She keeps running.
There is no one else running. No one else on the towpath at this time of night. She now sees a pylon. She likes pylons. We all like pylons. Pylons buzz when there is a mist. Pylons stalk the landscape of our dreams. Winnie sees that eyeball again. It is rising. It sits atop the pylon. It stares out at the world, unable to blink. It stares into the very darkest parts of Winnie. Parts of her hidden even to herself.
And The Weyward Sisters sing the Sugababes classic ‘Push The Button’:
If you’re ready for me, boy
You’d better push the button and let me know
Winnie keeps running.
There they are. The two men with their black hats and black coats and black trousers and black boots. They are on the towpath. One of them is sitting on a stool in front of a canvas on an easel. He is holding a paintbrush in one hand and a palette in the other. The other man is standing. He has a walking stick in one hand. He is using the walking stick to point at the pylon on the hill and the eyeball staring back.
Winnie runs past them. She does not look back.
Push The Button
Push The Button
Push The Button
By 1987 Jimmy Cauty, Alan Moore and Bill Drummond are washed up. No one buys their graphic novels any more, no one buys their posters of scenes from Mervyn Peake books any more, no one buys Echo & His Bunnymen records any more. So the three of them meet up in Alan’s house in Northampton and decide to form a band.
Alan is the drummer and singer, he also writes the words.
Jimmy plays guitar.
Bill plays bass.
They call themselves Extreme Noise Terror.
And they are.
And they record an album in a local studio.
And put it out on their own label.
And John Peel plays it on the radio.
But hardly anybody buys the record.
It is called Burn Wicker Man Burn.
They even build and burn a wicker man on the Isle of Jura off the West Coast of Scotia in the Summer of ’91. But still no one buys their record.
Then Eve from The American Medical Association hears them on The John Peel Show and thinks they sound great.
And Eve said to Adam, ‘I think we should invite Extreme Noise Terror to play with us when we perform “3 a.m. Eternal” at the Brits.’
And Adam said, ‘But Jonathan King said we should do it with Benny and Björn from ABBA backing us.’
And Eve said, ‘Fuck Jonathan King, I have had enough of him making our records sound like commercial shit. We were always supposed to be a rock band and somehow we have ended up as a disco band. Disco sucks.’
And Adam said, ‘Okay.’
So they do.
But before they do The American Medical Association write and record an album’s worth of songs with Extreme Noise Terror. The album is to be called The Black Room. It is not disco!
Then, on the night of the Brits, when Benny and Björn turn up to play, Gimpo (Eve and Adam’s helper) locks them in the dressing room. Extreme Noise Terror take to the stage with The American Medical Association and blow the place apart.
Afterwards Eve and Adam go to the aftershow party. On the red carpet they are all smiles for the tabloid cameras. But then Eve pulls from her Coco Chanel handbag a pearl-handled duelling pistol, as does Adam from the holster strapped to his leg. They then proceed to blow each other’s brains out.
The cameras keep clicking and the bulbs keep flashing.
The suicide note is found in Eve’s handbag. It reads, ‘We Died for Ewe.’
And they do.
Forget Madonna falling over, this is the greatest Brits moment ever. And ever and ever …
Their album, The White Room, which is already triple platinum, goes global.
As for Extreme Noise Terror, they release their follow-up record. It is called Never Mind. It changes the face of rock music in the ’90s. Northampton becomes the new Düsseldorf.
Jonathan King is still sitting in the Starbucks at Borough Market, even though it is after midnight. And he is still not able to get over the fact he let slip the chance to produce, manage and pull the strings of Extreme Noise Terror. No amount of tampering with his Wikipedia page can ever change that. And he has tried. But some fucker up in Northampton keeps changing it back.
Winnie keeps running.
And as Celine Hagbard falls to the ground, she just finds the strength to push the button on her iPhone.
There are now only twenty-four hours before GoogleByte completely shuts down. The mother of all search engines will burn up on re-entry.
Things are different when you are dead. For a start you don’t hold grudges. You communicate in a completely different way, and with life forms you would never have communicated with when you were alive.
Killer Queen has now formed her band – it consists of her, Crow, Dead Squirrel and John Lennon (the one at the bottom of Lee Navigation). They are called Tangerine NiteMare and they are about to release their first album, called Far Out. Mister Fox is their manager and Dead Perch does their social media.
John Lennon had been working on tracks for months but not getting anywhere with them. He only ever did this when Yoko Ono was out with her friends. She thought it was all self-indulgent rubbish, which it might have been. But Killer Queen thought it brilliant, and if he only took off the patronising whale noises and all that other nature stuff and made it sound a bit more industrial, it would work.
Crow flies in through the open doors of Yoko Ono’s apartment. He lands on John’s workbench, where his laptop is open. Crow uses his beak to click open the Far Out files. He is soon going through them, removing all the nature samples. Then he loops up some of the industrial sounds that John has not bothered with, brings up some of the keyboard parts that were lost. Then puts the whole lot through some new filters he downloaded. Mister Fox somehow has got into the apartment and is insisting they rip off a drawing he found on FlikGram that the fourteen-year-old Jimmy Cauty did for Led Zephyr Five, which they never used. Dead Squirrel, who is still lying in Gillett Square, but whose left eye is now in the belly of Crow, suggests they go with the mix they had and upload it straight away. Mister Fox does a deal with AmaZaba.
