear set up and working. Matt spent a good ten minutes with Johnny, admiring and discussing Johnny's new drum kit. While they waited for them, Pete chatted with Jenny and Spike.

‘So, what do you think of him then?’ Pete inclined his head towards Johnny and Matt, who seemed to be talking about cymbals.

‘I like him,’ Jenny said. ‘He makes me laugh.’

‘Yes,’ Spike said. ‘I just hope he can play.’

‘I don't fancy telling him, if he can't though,’ Pete said.

‘Why not?’ Spike seemed genuinely puzzled.

‘He scares me.’

‘Really?’ Jenny laughed. ‘But he's only a tiny little thing.’

‘I dunno.’ Pete shrugged. ‘You just get this feeling with some blokes. I dunno… perhaps it is a male thing.’

Spike and Jenny nodded, almost in unison.

‘Besides that, he has been in the army. He probably knows loads of ways of killing with his bare hands and all that.’

‘But he wasn't in the bloody SAS or anything. He was only a musician, a drummer,’ Spike said.

‘Perhaps he knows of a hundred ways to kill someone with just a drumstick then,’ Pete said. ‘Anyway, he still scares me.’

‘But you work with him,’ Jenny said.

‘Only in the way a lion tamer works with lions,’ Pete replied.

[Taken from Dance on Fire – A Novel by David Hadley – available here]

Dance on Fire - A novel by David Hadley

What do you do when sex and drugs and rock and roll are no longer enough?

At one time, Transmission were probably the most famous rock band on the planet. Now, even as they approach their twenty-fifth anniversary they are still up there, one of the top ten bands of all time. However, each of the surviving members of the band feels something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and the rock and roll dream they used to believe in so much has become an empty and hollow routine.

Dance On Fire is an exploration of the relationships between the remaining original members of Transmission, and their manager, as the band enters their 25th year together. The novel charts their growing realisation that rock music no longer has any meaning for them, and they are - at best - still going through force of habit - 'We've become our own tribute band.'

Dance On Fire is a novel about the shallowness of everlasting adolescence and the vacuity at the heart of the rock and roll mythology.

EU ‘Needs Your Money Now!’ Plea

A shocked Europe last night discovered that its MEPs, and other members of the EU gravy-train, were suffering from extreme poverty and urgently needed even more of their people’s money if they are not to stave of the tragedy of the EU not being able to meet the vital expenses claims of its MEPs.

In a last-minute fraught plea to help raise these vital funds, Celebrity Moaner Bob Gelded, has urged the people of the EU to give the ‘desperate’ EU another umpteen billions of their hard-earned money.

As Gelded said, using a fresh onion to wipe a tear from his eye:

Some of these poor MEPs are having to make do with lying between the honeyed thighs of only one or two ‘research assistants at a time, and, horror of horrors, they can only afford to have gold-plated fixtures and fittings in the EU parliament’s toilets. I personally know several distraught MEPs who haven’t been on a ‘fact-finding mission’ to a top Bangkok ladyboy brothel for over six months.

These people are desperate; give them all your fucking money now!

Also, Bonio, lead mouth with some other superannuated rock annoyance has vowed that unless the people of Europe pay up to keep his political pals from the EU gravy-train in fresh well-oiled Strasbourgian whores, he will have no choice but to wheel his band out and make them do gigs in several European capitals until the people finally do pay up, just to get the to shut up and piss off.

A spokesperson for the EU parliament dismissed widespread claims that the EU parliament is just a pointless talking shop that makes up absurd rules and regulations for the EU, just to give itself something to do.

However, the EU parliament claims that it urgently needs the extra money in order to develop yet more rules that will guarantee a standard European penguin for all the people of the EU region.

Legends of Rock - Part One

Osteopath Chaingun* and the Psychodramatic Megastoats first hit the British singles chart back in the summer of 1975 with their first single (The Square Of The Sum Of The Other Two Sides Makes You) My Squared Hypotenuse, Baby. Championed by Radio 1’s only ever truly hip DJ, Stan Rind**. The Megastoats soon achieved that level of obscurity that is a guarantee of rock music success.

However, The Megas (as they became known to their fan) did not stay obscure for long. By some oversight, they had managed to pick – as their lead guitarist – Nigel ‘Fluffytree’ Hacknslash, who possessed a trait unusual in a rock musician, a natural ability with, and a rudimentary understanding of, music.

In fact, such was his musical prowess that he spent nearly seven weeks as the principal triangle player in his junior school orchestra, until replaced by a girl who knew that a semi-quaver was not as Nigel presumed a half-masticated crisp-like snack.

It was through the musical efforts of Nigel Hacknslash that disaster befell the Megastoats. For it was he who accidentally penned a tune that an over-eager record company released as the perfunctory single from the Psychodramatic Megastoats first album: Put The Cheese Back In The Fridge, Doreen. This was, of course, The Square Of The Sum Of The Other Two Sides Makes You) My Squared Hypotenuse, Baby. Unfortunately, this led to the Megastoats having to appear on the then terminally unhip Top of the Pops, where Osteopath Chaingun, because he was one of the few rock stairs not to have a face like a hedgehog after a meeting with an articulated lorry, soon became a darling of the teenybop audiences of that programme. This meant Chaingun became the darling of those teenyboppers who had left behind Donny Osmond and David Cassidy, along with all their other pre-adult adolescent longings as they looked for someone who seemed to have more than a theoretical knowledge of the differences between the sexes, such that there was back in the 1970s***.

