Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  After our first song, which went down very well with the audience, Mr Richardson briefly made his way back to the stage to introduce Peter Tholen, the first guest speaker of the night. I had been watching him the whole evening. When Richardson was giving his long and boring speech, Tholen had been texting on his mobile the whole time, but when we played our first song, he put his phone away and watched us quite attentively, and after we finished he offered us generous applause.

  Then he walked up onto the stage with a big, fat grin on his face, and he gave us two thumbs up as he passed us. It felt nice to be recognized by one of the biggest music producers in the world, but at the same time it seemed so sleazy. He stepped up to the microphone, still looking in our direction and grinning at us, and he said, “That was really, really good. Three yeses from me.”

  Some of the students in the auditorium cheered, while others giggled at the poor Simon Cowell impression. And then Tholen said, “We should have a little chat after the show.”

  There was polite laughter from the audience at what they must have thought to be an innocent little joke to break the ice. But it wasn’t a joke, nor was there anything remotely innocent about it as we were to find out later.

  Tholen talked for about ten minutes. A couple of anecdotes from his time in this very school, a few jokes about teachers none of us had ever heard of, and then a recap of his long and successful career in which, so it seemed, every single thing he had been taught in our school had been of essential importance at one point or another. He must have loved this school so much that it made one wonder why he had left it in the first place. It was quite pathetic, really.

  After Tholen had finished his speech, he introduced our second song, Jerusalem. But then he didn’t leave the stage and return to his front row seat the way he was supposed to. Instead, he stood right next to us, put his hands in his pockets and stared at us with his goofy grin throughout the whole song. To be honest, I thought it was rather creepy.

  After the song, Tholen applauded us and then he looked into the auditorium and pointed both his hands at us as if he were proud of himself for having discovered us. Then Mr Richardson re-entered the stage to introduce the main speaker of the evening, Education Secretary Timothy Gardener. We stayed put because we were supposed to play another song after his speech, but of course that never happened.

  Gardener’s speech was remarkably similar to that of Tholen, except it didn’t have any of the jokes and puns and funny anecdotes. It was utterly boring. Never before had the distinction between a man who worked in entertainment and one who worked in politics been so obvious and so revealing. Gardener kept rambling on and on about youth and learning and education, and somehow he managed to make his way from there to his party’s favourite topic: freedom and responsibility of the individual. And that’s when Julian couldn’t hold himself back any longer.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 6

  It started out so nicely and all according to plan. First our head teacher Mr Richardson gave his welcome speech, praising everybody and everything; the school, the staff, the teachers, the parents, the alumni. Hell, he even praised the students. That was somewhat odd, because I couldn’t really remember Mr Richardson speaking favourably of the student body before, and there he was going on and on about how great and creative and dedicated we all were. I kept peeking at the audience from backstage while Mr Richardson was speaking. Parents and honorary guests had pleased smiles on their faces. All I could see in the students’ faces, however, was astonishment and disbelief. Anyway, his speech came to an end, and there was lots of applause, and then he introduced Puerity as if we were the bloody Beatles or something.

  “A great example of the creativity and the talent this school is so proud of,” he said.

  We entered the stage. I sat behind my drum kit, Ginger stood behind her keyboard, and Tummy and Julian plugged in their guitars. Julian placed himself behind his microphone stand. He put both his hands on the microphone as though he needed to hold onto something because otherwise he might have just collapsed.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But we’re not really that talented.”

  Roaring laughter from the audience.

  Julian turned around and looked helplessly at me and the others. In his face I could see the question he didn’t dare ask aloud. Why are they laughing at me?

  It was one of those moments that made me think Julian was bloody autistic or something. It sometimes confused him when people laughed at something he said, because even if he said the most hilarious thing in the world, chances were he was being dead serious.

  I shook my head dismissively. “Go on,” I said.

  Julian turned back towards the audience and put both his hands on the guitar. I counted 1-2-3-4 and we played our first song of the night. The song was Gaudeamus Igitur, a special request by Mr Richardson. It’s an old students’ classic with Latin lyrics along the lines of ‘Let’s rejoice while we’re young’. Yeah right, as if it’s such a great thing to be young and have your life run by teachers and parents.

  I had been watching Julian the whole time since we got on stage. He was so nervous that evening, more nervous than I had ever seen him before. But I attributed it to the fact that we were playing in front of a couple of hundred people, including a cabinet member and the most famous music producer in the world. We were all nervous, and who would blame us? But Julian really seemed more restless and fidgety than ever. He kept shuffling his feet and running his fingers through his thick black hair, and he kept touching the left back pocket of his trousers to make sure his notes were still there. Because Julian had a plan that nobody, not even I, knew about. His plan was as simple as it was ambitious. He wanted to bring down the government. Ten weeks before the general election.

