Musical Death Knell
by Andrew McCallum Crawford
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: The night Scottish Electric Blues died.
_____________________________________________________________________
He wedged his guitar case under the table and sat back in the seat. The carriage was almost empty. It was after rush hour. Music, that was what he needed. He screwed in his earphones and pressed play. One of the kids at school had told him how to copy his CDs onto his computer and transfer them onto the walkman thing. It was Blind Lemon Sneddon’s first album. Blind Lemon was good. Really good. Something special. He was a young guy. Youngish. He had only put out 2 CDs. Alan had both of them. They were never off his stereo. Not the walkman MP3 thing, the big stereo, in the living room. His neighbours didn’t appreciate it. They didn’t get the music. Fair enough, to them it must have sounded like a foreign language. Southern U.S. Drawl meets Central Belt Yelp. Scottish Electric Blues, the latest thing. Cutting edge. Blind Lemon Sneddon was the man.
The train pulled slowly out of the station. It was alright, there was no hurry, he knew he would get there in the end. He was on his way to Bishopbriggs, to an event called Musical Death Match, a monthly gig featuring all the big names. It would be Alan’s first visit. He regarded himself as a Blues aficionado. He’d been involved in music since he was eleven. His first ever lesson, he now realised, had been the most important – make sure you tune up properly. He’d perfected the art of GDAE by the second week, then progressed at lightning speed to Grade 8. By the time he left school there was nothing written by Saint Saens that he couldn’t play. At uni he ditched the violin and took up the guitar. He taught himself all of Limping Jack Sunset’s ‘Blues Wire’ by the end of first year and blew his second year grant on a pickup, amp and Echoplex. Then he started writing his own material.
That was all a very long time ago.
The train rumbled through Croy.
Alan was a musician, although he would never have introduced himself as such. He was a teacher. He taught Chemistry. How uncool. But music was what he did – the teaching was strictly to pay the bills. After 20 years in the classroom, it was easy money. He was a good teacher. Perhaps most importantly, he knew how to take a joke, and where to draw the line. But there was more to life than the 9 to 3.30 of electron clouds, test tubes and moles. He’d stumbled across Musical Death Match on Youtube. A couple of Higher pupils showed an interest. It was billed as a ‘jam session showdown’, where all the stars were pitted against each other. Alan supposed the competitive element was to keep the punters interested – he knew a thing or two about attention spans. Some performers were regulars. Blind Lemon Sneddon (of course). Lone Sheepdog Brigstone. Forth ‘n’ Clyde John Gowp. And they were starting to get some big names over from the States. Alan had seen videos of Jack Reverb Coombes and Memphis Belle Debop, and he was sure there were more that hadn’t been uploaded yet. The event was organised by a sultry wee woman called Doreen. She was all electric violin, mini skirt and dumpy legs, and exuded sex in a coy, studied, stunted manner. She saw fit to play her fiddle at every other gig. She was wont to perform, if the shaky videos could be trusted, with an out of tune E, not scordatura, not Danse Macabre, just flat. Sloppy. Is there anything more inept than a tone deaf violinist? She could almost be forgiven, though. She’d managed to get Limping Jack Sunset out of retirement. That’s why Alan was on the train. There was no way he was going to miss this.
Lenzie juddered past the window.
He clicked off the music and put the earphones in his pocket. Blind Lemon Sneddon was good, he had to admit it, but there was a glitch, a wee problem that was starting to spoil his enjoyment. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. It had nothing to do with the music. It was something personal. Alan had tried to ignore it, but couldn’t: Blind Lemon had a cheeky wee face. Slappable. There was no getting away from it. When you saw his photo you wanted to scud his lug. Some people might have put this down to sour grapes on Alan’s part, but even those who knew nothing about music reacted in this way to his picture. And there was something else that was beginning to annoy folk. Even though he’d only released two CDs, Blind Lemon was now regarded as a bit of a celebrity, appearing on game shows and opening fetes, not to mention that infamous stint on Loose Women where he got the piss ripped out of him for a fee. Someone made a joke that he had reached the point where he could fart into a microphone and sell the result. And that’s precisely what he did. It was an EP called ‘Windsongs From My Sphincter’, produced by none other than Gruff Plangent, Edinburgh’s finest, Old School, a valves and ¼-inch tape man. On vinyl. A thousand people bought it in the first week, according to BluesNews. Alan wasn’t one of them.
