Toy fights, p.14
Toy Fights, page 14
The day came, and the assembly hall was packed. We honked our way through ‘The Floral Dance’ and ‘Eye Level or the Theme from Van der Valk’, and both passed without incident. We gamely embarked upon ‘Those Magnificent Men’. The moment came. Mr Brown indicated me violently, like a mad wizard, casting an ‘up’ spell with his baton. I panicked and immediately shanked the big glissando, lipped into the wrong octave, and raspberried it. I tried to compensate immediately with my slide on ‘down’. Now: some technical information. These days, one can reach the lowest notes on the bass trombone with the induction of an extra coil of tubing engaged via a discreet valve, but back then we were purists. In those days the bass trombone had an additional seventh position, one only within the reach of basketball players, statistically few of whom are also brass specialists. But mortals could reach the bottom note by flinging the slide out to a full arm’s extension, and then additionally flinging out a little ornamentally tooled handle, which would afford you the extra four inches you needed for your deep contra-parp.† Anyway, appalled by my up-note, I determined to really make up for it on the descent: I made a gratifying growly downward slide, like a fat motorboat speeding past your ear – then flung the handle out to end on a big Alpine blart. Only I failed to catch it, and the trombone slide shot off the end, whistled past the ear of the French horn in front of me, and clattered to the floor six feet away. This all took place over about two seconds, which lasted about an hour, hence the detail. To be clear, then: the effect was basically ‘[Up] – YODELLED FART – [down] – BLAAAAARRRGHHH – shite – CRASH’. The ground lay before me, undefied, and refusing to swallow me up. Mr Brown didn’t even shake his head at me. When I looked to him, his eyes were closed.
* In one stroke, they had solved the honking, six-hundred-year-old problem of the operatic recitative, which should have been conducted solely through vocoders since 1940.
† I read online that ‘players found this tiring, and by the end of the nineteenth century, these handles had almost completely disappeared’. My arse they had.
19 Heinz Fry Dry Fear
At the age of twelve, around two years before I finally succumbed to it, I picked up the guitar for about a month. Alasdair and I immediately formed what we called a ‘rehearsal band’. We were called Powerplant. We were called Powerplant because this was the English translation of Kraftwerk. We were me on acoustic guitar, doubling on Jew’s harp, Alasdair on piano (upright; non-movable; front-room) and three more Jew’s harp players whose names are lost to the haar of time. Hang on: Grant Thain, Angus McKay, Gary … Nope. We sounded like testing day at a cartoon bed factory. It wouldn’t be quite true to say we modelled ourselves on the German man-machines; for one thing, we were hamstrung by our lack of synthesisers, which we assumed was what allowed Kraftwerk to play the same thing over and over again perfectly, though it might have been talent.* We’d play the same thing over and over again too, but it came out very differently each time. We were, though, admirers of their look. Some critics read Nazi sympathies into the Kraftwerk style, but what they meant was that they looked German. Not that they all carried off the Cabaret Stormtrooper look with equal aplomb – Florian Schneider’s expression was always more ashen-faced docker caught in his wife’s knickers and eyeliner – but the point was: band uniform. We had a brief experiment with our old Boys’ Brigade caps, mascara and foundation, but we valued our lives, and wisely opted for civvies. Alasdair had tried to pass off his brutal number 2 cut with the engraved side-parting as Teutonic affectation, but we all knew it was because his old man used to be Plymouth Brethren.
