PARLEZ-VOUS
MARTIAN?
Following their first gig, The Masked Martians continued to play all the local venues; both of them, Froods club once a month and the Murk every other Tuesday to two men, a dog and Lurky Moldern. After two months of this intensive gigging it was decided to range further afield, and the band bought a van, christened the Blunderbus due to its habit of meandering about the road, to obviate the need of cramming everybody into Flodge's mum's Mini, and of course Ogg could not be expected to walk too far with his drums in a wheelbarrow, as was his custom.
The Martians began to get regular bookings in such places as the White Mouse in Long Cheston and the village hall in Coolstoke-by-the-River, where the youth were less inclined towards growing beards and more towards drinking excessively and throwing themselves around the dance floor. It was at about this time that the phenomenon of Monster Rock, or as it was to become known, Mon, took the capital by storm. Reports were filtering through via the New Whimsical Excess of bands such as the Doomed and the Sock Whistles who adorned themselves with ghoulish make-up and extra limbs, and who couldn't play their instruments. It wasn't long before the daily papers caught on, and front-page outrages began alerting the populace to this evil new fad threatening our pop kids.
Holidaying in Coolstoke, A&R man Will Bilson, fired up by the latest article on Bill Bogey, who had allegedly sawn off the top of his head to reveal his glowing green brain, decided to go along to see this local band The Masked Martians on the off chance that they were actually alien beings; it would be quite a coup to find musicians who had real extra limbs, rather than the stuffed sleeves and trouser legs which so often seemed to be employed by devotees of Mon, or Munks as they were know. At first he was disappointed to find that they were apparently simple earthlings without even the presence of mind to stick warts on their noses, and the singer was lazy enough to consider a rubber mask a suitable effort; but when Twitch ripped off his mask as usual, Bilson was stunned. Not even Vi Venom (Bride of Turpentine) could compete with a face like that! This was surely the visage of a future star! Look at those acne scars, those eyes moving independently of each other, and most of all that hunched back! Oh no, it's just the way he's standing. Yet such was Twitch's collection of nervous tics that it seemed every part of his body was moving with a mind of its own, giving his dance a fragmented effect unequalled even by Piggy Pigface of the Enemas.
Bilson realised at once that in the realms of Mon, this was star quality, or at least asteroidness, and the sheer void that was the band only served to emphasise the sparklitude. Therefore he decided that - where he would normally take a singist aside and persuade them in the most ethical and altruistic way that the rest of the band are just holding you back, oh they're fine musicians, of course, but they'd be far better off with someone more suitable, it isn’t fair after all, with you at the front they simply don't stand a chance do they? I'll have a quiet word with them if you like - it would serve his purposes (which we shall gloss over) admirably to offer the band as a whole his services, for a modest, and believe me, in this business it is modest, percentage. So he did.
And the Martians found themselves in a studio recording their First Hit Single, as they liked to call it, for the Teenage Troll label. There had been a heated debate as to which song to record for the A side, so they had decided to put all the names in a hat. Then there had been a heated debate as to which sort of hat would be best suited for the purpose. In the end it was decided to use Phoebe's pillbox-with-a-veil, as this had the convenient attribute of being the only hat in the building, except engineer Hairy's trilby, which he refused to remove, allegedly because it would disturb his carefully arranged hairstyle, actually because it would, of course, reveal the awful truth of why he had been dubbed Hairy.
So they put all the names in Phoebe's hat. But it didn't help much. Then Wally came up with an idea; "Why don't we pick one out, and whichever one that is, that'll be the A side?" There followed a heated debate as to which of them should do the picking, following which Hairy solved the debate by running outside and dragging in a disinterested party, who to prove their qualifications stood around with their cocktails discussing how boring things were. After half an hour the Martians grew so disgusted with this that they picked up their instruments and began to thrash, while Twitch bellowed improvised words of which the general gist was "Go away, you boring old belchers!"