The warm stench of rotten eggs; the train was slowing down. Alan lifted his guitar case, making sure not to bang it off the leg of the table. He knew he was good. You don’t spend half your life in a classroom without learning something about self-evaluation. He’d made cassettes at home on a Portastudio. He knew he could write songs. He knew he could put them across. He knew he was better than most of the turns he’d seen in the Youtube videos. He knew he could do better.
Was that the point, though? That he knew he could do better?
He knew he was good. But he had never performed in front of a live audience. He’d never performed in public.
The train jerked to a halt.
The venue was a vast metal shed next to a truck depot. A bar had been set up just inside the door, selling beer at a pound a go. It wasn’t quite Glasgow, but there was a lot of posing going on. The men were trendy, each one with a hairstyle hopeful of a Vodafone advert, and the women were pale and scary. Everyone, regardless of sex, had ivory in their earlobes and a tattoo on their neck, and they were all sucking on little green bottles. Tank tops (tank tops?) were in abundance. Alan found a seat down the front, to the side of the stage. The decor consisted of huge propellers set in the walls. It was like sitting inside an industrial air extractor that had been left to rust. He knew there were floorspots up for grabs, that’s why he’d brought his guitar, but he was pretty sure they were all gone. Instruments were being tortured all over the shop. His teeth grated in time to Blues The Healer getting murdered by the emaciated dude behind him; the boy’s dreads were flailing. What the hell, Alan thought. Maybe he should just use the evening to meet other people, to network. Perhaps something would come of it. But he had the uneasy feeling he was kidding himself. It wasn’t difficult to put his finger on it. He felt old. No, it was worse than that. He felt like a teacher, an unwanted guest in the 6th year common room.
A group of enthusiastic young things were milling around a bearded gentleman in the middle of the room. The tank tops parted momentarily and Alan caught a glimpse of dungarees and rainbow braces. It was Gruff Plangent, an ancient TEAC reel-to-reel at his elbow. Someone had set up a video camera on a tripod. Not Gruff, surely? The place, Alan realised, was heaving. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a slice of the action. Everyone except Alan. He didn’t need it. He’d been practising his music for years. All he wanted to do was share it. No ulterior motives. No first step on the ladder to fame. Here it is. I think it’s good. I know it is. Please listen. I hope you enjoy it.
Maybe next time.
The laughter behind him was raucous. Everyone seemed to be talking about Professor Kaiser. Alan looked at the girl with the loudest voice. Her hair was short, dyed tartan. A matching red, blue and yellow butterfly was etched into her throat. He took a deep breath. ‘Who’s Professor Kaiser?’ he said.
‘Oh, you mean Professor Mackay!’ said the girl. ‘Kaiser’s his pet name. He doesn’t know, though!’
‘Who is he?’ said Alan.
The girl looked at him as if he were an imbecile. Or senile. ‘He’s the main lecturer on the bemuse course?’ she said. She sounded Australian, via Bearsden.
‘The what?’ he said.
‘The bemuse course,’ she said. ‘Bachelor of Music. BMus?’
‘What?’ said Alan, and cast an eye over the audience. ‘Is everyone here a music student?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So what?’
Something made a grating noise. Alan thought it was his teeth, but it was only the propellers in the walls; they had started to rotate.
‘If I can have everyone’s attention!’ It was Doreen. She had mounted the stage. Alan was relieved to see she wasn’t wielding her fiddle. She welcomed everyone to the venue. She insisted on calling the place ‘Bishopbridges’ – she was too posh to call it Bishopbriggs. This should have caused a titter, but didn’t. People didn’t want to give offence for fear of spoiling their chances of a floorspot. Did they take it this seriously? ‘We’ve dispensed with the competitive element this evening,’ she said. That was something else to be grateful for, thought Alan, although there were groans from the audience. ‘I know, I know, but there’s too much to get through! First off – you all know him! Forth ‘n’ Clyde John Gowp!’