  After our second song, Mr Richardson introduced the Education Secretary. Gardener had been invited to give a speech in honour of his former school, but being the politician that he was it turned into an election campaign speech pretty quickly, and when Gardener started talking about freedom and responsibility, Julian cleared his throat and interrupted him, much to everyone’s surprise.

  “Excuse me, Mr Secretary, sir,” he said.

  Gardener turned and looked across the stage at Julian, slightly bemused. “Do you have a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t going to take any questions tonight,” Gardener said, “but for a talented young man such as yourself I shall make an exception. Go ahead.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I was just wondering, how is it possible that your idea of freedom involves imposing a 9 p.m. curfew for everyone under the age of 18 in this country?”

  A murmur went through the audience, and the dignitaries in the first row exchanged nervous glances.

  Gardener looked at Julian and said, “What?”

  To most people it probably sounded like, what the hell are you talking about?, but to us it was quite obvious that what he was really saying was, I know exactly what you’re talking about, but where the hell did you get that information?

  That’s the question that Julian heard, and he was prepared to give an answer.

  “On April 25th you sent an email to the Prime Minister and to your fellow cabinet members, containing a draft bill titled the School and Community Safety Act, together with comprehensive plans to reform the school system under the title Faith in Education and Academic Freedom. In the School and Community Safety Act you propose a 9 p.m. curfew for any person under the age of 18 in order to secure the safety of our streets at night time. Why do you think it’s a good idea to lock young people up, sir? And how is that ‘freedom’?”

  The under 18-year-olds in the audience started booing. Gardener looked at Richardson. Richardson looked at Tummy’s dad. Tummy’s dad looked at Tummy. Tummy looked at Julian. Julian looked at Gardener.

  “Well, Sir?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, son,” Gardener said, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

  �
��I can help your memory, sir.” Julian pulled his papers out of his pocket. “It says School and Community Safety Act, sir. It has your name and the address of your ministry on it. It’s signed by you, sir. Surely you must remember? And this other paper is titled Faith in Education and Academic Freedom. It says—among many other things—that in order to appease members of religions other than Christianity, school staff and students will no longer be allowed to wear any religious symbols such as crucifixes. But it doesn’t say anything about Muslim teachers and headscarves. Does that mean that Muslim teachers and students will still be allowed to wear their religious symbols so they won’t get offended? It also says that every school will have to arrange for a designated prayer room so that Muslim staff and students can practice their religion. But it doesn’t say anything about prayer rooms for Christians, Jews or Buddhists. Will they, too, be allowed to practice their religion, or would that offend the Muslims? It also says that students will be prohibited from eating outside the school cafeteria during the month of Ramadan. I could go on.

  “In your email you urge your colleagues to keep this draft bill under wraps because otherwise, and I quote, ‘The election will blow up in our fucking faces’. Doesn’t have the public a right to know before the election what your plans for after the election are? Sir?”

  Julian looked at Gardener. Everyone looked at Gardener, but Gardener didn’t have an answer. He just ran off the stage.

  As Richardson jumped up from his seat and ran after him, the auditorium descended into chaos and Momoko’s cameraman didn’t even know where to point his camera anymore, Julian leaned forward to his microphone one more time and said, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the band and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”

  That same evening, Mr Richardson suspended us from school for the rest of the term. It was only two weeks until the summer holidays anyway, so we didn’t really miss anything. Of course our parents weren’t too happy, but in hindsight it was a good thing that we got suspended, because in the following weeks we probably learned more about life than school had taught us in the previous ten years.

  We went viral within two or three days. Before the whole thing erupted, we had 39 YouTube subscribers, and the view count of our most viewed video was 213. A week later we had 125,796 subscribers, and the footage of our Jerusalem performance followed by Julian heckling the Education Secretary had been watched 11 million times. We were like bloody Susan Boyle, it was completely insane.

  One of the most important things my dad ever taught me was to be prepared and always expect the unexpected. When I had set up our website about a year before this whole thing happened, the others had been scolding me for buying the big webhosting package. You know, 5GB of web space and unlimited traffic. We’re never going to need any of that is what they said, but I said one day we might. And there you go. With a smaller webhosting package our site would have crashed within the first 24 hours, and none of the 19,732 people who downloaded one of our songs for 99p each could have done so. In just one week we made enough money to buy pizza for everyone and to keep our website running for the next 200 years.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 7

  It was a riot. There’s no other word to describe it. A bloody riot. The event ended in complete chaos. Everyone was running around like chickens in a fire drill. And Momoko and her camera team were at the centre of it all.