Kraftwerk didn’t exactly capture the alienation of a generation, quite, but they did speak perfectly to that subset of tormented bright kids with no friends, few friends or friends they didn’t much like, for whom adolescence will always be the purest torment. The ‘Werk got me through some bad days, not least because all their music seemed to be pure locomotion, headed in the general direction of the hell out of here. The first album that turned us on was Autobahn. The title track, with its catchy refrain of ‘Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn’, built to a twenty-odd-minute epic that seemed, to us, a veritable Ring cycle. (The resemblance to the Beach Boys’ ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ was, I read here, ‘wholly accidental’; frankly, I could have worked this out for myself.) It was mind-blowing: sequenced synths, speeding-car noises panned left to right, skids, horns, laddies talking like robots. Side Two had a couple of rinky-dink things, and a bizarre synthesised field recording of birds and insects with fairy recorders and a mandolin. We played it once, and silently agreed never to mention it again. But then came Trans-Europe Express, which we dissected forensically. Finally, something recorded by a robot for other robots to play in the evening. Throughout, the Department of Redundancy Department was in permanent overdrive: we’d Dalek-sing along to ‘The young man stepped into the hall of mirrors / Where he discovered a reflection of himself’. Or the crowning glory of Trans-Europe Express – ‘Trans-Europe Express’, with its catchy refrain of ‘Trans-Europe Express’: so doggedly literal in its evocation of wheels clattering over points and other chuff-chuff noises, it really did feel like you were on the train, and as I had been on a train maybe four times, this was no small thrill. ‘Showroom Dummies’ is actually counted in; given that the whole tune appears to be based on a Casio keyboard preset held down with a single finger, this might be humour, or some German misunderstanding of it.† The end of the tune daringly attempts a little semi-fiddly synth melody, but rapidly falls to bits in a kind of trad jazz for Cybermen. (Robots, just like Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk, understand synchronisation but not counterpoint.) We tried counting in, in German (‘Heinz Fry Dry Fear’), and worked hard to synchronise our twangs, and even attempted a hocket, where two pairs of Jew’s harps would twang alternately. With the addition of Alasdair’s repeated staccato chords on piano, it now sounded like something written by the infant Steve Reich, i.e. even worse than the adult Steve Reich, but the effect was tighter and louder, a bit like two fat elves making steady and passionate love.‡ Alas, Powerplant soon fell apart owing to musical differences – some of us weren’t musical – and I put down the guitar again.
A couple of years later, Alasdair and I tried, unsuccessfully, to re-bond over Gary Numan, since he had clearly styled his miserabilist automaton pose on Kraftwerk, via pre-Midge Ure Ultravox. But Gary made the mistake of moving, slightly, and was further let down by the bulldozed graveyard that was revealed every time he opened his gob to do his strangulated Bowie thing. But Gary’s real problem was pathos, something that Florian, Ralf and the gang were way too cool for. ‘Are “Friends” Electric?’ and ‘Cars’ were pleading, embarrassing, Wullie-no-mates affairs. Kraftwerk made me feel good about having no mates.
* Kraftwerk’s anality is the stuff of legend: no external sound is tolerated in Kling Klang studios, and for decades the studio phone had the bell removed. If you wanted to talk to Florian or Ralf, you would call at exactly the appointed time, and they would pick up; one second late, and your chance was gone.
† I actually lost my German translator through a failed attempt at humour. At a poetry festival in Dresden, I’d improvised a little bit of completely inoffensive but – herein lay the offence – unscripted banter, which infuriated him, and the entire audience agreed that this was a really disgusting stunt to pull halfway through a four-hour bore-a-thon that had, thus far, been running like clockwork, danke sehr. I spent the interval crying in the toilets, and after the gig no one would talk to me. I later received an email saying: ‘I hope you will find someone else to translate your work; I am fed up with it.’
‡ I think minimalism is a hoax. Sorry. But Philip Glass’s music seems to be the product of some well-intentioned equal-opportunities scheme, and ‘Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards’ is why Reich shouldn’t have been allowed near anything with a longer decay than a banjo.
20 If with His Skirt He Do Touch Bread or Pottage
Alasdair and I had been drifting apart through Primary Seven; things had never been the same since a sexually confused sort-of fistfight – the pretext was some football matter, about which neither of us knew a thing – but as Baldragon first-years we had found ourselves thrown back together as we had no other friends. Heartily fed up with each other, we reflexively joined the Scripture Union on the assumption that it likely served as a hub for our fellow Baldragon nonentities. We also joined because we were in fear of our lives. While the hopeless cases might draw most of the flak, the flak factory of the scheme meant there was still plenty left for the likes of us. We sought protection, uselessly, in God and the Scripture. Being both from ‘kirky’ families, it was a fatally natural move. Alasdair’s dad was an angry church organist whose main sexual outlet was violent performances of Widor’s Toccata, which he attacked like a cross between Little Richard and Vincent Price. Since I was seven, I had been able to recite all the books of the Old Testament in fifteen seconds flat, as a sort of desperate party piece; this had convinced some easily impressed old dears at Sunday School that this bekilted and sporranned, wavy-haired prodigy was, like his grandfather, destined for the manse. Maybe I was finally getting the show on the road.