Alan sat forward in his chair. He had borrowed a couple of the boy’s albums from the library. Forth ‘n’ Clyde was a man who wrote songs with a humorous twist. Guitar and synthesiser – occasional banjo. He was holding a sheet of paper. There wasn’t a guitar, synthesiser or banjo in sight. Well, there were plenty in the audience, but not up on the stage, not in the vicinity of the performer. The crowd were already laughing. He leaned into the mike.
‘There’s a Blind Lemon crooner called Sneddon,’
he recited,
‘Who plays Scottish Electric Blues licks that are dead-on,
His celebrity status
Has filled the hiatus
Of good-looking performers with a Fez on.’
Hilarity! People were slapping their thighs! People were slapping other people’s thighs! Were they deaf? It didn’t even scan. What the hell was Forth ‘n’ Clyde playing at, reading crap poetry at a blues gig? Maybe it was Alan. Maybe he didn’t get it. Maybe the Limerick was part of a running gag – a running gig gag, that must have been it, it was full of references to previous gigs. Alan didn’t get the humour because he hadn’t been here before.
Forth ‘n’ Clyde left the stage. A few people in the front row stood up and touched him.
Doreen was back at the microphone. ‘Thank you, Forth ‘n’ Clyde John Gowp,’ she said. ‘That was brilliant.’ An ejaculation of sudden mirth – a guffaw – erupted from Alan’s mouth. He realised that, apart from the propellers, it was the only sound in the room. Doreen was staring at him. ‘And belated congratulations to Forth ‘n’ Clyde on getting his Masters in Music last week,’ she said. More applause. Especially from the girl sitting behind Alan. ‘Now the moment I’ve – we’ve all been waiting for,’ Doreen went on. ‘No, no, not our special guest, he’s been delayed somewhere, but he’ll be here later, don’t worry. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – Blind Lemon Sneddon!’
The applause was deafening. And the whistling. Blind Lemon climbed the steps. He wasn’t carrying his guitar. He was wearing a Fez, though. God, he wasn’t going to recite a Limerick, was he? A reply to Forth ‘n’ Clyde’s doggerel.
‘Many thanks to Blind Lemon,’ said Doreen, ‘for taking time out from composing his PhD thesis ‘Paradigm Shifts In Scottish Blues, 1990-2010’ so he could be with us tonight.’
More applause. More whistling. Alan felt pressure building in his ears. The grating seemed to be getting louder; the propellers were going faster. Blind Lemon whispered something to Doreen. Her hand shot to her throat; she swatted a small insect. She smiled. She seemed to be shaking.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Blind Lemon is going to perform the first movement of ‘Windsongs’.’ As one the audience gasped, ‘Ah, the Allegro maestoso!’ Doreen rearranged the microphone at arse level. Blind Lemon’s, not hers. A wave of hate lapped over the crowd; it was obvious that Doreen and Blind Lemon were a couple, or soon would be. The enmity waned slightly as she left the stage, but there was a lingering feeling that something had gone awry. Blind Lemon was leaning with his hands on his knees. ‘Hello Bishopbridges!’ he said. He pushed himself round. He keeked over his shoulder. His face was cheeky, slappable as he checked that his backside, his cheeks, were just so in front of the mike.
There was a heavy clunk as Gruff pressed ‘Record’ on the TEAC.
The performance began. It was fast, certainly, but there was nothing majestic about it. Alan had to turn away. It was unwatchable, but it wasn’t the only performance in the room. The woman in the seat beside him was moaning rhythmically, as was the girl with the tartan hair. And the guy next to her was tugging his dreads with one hand and thumping his groin with the other in time to the reverberations pumping out of the PA. In fact, the whole audience seemed to be undergoing some kind of exosomatic experience. Out of it. They had lost touch with reality.
Alan was on his feet. ‘This is shite!’ he heard himself shout.