  By the way, speaking of Momoko, right before we went on stage to perform our first song, Ginger came to me to apologize for calling me a liar when I had told the guys that I had met Momoko in the school corridor the other day. But it turned out that it was true. Momoko had been on her way to the head teacher because she was doing a report on Peter Tholen for her show Inside Momoko on T-Vox, and she wanted to attend the anniversary event with a camera team. Richardson said yes, and there she was, in the auditorium with a cameraman and a sound engineer. I kept watching her throughout the whole evening. At one point—and this is totally awesome—at one point when Richardson was speaking, she looked in my direction, and I waved at her. And she waved back and smiled! Can you believe that? Ask Ginger if you don’t believe it, she saw it too. She saw Momoko wave at me and then she turned to me with a WTF look on her face.

  Anyway, Momoko was there to stalk Peter Tholen, and her cameraman filmed every bit of him, including him standing next to us as we performed Jerusalem, and that’s how that performance ended up on T-Vox. And on YouTube. And everywhere else. And because they also filmed Gardener’s speech and Julian’s heckling, we also ended up on the TV news on every bloody TV station in the country, and all our lives spiralled completely out of control.

  Puerity shot to fame within 48 hours, can you believe it? We couldn’t. I mean, one day you’re just another bloke studying for your GCSEs, and the next day T-Vox are sending a limo to pick you up so you can appear on the most popular entertainment show in the country. It was so surreal. And so exciting. We were such noobs. We had no idea how this whole business worked. I mean, we knew how to play our instruments. We knew how to turn classical pieces of music into modern rock songs. Julian knew how to write amazing lyrics. But we had no idea how all the rest of it worked; the business side of music, the marketing, the media. We had no idea how to behave in front of a TV camera. I think that was a good thing. I think it was a good thing that before our first appearance on Inside Momoko no manager told us what to do and what to say, because we didn’t have a manager. The only person who gave us any advice before that show was Momoko herself, and that advice was, “Relax. Forget about camera and people. We just have little chat, okay?”

  That’s when she winked at me and smiled her awesome smile again, I kid you not. And I was like, “All right, lady, let’s have little chat,” and the others rolled their eyes at me as if I’d said something incredibly stupid. But Momoko apparently thought it was very cute and she giggled her adorable giggle.

  She quickly introduced us to her crew, Cameron the camera man and Mike the audio guy, and a makeup lady named Lily came to put powder on our glistening faces. Ten minutes later we were sitting on Momoko’s famous big red sofa as the show’s intro blared out of the loudspeakers.

  After greeting the viewers at home Momoko cut right to the chase.

  “If you have watch news today,” she said, “you have seen singer of a young band who got Education Secretary in big, big trouble. Everybody talk about everywhere, about Education Secretary and education reform plan. Everybody also talk about young band, but nobody know them. So I invite them in my show so people can get to know Puerity and we can have little chat about what happen yesterday.”

  She turned to us. “Herro, Puerity. Welcome to my show.”

  “Herro, thanks for having us,” I said. Michael and Ginger said hi as well. Only Julian was sitting there, biting his fingernails and not quite sure where to look.

  “You welcome,” Momoko said and smiled. “Is great to have you. Why don’t you introduce? So that viewer can know you. You want to start, Michael?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “Hello, my name is Michael, I’m 17 and I play the drums.”

  “Hi, I’m Emily, I’m also 17 and I play the keyboard.”

  “Actually,” I said, “we call her Ginger. At school everyone calls her Ginger because of her ginger hair.”

  “Eh?” Momoko said. “Really? That so cute!”

  “That’s not true!” Ginger protested.

  “It is too,” I said. “Also, in nursery school she always used to dance like Ginger Rogers.”

  “Thomas!”

  “You can call me Tummy,” I said and turned to the camera. “Hi, my name is Tummy and I play the bass guitar.”

  “And how old you are, Tommy?” Momoko asked.

  “No, no,” I shook my head. “It’s Tummy, not Tommy.”

  “Tummy?”

  “Yeah,” Ginger said. “People call him that because he’s fat.”

  “I’m not fat! And to answer the question, I’m 17.”


  “Yeah, seventeen stone.”

  “Seventeen years!”

  “In Japan we have sumo wrestler,” Momoko said. “Many sumo wrestler are very famous. Sumo wrestler are very honoured in my country. They must always eat very much so they can be very big. Very big is very good. You are very cute, Tummy.”