What was really driving me was more complex. At one level, joining the Church just continued my life-game of seeking both forgiveness for everything and the approval of my mother. Though she’d long accepted that he wasn’t going to come round, Dad’s rejection of the Kirk still rankled; this had left her increasingly isolated within the household. So apart from anything else, this was a pretty smooth Oedipal move. Initially, then, I’d spotted a chance to kill two birds, but I soon saw I could take out a third. After about a year of lager-shandy-strength praying and Bible study with the Baptists, my testosterone was beating its way up the beach, and I felt in my body that youthful rebellion was a contractual necessity. Atheism, weed, a porn stash and some minor vandalism should have worked fine, as it did for most of us. But I had no intention of returning my blessings, either heavenly or maternal. However, I could see that if I embraced a faith far more extreme than my mother’s or grandfather’s, it might also accomplish the goal of Being a Worry to Them. My unconscious must have been delighted with itself for circling that squared circle so elegantly. You’d have to ask it.
Things got off to an unimpressive start. In the playground, my ‘Jesus Saves’ badge conspicuously did not shield me from a bucket of dirty water emptied over my head by the egregious Dougal Spankie; I loftily forgave him and embarked on Matthew 5:38, ‘I say unto you, that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other,’ though didn’t make it as far as ‘And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,’ as Dougal was by then stomping my blazer into a dirty puddle. He then made me eat a pan drop that had been previously inserted into the anus of one of his orc-posse. I reasoned that I was not praying hard enough, and resolved to put in more hours. We were going to need a bigger badge.
The Scripture Union was run by a plain young woman called Mrs Jack, with no shoulders or breasts and untameable rough fawn hair that grew in four different directions. She was a kind and sincere soul, and she had a husband who put in the odd appearance. He was a sales rep for a soft drinks company, a handsome, olive-skinned, Mediterranean-looking guy; we reasoned somehow that she had been rewarded with him. Mrs Jack was soon pregnant, and he was soon dead of cancer, and her forbearance and lack of anger were admirable and terrible things to behold. This event – or at least the equanimity with which she reported it – shook me, and made no sense. I was close to seeing through the whole scam, when Mrs Clyne stood in for the grieving Mrs Jack. Small, dark-eyed, pale, essentially Ali MacGraw with a mess of black snakes on her head, Mrs Clyne was the last woman in the school to wear a black cloak, under which she wore white stockings and – this fact verified by a number of semi-horizontal oops-dropped-ma-pencil sources – matching suspenders. She suggested that we might like to go to an inter-school SU meeting in town with her once a week. Had she proposed we go and tend the pustules of dying jakies under the bypass, I would have responded with no less alacrity.
It was here I discovered the Prayer Group. Now: at least the Buddhists are mostly involved in some kind of genuine self-work, the dervishes are getting a little exercise, and his five-times-daily prostrations mean you rarely meet a Muslim bloke under the age of eighty with a bad back. By contrast, the Christian prayer group is just about the most useless gathering on this earth, being twenty people in a room pleading endlessly with someone who clearly isn’t. Prayer meetings, we would be reminded frequently, were not meditation. The great evil of Transcendental Meditation was then receiving a lot of publicity, and pictures of yogic flying (basically a game of seated bouncy-bouncy with a row of mattresses) were circulated as evidence of its black magic. The devil was real, and the self was his portal; it was not to be dwelt on, enquired of or investigated further. All thinking was absolutely forbidden. (Meditation involves its cessation, of course, but evangelical Christians believe exactly what they like; they falsify nothing and verify everything.) We had to concentrate on Christ the beloved, block all thought with his radiance and learn to speak continuously without engaging our brains.