Blind Lemon was in mid-rip. The fart, an extended E as far as Alan could make out, the kind of perfectly intoned E that Doreen could only dream about, trailed off into silence, like a small aeroplane spiralling into a distant hayfield. Then a dull thud, the sound of impact, something soft on cotton. The propellers in the walls continued to rotate, uselessly. The Cessna might have crashed and burned, but the smell was of a thousand braking locomotives.
‘Who said that?!’ It was Doreen, the organiser, the love interest in the story, the learner violinist.
‘I did,’ said Alan. ‘What the fuck is this? I paid a fiver to get in here. I came here to listen to music. I didn’t come here to watch someone...’ He gestured weakly at Blind Lemon, who was still squatting with his arse to the audience. What was Alan saying? He felt like a traitor. He liked the boy’s stuff – well, the first two CDs anyway – but this was just...it was worse than terrible. What was wrong with these people?
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Doreen. She turned, concerned, to Blind Lemon. Even though he was facing the back of the stage, you could tell he was embarrassed; something in the tilt of his Fez.
‘Yeah, you nobody!’ someone shouted. It was the girl with the tartan hair. ‘You shouldn’t even be here. You impostor.’
‘But I’m a musician!’ said Alan. His guitar case was at his feet. Just as well he hadn’t arranged a floorspot. ‘I write songs! I’ve been doing it for years!’ He tried to stop himself, but couldn’t. ‘I can do better than this!’
‘That’s not the point!’ chorused half the audience.
It was a wind up. He was sure now. It was all a joke. Fair enough, the joke was on Alan, but he could handle that, he was a teacher. In the middle of the room, Gruff Plangent was smiling as the TEAC’s reels turned wonkily, like eyes in the head of a lunatic. Maybe Gruff was a kindred spirit. He was definitely the only person in the room older than Alan.
‘I think you should leave,’ said Doreen. She was talking to Alan, but Blind Lemon jerked round with a quizzical expression on his face. His Fez fell off.
There was a sudden ruckus at the door and an old man in a wheelchair, a man even older than Gruff, was being pushed through the crowd then manhandled, still in the wheelchair, onto the stage. Doreen rushed up the steps and knelt beside Blind Lemon, a genuflection. She placed a hand on his neck and coaxed him to the refuge of the bar. He crawled. Someone pushed a guitar at the old man. He looked at it for a moment as if he didn’t know what it was, then plugged it into an amplifier that had appeared at his side. He didn’t have to adjust the microphone, but pulled a big yellow hanky out of his sleeve and gave it a good wipe.
‘Retirement sucks, man,’ he growled in his Louisiana drawl. ‘This is Work It.’
Alan was ecstatic. So was everyone else. Wankers. He turned to the girl. She was doing the mashed potato in time to Limping Jack’s licks. ‘Has. He. Got. A. B. Mus?’ Alan mouthed, slowly. The girl gave him the finger then segued into the next phase of her hand jive. The smell lingered, but was bearable; the propellers were spinning in the walls in time with the TEAC, which seemed to have caught up with itself. Alan clocked Gruff Plangent, who leaned back in his chair; he tucked his thumbs into his braces and winked.
‘Let the children play,’ Limping Jack groaned.
‘Their daddy’s workin’ them fields.’
It was a monster gig. Musical Death Match IX. Musical Death Knell, more like. The night Scottish Electric Blues, and Blind Lemon Sneddon, died. Alan bought the EP (on vinyl) as soon as it came out, but only listened to side 1, the side with Limping Jack Sunset. He watched the video on Youtube, too. All of it. It was embarrassing. It still is, although he keeps coming back to it. It’s had over fifty thousand plays.
He hasn’t mentioned it to the kids at school.
Footnote: Alan Barr’s debut album, ‘The Bishop’s Bridges’, is available as a free download on selfstartblues.co.uk
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: The night Scottish Electric Blues died.