However, the Megas where saved from the fate of being known as 'a teenybopper’s band', when Chaingun fell off the balcony of his Chelsea penthouse apartment hen trying to retrieve a groupie’s bra that had somehow become attached to the next door apartment’s TV aerial during a rather tense episode of The Sweeny.

After that, the Megas replaced Chaingun with Spunk Splatterback, a man so ugly that even his own mother tried to drown him in a sack, and – consequently – only a few months later the Psychodramatic Megastoats returned to the obscurity that their talents so richly deserved.



*Real name - Norman Barnstoneworth
**Real name – Lord Rupert Henry Farigthonstone-Worthy III
***Hence the familiar cry of the 1970s-era father made to witness Top of the Pops by his offspring of: ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ to nearly every act – except, of course, Gilbert O’Sullivan.

The Summer Of Vegetables

‘C’mon baby, get on down and pickle my cabbage’ with those words from the legendary number one single by Stan Dibber and the Allotment Lean-Tos, Britain’s Summer Of Vegetables began. Not since the mid 1960s had the media been able to hype a teen sensation like this. Yes, there had been punk, acid, knitwear, and all those other far too short-lived fads for the media, especially the sub-section of it that likes to consider itself hip and happening with its collective finger on the pulse, to make significant increases in the audience share they were able to deliver to their advertisers.

Of course, social commentators had been bringing out articles and TV documentaries, seemingly by the score, about the increasing amount of asparagus seen at this country’s leading nightspots, but it had, until Stan Dibber came along, only been sporadic and mainly asparagus-based.

As for the actual pickling of vegetables, there were rumours of such things going in the dark backrooms of some of more hip and happening top clubs, where it was alleged several A list celebrities and major catwalk artists indulged in onion pickling parties, but nothing had ever been confirmed. This was despite several tabloid newspapers almost openly touting for any incriminating photographs of say a major TV antiques show presenter dabbling with piccalilli in the company of a pair of glamorous local government clerical assistants.

However, like all such modern day fads, the Summer of Vegetables was short-lived. Soon there was talk of some of the bright young things getting involved with sprouts and sordid tales of several young rock stars overdosing on pickled gherkins.

Then, just as the government was to launch a £50 million campaign to warn the nation’s youth about the danger of mixing cabbage and peas, along with a hard-hitting and graphic advertising campaign cautioning of the dangers of pickled beetroot, it was all over as the fickle attention of the nation’s youth turned to the seedy, exotic and disturbingly erotic delights of political blogging instead.

A 1960s Love Affair

Poodlebrain Hippy-Hippyshake was one of the darlings of the swinging sixties. She was most famous for hanging around on Mediterranean beaches with her top off whilst in the company of various members of some of the hippest bands of the 60s, such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Nigel and the Rockin’ Cost Accountants, Brian’s Cheese Event Collective, but most famous of all, the legendary Orange Nipple.

Poodlebrain first met the genius behind Orange Nipple, Strum Outtolunch whilst sharing a lilo with Keith Richards on the beach at Juan-le-pins. Outtolunch was building a sandcastle just yards down the beach, but such was his drug-addled state at the time, he was trying to build it out of a round of Brie Paul McCartney had bought down to the beach to nibble on whilst writing songs that would latter appear on the Sergeant Pepper album.

It was lust at first sight for Poodlebrain. Outtolunch had the then highly-wasted look that suited the young back in those days, and there was – as Poodlebrain later said – about the way he started off towards the horizon drooling slightly and humming to himself that made her incredibly horny.

Unfortunately just a mere 3 weeks after they became an item, Outtolunch, after an overdose of acid-spike fruit pastilles began to believe he was a guillemot and tragically fell to his death from a cliff where he was trying to build a nest for himself and Poodlebrain to raise their young.

After a brief fling with Gram Parsons at a desert motel just off the M6, Poodlebrain became involved with a sect of accountants and began to experiment with double-entry bookkeeping, despite being warned of its dangers by Mick Jagger himself.

Despite the warnings from Jagger and the attempts by Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce to get her to become a groupie for Cream, Poodlebrain became infatuated with accountancy and even began to dabble in the seedy underground world of Business Studies.

Little was heard of Poodlebrain during the whole of the 1970s. Many just assumed that she had overdosed on invoice reconciliation, or had audited one too many dodgy expense claim, like so many of the beautiful people who have turned their backs on drugs, sex, peace and love to become respectable business people.