Crow hits ‘Send’.
Dead Perch gets to work on social media. Within moments it is being listened to, Shared and Liked around the globe. It passes seven million streams within sixty minutes. By dawn it would be the most played piece of music on the globe.
Killer Queen heads around to the Maelstrom, off the northern tip of Jura. She wants to listen to it there in full surround sound.
The only question left worth asking is: was the dress blue and gold or black and white?
Winnie is still running, but she is getting her mind more under control. This entire imagining grapefruit-rising-into-the-sky and landscape-artist-at-work-on-the-canal-path-at-midnight thing has been repressed. As has the urge to nail that young man to the floor.
But she does know these are the tell-tale signs of stress. That she has been overdoing it. And maybe she is not ready to end death for mankind for ever quite yet, whatever her agreement with Celine Hagbard is. ‘I’m sure she understands. Celine has always been so understanding in the past when she has one of her turns.’
As she runs down into her more familiar territory, with Hackney Marshes to the left and Springfield Park to the right, she decides she is going to give herself twenty-four hours to decide if she should hit ‘Send’. She will email Celine Hagbard in the morning and be totally upfront with her about these concerns.
In those twenty-four hours, she feels the need to do something else with her life. Explore some of her other urges. Maybe get pregnant. Maybe this diary she has started could become a novel. Do people still write novels? And if they do, do people read them?
Then a fox trots nonchalantly past Winnie. When did foxes get so cocky and confident? Is it something to do with the fox-hunting ban? It’s as if foxes now think they can
go where they want, when they want. Before you know it foxes will be running everything.
Winnie is now running on the opposite bank, past the warehouse in Hackney Wake. She looks up to where she first saw the girl with the Gaffa-Taped mouth who gave her the book. The double doors are open as they were before, but there is no light on. But then she sees what looks like a crow fly out. Seconds later the lights go on in the apartment and the girl is standing there and looking down at her. The girl waves and seems to beckon her up.
Winnie takes the path up to the bridge, crosses the canal and finds the entrance to the warehouse.
Seconds later she is in the apartment with Yoko. Yoko is still not speaking, but Winnie quickly realises Yoko can hear, and within seconds they develop a way of communicating – Winnie talking and Yoko using a mixture of crude sign language and writing things down with paper and pencil.
They are off.
Yoko shows her the news story about the Hockney Award and the four shortlisted artists. She indicates that she thinks this is all elitist rubbish, existing only to further the interests of the commercial art establishment and those in positions of power at Tate World.
If, twenty-four hours earlier, Winnie had been presented with these arguments she would have thought them to be the naïve half-baked thoughts of a frustrated teenager. But now, as part of the twenty-four hours she is giving herself to embrace everything before hitting ‘Send’, she is thinking, ‘Fuck it, let’s see where this goes.’
While Winnie puts the kettle on, Yoko is already doing the artwork for a poster using Letraset. As the tea is brewing, Yoko is making the new silkscreen using the artwork.
While they are waiting for the tea to cool enough in their mugs to drink, they start to screen-print the poster. Yoko does the screen-printing. Winnie hangs the poster up on the washing lines to dry.
Winnie loves working at this speed.
The poster reads:
ABANDON ALL ART NOW
Major rethink in progress
Await further instructions
When they have ten of the posters printed, Yoko does the artwork for a second one. She gets the silkscreen made and they are soon printing out these new ones. They read:
It has come to our attention you did not abandon all art now
Further direct action is thus necessary
The K-SEC announce the ‘mutha of all awards’, the 2023 K-SEC
Award for the worst artist of the year
In smaller typeface they name the four shortlisted artists and how you can vote for whoever you thought the worst. Also on the poster is the prize money: one million ZitCoins.
Winnie is a bit concerned about this.
‘How can we pay the winner? Or is this just a hoax?’
Yoko writes on a scrap of paper the following reply: ‘Nothing I do is a hoax. Everything I do is for real. Look at my arm.’
Yoko then shows Winnie her arm. On it, scarred into the skin, is ‘4 REAL’. Winnie does not ask anything else; she just accepts what she reads.
‘We will find the money,’ Yoko notes down with a pencil.
And she gets on with doing the artwork for the third poster. It reads:
AMENDING THE HISTORY OF ART
The winner of the K-SEC Award
Announced at noon today
VOTE NOW
By 1:00 all the posters are printed.
By 2:00 all the posters are dry.
They head out into the night with the thirty posters, a bucket of wallpaper glue and a brush.
They get a cab up to Kingsland Road and get to work.
It only takes them about an hour to have all thirty of the posters pasted up onto walls.
By 3:00 – job done.
They head back to Yoko’s to get on with whatever is going to happen next.