It eventually had the desired effect as one by one the partiers strolled out of the studio; mass exodus was out of the question, of course, as this week's watchword was Nonchalance. As the Martians faltered to a halt Hairy's voice came through the monitors:
"Brilliant! Now how about a stab at the B side?"
Thus came the Masked Martians' debut single, finally released (after a heated debate) as a double B side, Go Away You Belchers and Hairy Hairy Hairy Man (Keep It Under Your Hat), and the day afterwards they were back gromming the Murk.
*
It was two weeks later that the Martians vibed onstage in their new vegetable-netting robes to be engulfed in a huge roar, which appeared to be of appreciation, but no sooner had the buzz and chunder of first number favourite Az Waz Ar Boo Nah started up than the crowd started shouting to them to "go away, you belchers!" A large red question mark formed over the heads of the slightly bewildered musicians; apparently someone had arranged a light show… but no, it was only cartoon-like symbolism. The only light show the Martians had ever had was Wally's friend Olly with a torch and some coloured sweet wrappers. By the time Teletext came round it was beginning to dawn on the band that the punters, rather than demanding the immediate absence of the band they had presumably come to see, were in fact lodging a song request. Martian eyes met across the stage and the memory of their Day in the Studio slowly surfaced from their sieve-like banks. Obviously Bilson had been up to something in the meantime. Martian eyebrows raised quizzically, silently imploring of the others whether anybody could actually remember the song. Oh dear. Luckily their charismatic singer had the solution.
"We don't play requests!" roared Twitch.
"Go Away You Belchers!" roared the crowd.
Maybe he didn't have the solution after all. So instead the Martians carried on regardless, launching into Teletext without so much as a backward nod to a blind bean. "Go Away You Belchers!" roared the crowd, all except Werbin Yaf, who roared "Hairy Hairy Hairy Man (Keep It Under Your Hat)!" which would have been even more of a problem for the Martians, consisting as it did on record of abstract noodles and tunings up interspersed with snatched wafflings of a bored Twitch yammering streams of consciousness to keep himself, er, conscious, all to the blistering thrash of Ogg pummelling the metal waste bin with his shoes. Truth to tell, the Martians themselves had no memory of recording the track, it having been put together by Bilson after they had all gone to the pub, on the assumption that nobody listened to the other side anyway except Werbin Yaf, which assumption was completely correct.
Meanwhile, the Martians blasted on, through Dogshit Alley, Some Bastard's Stolen My Name and Died, Excruciating Minuscule… The list was endful, though with lots on it. And all the time the crowd surging and teeming, braining the air with "Go Away You Belchers!" but to no avail, until finally the refrain of I've Got a Mug with a Picture of a Doggie On It reached its crescendo and Twitch performed his new finale, pulling the ripcord of the parachute pack he had been wearing, whereupon the parachute fell dramatically from his back and flopped excitingly onto the stage behind him, still neatly packed.
As Wally and Flodge ripped into their guitar duet backed by Phoebe and Ogg smashing into their simultaneous bass and drum solos, giving the overall impression of an entire band playing together, the audience erupted, storming the stage, bouncing up and down, shouting "Go Away You Belchers!" and generally getting in the way. All three guitarers found themselves crammed against the backline as the punters flowed around and behind yea even unto the dressing room probably, and Twitch at the frontispiece slowly became suddenly piddled off as the legendary invisible wall between performer and performed-at dissolved into myth. Fuming at the teeth, he left the band. "Fork this for a game of pawns of the imperialist warmongers," he muttered, and walked off the stage with only a brief dangle until he released his parachute pack, the contents of which he abandoned beneath the feet of the invaders. He was never seen again until the next time eyes were laid upon him.