_____________________________________________________________________
He wedged his guitar case under the table and sat back in the seat. The carriage was almost empty. It was after rush hour. Music, that was what he needed. He screwed in his earphones and pressed play. One of the kids at school had told him how to copy his CDs onto his computer and transfer them onto the walkman thing. It was Blind Lemon Sneddon’s first album. Blind Lemon was good. Really good. Something special. He was a young guy. Youngish. He had only put out 2 CDs. Alan had both of them. They were never off his stereo. Not the walkman MP3 thing, the big stereo, in the living room. His neighbours didn’t appreciate it. They didn’t get the music. Fair enough, to them it must have sounded like a foreign language. Southern U.S. Drawl meets Central Belt Yelp. Scottish Electric Blues, the latest thing. Cutting edge. Blind Lemon Sneddon was the man.
The train pulled slowly out of the station. It was alright, there was no hurry, he knew he would get there in the end. He was on his way to Bishopbriggs, to an event called Musical Death Match, a monthly gig featuring all the big names. It would be Alan’s first visit. He regarded himself as a Blues aficionado. He’d been involved in music since he was eleven. His first ever lesson, he now realised, had been the most important – make sure you tune up properly. He’d perfected the art of GDAE by the second week, then progressed at lightning speed to Grade 8. By the time he left school there was nothing written by Saint Saens that he couldn’t play. At uni he ditched the violin and took up the guitar. He taught himself all of Limping Jack Sunset’s ‘Blues Wire’ by the end of first year and blew his second year grant on a pickup, amp and Echoplex. Then he started writing his own material.
That was all a very long time ago.
The train rumbled through Croy.
Alan was a musician, although he would never have introduced himself as such. He was a teacher. He taught Chemistry. How uncool. But music was what he did – the teaching was strictly to pay the bills. After 20 years in the classroom, it was easy money. He was a good teacher. Perhaps most importantly, he knew how to take a joke, and where to draw the line. But there was more to life than the 9 to 3.30 of electron clouds, test tubes and moles. He’d stumbled across Musical Death Match on Youtube. A couple of Higher pupils showed an interest. It was billed as a ‘jam session showdown’, where all the stars were pitted against each other. Alan supposed the competitive element was to keep the punters interested – he knew a thing or two about attention spans. Some performers were regulars. Blind Lemon Sneddon (of course). Lone Sheepdog Brigstone. Forth ‘n’ Clyde John Gowp. And they were starting to get some big names over from the States. Alan had seen videos of Jack Reverb Coombes and Memphis Belle Debop, and he was sure there were more that hadn’t been uploaded yet. The event was organised by a sultry wee woman called Doreen. She was all electric violin, mini skirt and dumpy legs, and exuded sex in a coy, studied, stunted manner. She saw fit to play her fiddle at every other gig. She was wont to perform, if the shaky videos could be trusted, with an out of tune E, not scordatura, not Danse Macabre, just flat. Sloppy. Is there anything more inept than a tone deaf violinist? She could almost be forgiven, though. She’d managed to get Limping Jack Sunset out of retirement. That’s why Alan was on the train. There was no way he was going to miss this.
Lenzie juddered past the window.
He clicked off the music and put the earphones in his pocket. Blind Lemon Sneddon was good, he had to admit it, but there was a glitch, a wee problem that was starting to spoil his enjoyment. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. It had nothing to do with the music. It was something personal. Alan had tried to ignore it, but couldn’t: Blind Lemon had a cheeky wee face. Slappable. There was no getting away from it. When you saw his photo you wanted to scud his lug. Some people might have put this down to sour grapes on Alan’s part, but even those who knew nothing about music reacted in this way to his picture. And there was something else that was beginning to annoy folk. Even though he’d only released two CDs, Blind Lemon was now regarded as a bit of a celebrity, appearing on game shows and opening fetes, not to mention that infamous stint on Loose Women where he got the piss ripped out of him for a fee. Someone made a joke that he had reached the point where he could fart into a microphone and sell the result. And that’s precisely what he did. It was an EP called ‘Windsongs From My Sphincter’, produced by none other than Gruff Plangent, Edinburgh’s finest, Old School, a valves and ¼-inch tape man. On vinyl. A thousand people bought it in the first week, according to BluesNews. Alan wasn’t one of them.
