Bandwagon

by Andrew Fish

– keeps the crowds down.’

  He pointed upwards and Riff’s gaze followed. About thirty feet above them was the underside of another skywalk whose route exactly followed their own.

  ‘There’s one of these every two storeys up to the twelfth. Every block has a group of elevators to link them and you can also get in and out of the buildings at each skywalk level.’

  ‘Are there no pedestrians at ground level?’ Riff asked.

  Emil shook his head. ‘There used to be,’ he said, ‘but they decided to widen the roads when they built the first skywalk.’

  He led the way through a set of double doors into the theatre. The entrance hall was a plush affair, with a beige carpet across the floor and up the lower edges of the wall. From the top of the carpet to the ceiling, the walls were papered in a subtle cream and gold pattern and punctuated by oval, gilt-edged mirrors and gold candelabras. Pausing to allow the robots chance to take in the sight, Emil waited for a moment before guiding them gently over to a set of elevators in one corner of the room.

  ‘We’ll go up to your rooms first,’ he said, ‘get you settled in before I show you the stage.’

  ‘Rooms?’ Vid queried – the first thing he’d said since leaving The Inferno.

  ‘There’s a hotel above the theatre,’ said Emil. ‘It’s very popular with theatre-goers and quite convenient for the performers too.’

  The elevator deposited them on a floor whose décor was slightly less ostentatious than that of the lobby, but nonetheless much smarter than any of the hotels which the robots had so far encountered. Riff had heard stories of musicians trashing hotels when they got restless; this hotel looked as if it played host to bored interior designers instead.

  ‘These are your rooms,’ said Emil, pointing to three doors, evenly spaced along the corridor.

  ‘We get one each?’ Vid asked. If his skin had been pliable enough, he would have pinched himself to see if he was dreaming. As it was, he quickly examined his memory for any variants on the rose-coloured-spectacle virus.

  Ben sat on the edge of his bed and stared into space. Alone, he thought. After all this time he was finally alone. It was his own room – at least until the management realised he wasn’t a band and chucked him out. But then, if they stuck him in a hole in the ground he wouldn’t really have cared. It was over. He felt abandoned, depressed and a long way from home.

  A sound dimly penetrated his consciousness but he ignored it. It came again and he vaguely realised it was coming from the door. The third time he realised it was a knock. Ben dragged himself to his feet and opened the door to admit Tony. The manager entered the room and looked around at the near-empty space. His face was business-like, betraying no sign of sympathy or concern.

  ‘They’ve gone then,’ he remarked simply.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘All gone.’

  There was a silence where Ben felt Tony could have said something reassuring. He didn’t. ‘They’ve taken their instruments too,’ Ben added – trying to bring home the economic impact. He slumped onto the bed and stared at the floor.

  ‘It hardly matters,’ said Tony. ‘The new musicians will probably have their own.’

  Ben looked up in surprise. ‘New musicians? You mean I’m still in a band?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tony. ‘Would I give up on you now? I told you we were going places and, with the right band, we still will. In fact, I think I know just the people.’

  ‘People? You mean…’

  Tony nodded. ‘The robot gimmick is all well and good, but I think it’s time we stopped playing around and put a real band together, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Ben began, wondering what Vid and Riff would have made of Tony’s casual dismissal of their abilities.

  ‘Of course, you’ll need to work out a new name – Blood and Oil just wouldn’t work for a band of human beings. And we’ll need to get some proper stage-lighting as well.’

  Ben looked at Tony through misty eyes. The rapidity of Tony’s decision-making and the implication that he was prepared to put his money where his mouth was seemed like some kind of odd dream. It was also less than confidence-inspiring: as the token human in a band of robots he felt sure of his place, but with real musicians? He sighed as his manager left him to his thoughts.

  42

  Music history is a pursuit that, whilst somewhat geekier than appreciation of the music itself, still finds a following with the more ardent breed of fan or journalist.