But it was not enough that we had saved our own souls. We had to Go Forth and Witness in the name of the Lord. We were given our urgency through the fact of our living in The Last Days. The Last Days begin pretty much half an hour after the Ascension, and afford all born-agains their biggest sexual kick. This is where they find the licence for their taboo-breaking, their behaving as if excepted from the normal protocols: it’s what frees them to shake, foam and collapse on the ground, to yell like winos on street corners, and to act like children in adult company. Alasdair and I agreed with the current projections: given the signs, we were definitely talking this October, at the latest. By June, the Beast would have us all tattooed with our personal barcodes, and by August we’d be listening to the frogs bouncing off our umbrellas.
Fuelled up on imminent Rapture, I took to the air and shot down unbelievers like the Red Baron, and slapped a thousand crosses on my cockpit. I made more conversions that year than Andy Irvine. I had an eye for the friendless and the insecure, and a good line in hellfire. The fact that they lapsed or renounced after a week was no business of mine. Aftercare was the Church’s job. My technique was to identify the worst fear of my target, fix them in my unblinking stare, and detail how very much worse things were likely to get for them after the imminent Return, i.e. before Christmas. Ronnie Wilson: not only will your mum never come back from Tenerife, where she is currently shagging the Grattan’s catalogue man, but you will be separated from the rest of your family for all eternity. Alasdair Bottoms: you will be the fattest boy in hell. Stuart Buist: if you think your spots are bad now, I can promise you that the oozing buboes that await you below will cause you to look back upon this time as one of creamy-skinned perfection. For I have read somewhere that it will be so.
It was around this point that either my mum or dad probably should have intervened. The Church is safe enough for kids, if it’s the sort most folk used to attend, where they believe in the goodness of belief far more than they actually believe, sing a few songs and hear a nice sermon on human decency. Adults can believe what they want, and they should be respected, if those beliefs hurt no one else. (Their beliefs certainly shouldn’t be respected, though one should find respectful ways to convey one’s disdain for them.) Children shouldn’t be allowed to believe in anything but Santa and the love of their family and friends. They especially shouldn’t be allowed to believe in anything as sin-obsessed as the Christian God and his satanic enforcer, and especially during puberty, when their brains are already undergoing profound and confusing change. What kind of asshole, precisely, would tell a fourteen-year-old they’d be damned for a wank, or a mouthful of cider, or the touch of a breast, or a trip to the cinema, or merely the thought of those things – things whose intrinsic evil was never once explained to us, beyond a jab at some practically Delphic line of scripture? I can tell you precisely: two kinds of asshole – one weak and afraid, and the other some shade of evil. But it will have been hard for my folks to judge the right moment to step in. My mum’s initial pride at my churchgoing only slowly turned to concern, and she couldn’t have known the moment I began to truly believe, which is to say go mad. Dad described himself as an agnostic, because his atheism would have hurt my mother, so he avoided the subject; that epitaph for dads everywhere.* Besides, any intervention would have been met with the kind of hysterically well-briefed resistance neither of them had the energy for.
Of course, the only genuinely guilty parties were the grown-ups within our mission. There were far fewer of those than the set of adult humans, given how many of the childlike – in the form of the lost, the easily led and the mentally ill – we attracted. And amongst those folk, there were men and women I persist in thinking of as ‘good’, even now; though they weren’t good, because to be ‘a person of faith’ adjects no credit to your character, and while they may have performed some minor charities, all were in service to their ‘mission’, which was invariably either unnecessary, unwelcome or actively Mother Teresa-style catastrophic. But nor were they wicked. They were merely religious. No, only a handful were really culpable, and they were the same as cult leaders everywhere: narcissists whose faith wasn’t even cynical, because narcs do neither sincerity nor insincerity, which are both values predicated on the existence of a soul. Nor do they distinguish between lies and truth, since either can serve the same end, which is the fulfilment of their will. Their evil plans aren’t even evil, but just energy-saving pathways made visible to them through reptilian necessity.