The warm stench of rotten eggs; the train was slowing down. Alan lifted his guitar case, making sure not to bang it off the leg of the table. He knew he was good. You don’t spend half your life in a classroom without learning something about self-evaluation. He’d made cassettes at home on a Portastudio. He knew he could write songs. He knew he could put them across. He knew he was better than most of the turns he’d seen in the Youtube videos. He knew he could do better.
Was that the point, though? That he knew he could do better?
He knew he was good. But he had never performed in front of a live audience. He’d never performed in public.
The train jerked to a halt.
The venue was a vast metal shed next to a truck depot. A bar had been set up just inside the door, selling beer at a pound a go. It wasn’t quite Glasgow, but there was a lot of posing going on. The men were trendy, each one with a hairstyle hopeful of a Vodafone advert, and the women were pale and scary. Everyone, regardless of sex, had ivory in their earlobes and a tattoo on their neck, and they were all sucking on little green bottles. Tank tops (tank tops?) were in abundance. Alan found a seat down the front, to the side of the stage. The decor consisted of huge propellers set in the walls. It was like sitting inside an industrial air extractor that had been left to rust. He knew there were floorspots up for grabs, that’s why he’d brought his guitar, but he was pretty sure they were all gone. Instruments were being tortured all over the shop. His teeth grated in time to Blues The Healer getting murdered by the emaciated dude behind him; the boy’s dreads were flailing. What the hell, Alan thought. Maybe he should just use the evening to meet other people, to network. Perhaps something would come of it. But he had the uneasy feeling he was kidding himself. It wasn’t difficult to put his finger on it. He felt old. No, it was worse than that. He felt like a teacher, an unwanted guest in the 6th year common room.
A group of enthusiastic young things were milling around a bearded gentleman in the middle of the room. The tank tops parted momentarily and Alan caught a glimpse of dungarees and rainbow braces. It was Gruff Plangent, an ancient TEAC reel-to-reel at his elbow. Someone had set up a video camera on a tripod. Not Gruff, surely? The place, Alan realised, was heaving. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a slice of the action. Everyone except Alan. He didn’t need it. He’d been practising his music for years. All he wanted to do was share it. No ulterior motives. No first step on the ladder to fame. Here it is. I think it’s good. I know it is. Please listen. I hope you enjoy it.
Maybe next time.
The laughter behind him was raucous. Everyone seemed to be talking about Professor Kaiser. Alan looked at the girl with the loudest voice. Her hair was short, dyed tartan. A matching red, blue and yellow butterfly was etched into her throat. He took a deep breath. ‘Who’s Professor Kaiser?’ he said.
‘Oh, you mean Professor Mackay!’ said the girl. ‘Kaiser’s his pet name. He doesn’t know, though!’
‘Who is he?’ said Alan.
The girl looked at him as if he were an imbecile. Or senile. ‘He’s the main lecturer on the bemuse course?’ she said. She sounded Australian, via Bearsden.
‘The what?’ he said.
‘The bemuse course,’ she said. ‘Bachelor of Music. BMus?’
‘What?’ said Alan, and cast an eye over the audience. ‘Is everyone here a music student?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So what?’
Something made a grating noise. Alan thought it was his teeth, but it was only the propellers in the walls; they had started to rotate.
‘If I can have everyone’s attention!’ It was Doreen. She had mounted the stage. Alan was relieved to see she wasn’t wielding her fiddle. She welcomed everyone to the venue. She insisted on calling the place ‘Bishopbridges’ – she was too posh to call it Bishopbriggs. This should have caused a titter, but didn’t. People didn’t want to give offence for fear of spoiling their chances of a floorspot. Did they take it this seriously? ‘We’ve dispensed with the competitive element this evening,’ she said. That was something else to be grateful for, thought Alan, although there were groans from the audience. ‘I know, I know, but there’s too much to get through! First off – you all know him! Forth ‘n’ Clyde John Gowp!’