  It isn’t, however, completely pointless: the fan bemoaning the dearth of decent music in the modern charts can trace the lineage of his favourite bands in much the same way as a couple contemplating marriage can trawl their collective family trees in search of wedding guests.

  The parallel with family trees is an apposite one: it is not uncommon for the music press to show the relationships between bands in a form that would be remarkably familiar to the genealogist. Musical trees are perhaps a little less weighty and, with better documentary evidence, often easier to research, but perhaps that is why they can be a popular hobby without becoming a career.

  There are, however, some musical family trees that would have even an experienced royal genealogist screaming and running for the brain pills. For a comparable family tree to exist would require a family member to be possessed of a time machine and an insatiable desire for sexual relations with his ancestors32.

  This is because musicians can have relationships which have no analogue in the world of genetics. Bands frequently break up, spend time in various incarnations and then rejoin after differences are finally resolved.

  One such band is Grey Saturday, popular with hard rockers, lawyers and cubist painters throughout the universe. The band’s continual changes of line-up have led to a family tree so complex that it is frequently either mistaken for a subway map or a basic pattern for wallpaper.

  Their early history was simple enough – singer Gary Strange formed the band with guitarist Beresford Christie and the pair began busking on street corners under no fixed name before being joined by drummer Michael Preston and bassist James McVitie. They weren’t staggeringly original, but they nonetheless managed to secure a recording contract and found themselves in need of a name. In an attack of inspired unoriginality they settled on Preston Biscuit under which name they recorded four blues-rock albums starting with a self-titled debut. Their success was a familiar story; their descent into drink and drugs predictable. Strange’s mental breakdown, however, took them into a whole new league.

  It wasn’t that his symptoms were unusual: for a musician to see elephants dancing in the sky above his performances was far from unusual, particularly in light of the recent smash movie 633 Elephant Squadron. When his fear of being trampled forced him to retire, however, things began to get strange.

  Strange’s replacement was, unusually for the time, a woman. McVitie’s wife, Kerry, was a gifted singer and pianist. She joined them for their fifth album, a predictable step into psychedelia appropriately named The Silent Stamp of the Elephant. Christie, however, was unhappy with the band’s new direction and left to form his own band.

  Struggling for further chart success, the band recruited Hair Windsor and his wife Sarah from art-rock band Wig. With this new line-up they released two final albums under the Preston Biscuit name including a second self-titled album, which caused no end of difficulty for music historians – particularly since renewed interest in Strange had catapulted the first album back into the charts.

  In the new band, however, all was not well. During the recording of their second album I Told You So, it came to light that not only was Sarah cheating on her husband with former bandmember Christie, but that the McVitie’s were also undergoing a marriage break-up. For a few months it appeared the writing could well be on the wall for the outfit. Hair and James both left to forge solo careers and the album was released with as little trumpeting as an imaginary elephant could provide.

  It didn’t matter, however. The albums themes of
love, fidelity and why they were both a load of rubbish struck a chord with a disappointed generation. Sales were astronomical. With some of the lyrics they may even have been astrological. It would have been a ridiculously unpredictable move for the band not to continue.

  They continued. With Gary Strange’s twin brother replacing Windsor, the now three-piece band renamed themselves to Grey Saturday (but we recorded I Told You So)33 to distance themselves from their former members. This line-up remained stable for just over a week, in which time they managed the recording of just one song, intended as their next single. Following the recording, Kerry McVitie left and was replaced by the returning Beresford Christie, leading to a totally different sound for the next recording. Unable to decide which of the two new songs should be the A-side of their next single, and already struggling to keep the new line-up together, the band released two singles with each carrying the other’s A-Side as its B-Side. The friction between the two songs’ writers meant that, when the songs spent three weeks at numbers one and two respectively, the resultant argument led to yet another line-up change.

  Over the next fifteen years, the band managed a record thirty-seven different line-ups, including two years where none of the original members were present at all, before finally reforming under the name Preston Biscuit with Preston and James McVitie being