Then, in the late 1980s Poodlebrain Hippy-Hippyshake reappeared on the scene as head of the largest record company in America, just in time to make sure that the company earned itself record profits just as the CR boom took off. Unfortunately, though, in an attempt to recapture that heady thrill and excitement that accountancy first brought her, Hippy-Hippyshake became a massive user of cheeseburgers, until one tragic night in 1992 when – after a double-triple Whopper with extra extra cheese and Cardiac-Attack™ Sauce – she exploded, showering a significant portion of Manhattan in semi-digested cheese and fragments of aging business-suited former hippy.

An Episode From The History Of British Pop Culture

Dispatch Fantail was, back in the 1960s, one of the leading figures of the British Eating Pies Boom. Coming quickly after the British Blues Boom, the mania for eating pies was taken up by those who found it difficult to play the guitar and/or moan convincingly about what it was like to grow up black in 1950s America.

The other advantage of the Eating Pies Boom was that it was entirely home grown due to the fact that most English towns, and even small villages, usually had a shop that sold pies of some form or another, even if only the simple staple steak and kidney pie or, for intermediate pie eaters, the apple pie.

Of course, there were those purists who regarded any other pies other than the steak and kidney, or the apple pie, as ‘inauthentic’ and a betrayal of the purity of eating pies. There were others though who, beginning with the more complex chicken and mushroom pies, began to explore the possibilities of other forms of pie, some even going as far as quiches, pizzas (then still regarded as quite exotic, foreign and ‘other’), with the more adventurous going down the dangerous path of the strudel, others losing themselves in the Eastern mysticism of the pancake roll or kebab.

Dispatch Fantail herself, began publicly eating the traditional steak and kidney pie in the backrooms of her local pubs, this was – of course – back in the days when the idea of food in pubs was still very much a novelty, so someone eating a pie live on stage soon began to attract large audiences, especially those keen to witness Fantail’s legendary virtuosic dexterity with the knife and fork and her – for the time – daring use of the solo ketchup sachet.

However, soon with the pressure of eating several pies a week in several different pubs and clubs, the constant touring, began to have an effect on Fantail, her increasing use of condiments began to have deleterious consequences for her pie eating, with Fantail once seriously overdosing on freshly ground black pepper which resulted in a lengthy hospital stay where she was not even allowed to be in the same room as even a solitary mince pie until her recovery was complete.

Unfortunately, spending so long away from performance pie eating meant that Fantail lost her edge, and even her most loyal fans began drifting away. Eventually Dispatch Fantail gave up pie eating altogether, became a vegetarian and moved to an isolated cottage in Scotland, where she is rumoured to still live to this day.

Occasionally, a lone walker, out on the Scottish moors at night, tells of smelling a steak and kidney pie cooking somewhere off in the distance, but these reports have never been confirmed.

One Of The Strangest Incidents Of The Last Decade

Napalm Cheeseguttering has now become famous mainly through one of the strangest incidents of the last decade, at a time when mere fame became the lot of anyone un-self-aware enough to enter, with an eagerness often in direct inverse proportion to any discernable talent or ability, the increasing number of talent and ‘reality’ shows that seemed to infest the TV schedules like acne on the face of a teenager and to much the same aesthetic effect.

At the time of the incident, Cheeseguttering was the lyricist, lead vocalist and bass player in Goat Knee Designator (formerly: Spunk It Up The Wall) yet another run-of-the-mill rock band. Rock music, despite being terminally moribund and about as musically exciting as an undertaker’s End-of-Year balance sheet, was still the main way that teenagers (of all ages) felt was something worth at least pretending to like. And for teenage boys especially it was still seen as the best way of getting to see, and – on occasions - actually touch what girls keep inside their underwear, without having to go through the horror and trauma of having to talk to them.

Anyway, one day in early May 2006 Cheeseguttering was walking down the High street in the small suburban town of Burnwitchburn, carrying his bass in a guitar bag and contemplating whether to go to the chip shop or the Chinese takeaway, when he saw her.

Without a moment’s pause, Cheeseguttering did what any teenager in a rock band does when suddenly confronted by a beautiful woman, he wrote a song about her. She’s Got Tits Like A Dead Heat In A Zeppelin Race, of course became that year’s most played single, topping the charts for 13 months and entering the record books as the song most requested on Valentine’s night for the next six years in a row.

It seemed then that Goat Knee Designator, and – of course - Napalm Cheeseguttering himself, could only go on from there to become one of the greatest rock sensations of all time. However, Cheeseguttering had a terrible secret in that he was quite interested in maths, and quadratic equations in particular. He also had a deep interest in, and understanding of, science and the world around him with more than a glib, superficial understanding of the way it worked and the political processes involved.

Of course, when the established rock stars found out about this, they knew they would have to act fast. Realising the danger to their own positions of someone becoming a famous rock star and then engaging in the mandatory pontificating about science, the world and politics that such a position entails, whilst actually knowing something about what he was talking about was a danger to the positions of all of them. Consequently, they decided that Cheeseguttering would have to be stopped.

Consequently, since that day Napalm Cheeseguttering was invited to collaborate on the writing of a charity single by some of the biggest names in pop music he has never been seen again, not since that day Sting, Bonio and Bob Geldof were seen, each clutching a baseball bat, leading him into a soundproof rehearsal room at a secluded Nevada desert recording studio.