Alan sat forward in his chair. He had borrowed a couple of the boy’s albums from the library. Forth ‘n’ Clyde was a man who wrote songs with a humorous twist. Guitar and synthesiser – occasional banjo. He was holding a sheet of paper. There wasn’t a guitar, synthesiser or banjo in sight. Well, there were plenty in the audience, but not up on the stage, not in the vicinity of the performer. The crowd were already laughing. He leaned into the mike.
‘There’s a Blind Lemon crooner called Sneddon,’
he recited,
‘Who plays Scottish Electric Blues licks that are dead-on,
His celebrity status
Has filled the hiatus
Of good-looking performers with a Fez on.’
Hilarity! People were slapping their thighs! People were slapping other people’s thighs! Were they deaf? It didn’t even scan. What the hell was Forth ‘n’ Clyde playing at, reading crap poetry at a blues gig? Maybe it was Alan. Maybe he didn’t get it. Maybe the Limerick was part of a running gag – a running gig gag, that must have been it, it was full of references to previous gigs. Alan didn’t get the humour because he hadn’t been here before.
Forth ‘n’ Clyde left the stage. A few people in the front row stood up and touched him.
Doreen was back at the microphone. ‘Thank you, Forth ‘n’ Clyde John Gowp,’ she said. ‘That was brilliant.’ An ejaculation of sudden mirth – a guffaw – erupted from Alan’s mouth. He realised that, apart from the propellers, it was the only sound in the room. Doreen was staring at him. ‘And belated congratulations to Forth ‘n’ Clyde on getting his Masters in Music last week,’ she said. More applause. Especially from the girl sitting behind Alan. ‘Now the moment I’ve – we’ve all been waiting for,’ Doreen went on. ‘No, no, not our special guest, he’s been delayed somewhere, but he’ll be here later, don’t worry. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – Blind Lemon Sneddon!’
The applause was deafening. And the whistling. Blind Lemon climbed the steps. He wasn’t carrying his guitar. He was wearing a Fez, though. God, he wasn’t going to recite a Limerick, was he? A reply to Forth ‘n’ Clyde’s doggerel.
‘Many thanks to Blind Lemon,’ said Doreen, ‘for taking time out from composing his PhD thesis ‘Paradigm Shifts In Scottish Blues, 1990-2010’ so he could be with us tonight.’
More applause. More whistling. Alan felt pressure building in his ears. The grating seemed to be getting louder; the propellers were going faster. Blind Lemon whispered something to Doreen. Her hand shot to her throat; she swatted a small insect. She smiled. She seemed to be shaking.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Blind Lemon is going to perform the first movement of ‘Windsongs’.’ As one the audience gasped, ‘Ah, the Allegro maestoso!’ Doreen rearranged the microphone at arse level. Blind Lemon’s, not hers. A wave of hate lapped over the crowd; it was obvious that Doreen and Blind Lemon were a couple, or soon would be. The enmity waned slightly as she left the stage, but there was a lingering feeling that something had gone awry. Blind Lemon was leaning with his hands on his knees. ‘Hello Bishopbridges!’ he said. He pushed himself round. He keeked over his shoulder. His face was cheeky, slappable as he checked that his backside, his cheeks, were just so in front of the mike.
There was a heavy clunk as Gruff pressed ‘Record’ on the TEAC.
The performance began. It was fast, certainly, but there was nothing majestic about it. Alan had to turn away. It was unwatchable, but it wasn’t the only performance in the room. The woman in the seat beside him was moaning rhythmically, as was the girl with the tartan hair. And the guy next to her was tugging his dreads with one hand and thumping his groin with the other in time to the reverberations pumping out of the PA. In fact, the whole audience seemed to be undergoing some kind of exosomatic experience. Out of it. They had lost touch with reality.
Alan was on his feet. ‘This is shite!’ he heard himself shout.
Blind Lemon was in mid-rip. The fart, an extended E as far as Alan could make out, the kind of perfectly intoned E that Doreen could only dream about, trailed off into silence, like a small aeroplane spiralling into a distant hayfield. Then a dull thud, the sound of impact, something soft on cotton. The propellers in the walls continued to rotate, uselessly. The Cessna might have crashed and burned, but the smell was of a thousand braking locomotives.