A young man walks past the posters. They catch his attention. He photographs them on his phone. He uploads the photos onto FaceLife. They get Shared. And Shared. And Shared. And Shared.
A researcher on the early shift for the Today programme on Radio Four sees it on her FaceLife page and thinks it could be an interesting story. She presents it to her producer, who is also working the early shift. They decide to make it the cultural story of the morning. The show’s presenter, John Humphrys, is briefed. For those that don’t know, the Today programme is on air between 6:00 and 9:00 every morning. It is the most listened to live news and current affairs radio programme in the world. It is simultaneously translated into 853 languages as it is broadcast. It has approximately seven billion daily listeners. It defines the agenda for the day – for everyone.
Winnie and Yoko are back down Hackney Wake. Yoko chops out two lines of pure Colombian caffeine. They snort, then get back to work.
Yoko explains to Winnie about The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and plays her the track John and her had been working on. They remove all the rubbish John had done and replace it with a better loop from Nina Simone, then a sample from ‘Alejandro’ by M’Lady GaGa.
It seems that although Yoko can never speak in her life again, she allows herself to sing.
Yoko gets them to do some chanting that she records. It goes, ‘Mu Mu, Mu Mu, Mu Mu, Mu Mu.’ It makes no sense, yet it makes perfect sense. Yoko flies it in. The track is almost there. Winnie suggests the tune from ‘Telstar’ by The Tornados would fit perfectly. They have to play this live on Yoko’s keyboard. Those piano lessons Winnie had as a child come in useful. The track is sounding brilliant.
Winnie tries to convince Yoko they should upload the track.
It goes against all of Yoko’s Post-Digital Underground principles. Yoko wants to cut it as a real vinyl record, but Winnie argues the case that Yoko is already breaking her principles all the time by using the recording methods she does.
Winnie wins the argument.
Winnie presses the button.
The track uploads.
It is off.
Free.
Within sixty seconds of it going live, it is showing on GaGa’s GoogleByte Alert, and she is then listening to it on her morning run down on the Hoboken waterfront.
M’Lady GaGa tweets.
Winnie tweets back.
M’Lady GaGa suggests recording some live vocals for the remix when she has completed her run in forty minutes.
M’Lady GaGa knows she is back in action.
This is going to be better than if she had done that track with The American Medical Association, and definitely better than the shit album she did with The Neptunes.
M’Lady GaGa has her best ideas when running.
She has one of her best ideas now.
‘Bad Moon Rising’.
Is the dress black and white or blue and gold?
Winnie and Yoko watch as the streams keep climbing. By 5:00 they have passed the seven million mark.
Jonathan King has already listened to the track eleven times, and he is also watching the streams climb. This is the sort of track he should be involved with. He goes straight onto Wikipedia to update his page.
Winnie and Yoko see this on Yoko’s GoogleByte Alert. They just think it funny.
Then M’Lady GaGa sends in her live ‘Bad Moon Rising’ vocals – and if you are wondering, this has nothing to do with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Neither Winnie, Yoko nor GaGa have ever heard of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Once they have spun that in, the track is ten times better than it was. They upload the new mix and it instantly goes mental. Especially in China and India. But that’s maybe just because of the time of day there: the kids are just getting home from WikiCampus, or something.
Winnie is knackered.
Yoko is knackered.
Winnie borrows Yoko’s bike and cycles back the two kilometres or so to Victoria Mansions. The birds are already singing. By the time she climbs into her bed it is almost daylight.
She instantly falls asleep.
A deep sleep.
She dreams.
Vivid dreams.
Note
: from now on in this book, unless otherwise stated, when Yoko Ono or John Lennon are mentioned, they are the ones both living and dead in Hackney Wake.
Barnhill
Jura
26 April 1984
Dear Diary,
There is no way I am going to send what I wrote today to Dog Ledger. I may just rip the whole lot up and start again tomorrow.
What happened last night was that Francis Riley-Smith had some of his homemade LSD, as in acid.* Jimmy persuaded me I should, and although Bill seemed reticent at first he ended up taking a tab, so I just thought, ‘Why not? I have risked everything else in life, why not try acid once?’ So I did. And then we all went off in search of the Neolithic standing stones.
Somehow I got home, and when I woke up this morning I was still tripping. But that didn’t stop me from getting on with the writing. I know I have to get a three-thousand-word chapter done each day or everything else will start to slide.
And I hope tomorrow I can bring things back into line.
Goodnight.
Love,
Roberta X
Postscript: I ripped off the name Tangerine NiteMare from Francis’s friend Jimmy. He had been telling us about an imaginary band he had as a teenager called Tangerine NiteMare. They played Krautpop, or something.
* Francis reckoned he could make millions from the manufacturing of his branded LSD. He uses some of the waste product from the Jura distillery to make it. He has an underground laboratory back at Jura House, where he does it all. He keeps threatening to take me back there and show me how it is all done. I don’t know whether to believe him or not. It might be just his friend Jimmy that brings it up for him.
2023: a trilogy (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) Page 8