The remaining Martians, troupers none, nevertheless continued grooving while the newly-adopted frontpersons merrily performed their own interpretation of their fave Martians song. "Go Away You Belchers!" they warbled, yelled or croaked, each according to hir wont, "You boring old belchers, go away!" It was certainly the most enthusiastic reaction they had yet provoked, and the punters were virtually doing all the work themselves. They would meet their friends tomorrow and say how great the gig was, you should have been there, oh you were weren't you, then they would both go and seek out a total stranger and say how great the gig was, brill band the Masked Martians! So on rumbled Ogg out of Nim, on churgled Phoebe, on scrunged Flodge, but after an hour or so Wally decided enough was too much and ceased zwip doinging, laid his guitar against an amp to feed back merrily and retired to the dressing room, only to find the fangs had established themselves there also. Not only had they taken over band duties on stage, here they were also misbehaving in the manner of musicians everywhere. They sat on the chairs (two, wooden), worried their hair in a remaining triangle of mirror, read the nationwide gig guide in Smash Melody Express to see if anyone else was using the same name (John Smith, 17 and a half, trainee cake fitter and admitted heterosexual, was already softly crying in a corner) and made frequent visits to the lavatory. Therefore Wally made his excuses ("An elephant sat on my car"/"I left it on the bus"/"My uncle's been abducted by aliens") and left, pushing his way back across the stage to the only place where there were no punters left, which was where the punters were supposed to be.
As Wally stood on the dance floor watching the entertainment, he was joined gradually by the remaining Martians, until the band were down there sipping lager (Flodge's round) and feigning disinterest, while the audience were up there playing the instruments and behaving like total pillocks. "Hmmm," hmmmed Wally, "Interesting development." He then became aware of a figure at the bar, the only one apart from the staff not to have invaded band space. Turning around, he saw it was Will Bilson, making his first personal appearance since the fourth paragraph. As Wally caught his eye, Bilson winked with the other, threw a face-splitting grin and stretched out an arm at the very end of which stood a confident upright music biz thumb. "Interesting development!" he mouthed, and the camera returns to Wally as he looks back at the stage with an apprehensive look on his face. Music gets louder and blurrier and finally vibes off into the distance as the picture fades to black.
Fade in on distant figure tramping across a vast expanse of tarmac, not unlike a runway, under the midnight sky. A row of flagpoles flying standards of all nations lines the border between macadamadamac and grass on one side, on the other we see the silhouettes of heroic statues and monuments which are in fact either of local pirates of historical renown or uncomfortably reminiscent of penises, beyond which slopes the more cultivated end of Armadillo Grove providing a splendid vista of green growing-o and meaningless stone walls leading magnificently unto the Hub itself, a breathtaking sight of buildings in gleaming concrete and glittering concrete set of by brilliant concrete, and glass windows, although here in the night they were brooding towers dark and moody. Anyway, this figure, it mooched disconsolately with a lurching gait broken by a staggering twirl as its travelling tic broke its moorings and took over his entire walk. If Twitch had his way he would have been stomping angrily. As always when a trifle hissed off, he had made his way to the famous Pilmo Arf, the city's excuse for a seaside. The desert of hard place across which he was now gimbling was known as the Promenade, a fine place for Brightfoot's Fair for a week in Easter and two in the summer, a convenient setting for various Pilmo Chamber of Commerce functions in the dry season, and for the other 340ish days of the year a bleak and discouraging wasteland sure to put the dampers on the antics of the many courting couples who headed there in the mistaken belief that it would be romantic.
From the heights of this famous promenade one could view the famous Pilmo Stretch, which was, basically, water. Being a bay and all. Or one could venture down to the foreshore, which was built on a cliff dropping rather undramatically from the road. There was still a fair bit of raw cliff jutting here and there, but much of it had been tamed by a network of walkways, flights of steps and a small selection of swimming pools. There was also a set of diving boards, and every summer Twitch was astonished that there really were mad buggers who would actually plummet off the very highest of these, apparently FOR FUN! In Twitch's childhood it used to be quite the thing to climb up to the top board without shaking in your boots; Twitch could only manage this by going barefoot.