‘Who said that?!’ It was Doreen, the organiser, the love interest in the story, the learner violinist.
‘I did,’ said Alan. ‘What the fuck is this? I paid a fiver to get in here. I came here to listen to music. I didn’t come here to watch someone...’ He gestured weakly at Blind Lemon, who was still squatting with his arse to the audience. What was Alan saying? He felt like a traitor. He liked the boy’s stuff – well, the first two CDs anyway – but this was just...it was worse than terrible. What was wrong with these people?
‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Doreen. She turned, concerned, to Blind Lemon. Even though he was facing the back of the stage, you could tell he was embarrassed; something in the tilt of his Fez.
‘Yeah, you nobody!’ someone shouted. It was the girl with the tartan hair. ‘You shouldn’t even be here. You impostor.’
‘But I’m a musician!’ said Alan. His guitar case was at his feet. Just as well he hadn’t arranged a floorspot. ‘I write songs! I’ve been doing it for years!’ He tried to stop himself, but couldn’t. ‘I can do better than this!’
‘That’s not the point!’ chorused half the audience.
It was a wind up. He was sure now. It was all a joke. Fair enough, the joke was on Alan, but he could handle that, he was a teacher. In the middle of the room, Gruff Plangent was smiling as the TEAC’s reels turned wonkily, like eyes in the head of a lunatic. Maybe Gruff was a kindred spirit. He was definitely the only person in the room older than Alan.
‘I think you should leave,’ said Doreen. She was talking to Alan, but Blind Lemon jerked round with a quizzical expression on his face. His Fez fell off.
There was a sudden ruckus at the door and an old man in a wheelchair, a man even older than Gruff, was being pushed through the crowd then manhandled, still in the wheelchair, onto the stage. Doreen rushed up the steps and knelt beside Blind Lemon, a genuflection. She placed a hand on his neck and coaxed him to the refuge of the bar. He crawled. Someone pushed a guitar at the old man. He looked at it for a moment as if he didn’t know what it was, then plugged it into an amplifier that had appeared at his side. He didn’t have to adjust the microphone, but pulled a big yellow hanky out of his sleeve and gave it a good wipe.
‘Retirement sucks, man,’ he growled in his Louisiana drawl. ‘This is Work It.’
Alan was ecstatic. So was everyone else. Wankers. He turned to the girl. She was doing the mashed potato in time to Limping Jack’s licks. ‘Has. He. Got. A. B. Mus?’ Alan mouthed, slowly. The girl gave him the finger then segued into the next phase of her hand jive. The smell lingered, but was bearable; the propellers were spinning in the walls in time with the TEAC, which seemed to have caught up with itself. Alan clocked Gruff Plangent, who leaned back in his chair; he tucked his thumbs into his braces and winked.
‘Let the children play,’ Limping Jack groaned.
‘Their daddy’s workin’ them fields.’
It was a monster gig. Musical Death Match IX. Musical Death Knell, more like. The night Scottish Electric Blues, and Blind Lemon Sneddon, died. Alan bought the EP (on vinyl) as soon as it came out, but only listened to side 1, the side with Limping Jack Sunset. He watched the video on Youtube, too. All of it. It was embarrassing. It still is, although he keeps coming back to it. It’s had over fifty thousand plays.
He hasn’t mentioned it to the kids at school.
Footnote: Alan Barr’s debut album, ‘The Bishop’s Bridges’, is available as a free download on selfstartblues.co.uk
About the Author
Andrew McCallum Crawford was born in Grangemouth and now lives in Greece. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in Lines Review, Junk Junction, The Athens News and Ink Sweat and Tears. His first novel, Drive! – a story of 1980’s Edinburgh pub rock, attempted patricide and arson – was published last year.
His blog can be found at http://www.andrewmccallumcrawford.blogspot.com/ and his novel can be purchased at this link on Amazon.co.uk.
His blog can be found at http://www.andrewmccallumcrawford.blogspot.com/ and his novel can be purchased at this link on Amazon.co.uk.