The joy of Pilmo Arf was that it was like nowhere else in the world, as indeed is everywhere else in the world, because other places had proper beaches, not Concrete Beach Slabs which at low to medium tides didn't even have the energy to reach the water, leaving prospective swimmers to hobble painfully over slippery and jagged rocks before they could enjoy their chosen pursuit. It was a special place for Twitch, though, for it was here that he first saw the splendour that is Pilmo Arf, and here that he first encountered the pleasure of being on Pilmo Arf. Now, standing on the highest heights where all around him lay Arf, he sought solace for his grief.
Five minutes later he had still not been solaced, so he headed home. Pilmo Arf was a pretty boring place, after all.
The trouble with Twitch
The trouble with Twitch was, he was Twitch. There is a certain Twitch ethic about musical performances, part of which concerns the aforementioned invisible barrier between band and audience. This barrier has been the subject of much concern among aesthetes and critics of popular culture (music division), some maintaining that it invalidated the essential working class ethic of rock'n'roll by implying the existence of an elite, others claiming that it was a manifest necessity of the performance syndrome and was there to ensure the maximum possible enjoyment and full effect of the proceedings. A third school was of the opinion that hey, that's showbiz! and a varied scattering of myriad independent schools of thought brought even more points of view to the fray; Adrian Van Enzyme's own critique, for instance, reading thus: "You know that invisible barrier between the band and the performer? Well, it's crap!"
Twitch had always been of the opinion that what barrier? What are you babbling about? Are you pretentious, then? Did you call my pint an unthinking, ill-informed bigot? The whole debate had, in faction, passed him by, with nary a cheery wave nor shouted greeting. It was not until a couple of hours ago, he considered as he lay abed with the TV flickering sweetly against walls and ceiling and the radio playing golden night-time oldies, that it had ever mattered; but tonight, the crowd had challenged the unspoken assumption that it was he and four others who were in The Masked Martians and nobody else, and instead insisted that they were all members of that beat combo. Which was patently untrue. Or was it? For he had, passing on his way home, heard the band still playing and had popped back in to see what went. To his miff, he saw that not only were the audience now all members of The Masked Martians, and playing with even more trank and rankle than the earlier incarnation, but The Masked Martians themselves were apparently no longer in The Masked Martians, relegated to the Not On Stage area. Something disturbing had happened tonight, and it cheered him not that if the trend extended into other areas he might find himself deciding to cut off the DHSS's money, or making speeches on television blaming the Government for all his own cock-ups (he had tried this already, though without being broadcast on television, and the DHSS had threatened to cut his money off). It seemed that if in future he tried to get his songs heard by entering a conventional performance scenario, he would instead find himself listening to some social inadequate stroking hir ego with hastily-improvised bad rhymes. That, surely, was what karaoke was for, but this is a retrospective and it would be some years yet before karaoke would make its way over from the east for tone-deaf non-entities to make fools of themselves with.
Hmmm. OK, if that's the way it is…
"'Heart of the Charts'? Who, us?"
"Yes, you! The Masked Martians! Now get in the bus, we're off to Lumpen! Where's the other one, that Twit guy, the singer?"
"Don't know. He's not at home."
In fact he was, but was staying in bed for a week in order to preserve the ten pence he had left until next giro day, and refusing to communicate in case somebody said something that wasn't in the script. He was slightly mad at the moment. So the four remaining Masked Martians travelled up without him, having slipped notes under his door and left messages with all his friends, which took no time at all.
Bilson disturbed himself quietly in the back seat, thinking back to paragraph four. His original intention had been to secure Twitch, taking the band only as a convenience, and here was he stuck with the band and no Twitch. On the other hand, he had a Hit Single in his pocket. It had, with the assistance of his many muso biz contacts and offers of appropriate favours to the right DJs, gone straight in at No 1. It also did no harm that he had planted a story in the tabloids laced liberally with accounts of swearing, vomiting, various quirks of sexuality and rent-a-quote politicians' declarations of outrage, which luckily the band themselves hadn't seen as they shunned the establishment press due to its propagandic tendencies. Or was it because they couldn't read? It didn't matter now who fronted the band, he could even do it himself if he wasn't old, fat and balding. He would just have to find a tramp on the streets and get him to mime on the box.
And that is what he did.