The miniature Christabel startled me; that I was intimate with a woman who was replicated in this way was unsettling. I looked around me, doing a memory rewind to check that I had come to this by steps that were impulsive but not incomprehensible; all of those steps had been taken because of my belief in a connection that was there before we met and that connection had brought me to the Hammersmith Apollo tonight.
Jackets were more open now and I noted a fair number that said NOT IN MY NAME and WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Also present, along with the dangerous men, were a substantial number of enthusiasts whose haircuts suggested that they thought war was the answer. The VE WA T-shirt I’d seen before now revealed itself as GIVE WAR A CHANCE. I was made aware, not for the first time, that I was not fully engaged with the world. Certainly I didn’t think war with Iraq was a good idea but I’d come here tonight to see and hear Mobile Mortuary and I wasn’t expecting David Dimbleby and a discussion on the international situation.
Looking up from where I stood I saw that the lobby was at the bottom of a kind of atrium at the top of which were several tiers of pinkness below the pink ceiling. The stairs on my left offered CIRCLE and LICENSED BAR. Before going up I asked one of the ticket takers if there was a support band.
‘Fathoms,’ he said.
‘Deep?’
‘No idea. Next!’
I went up the stairs, gave the licensed bar a miss, and went directly to my seat in the first row of the circle.
I had a good view of the stage where there was no action as yet. The only light was from some art deco ceiling fixtures. The audience murmured, coughed, and shifted in their seats for quite a long time. I had no one to murmur to until the middle-aged man on my left took off his jacket and revealed a T-shirt that said ANAPAESTS FOR PEACE. When he saw me reading it he smiled and said, ‘De-de-dum?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Iambic is the martial metre,’ he said: ‘“The king with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning …”’
”’Beware the Jabberwock, my son\ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!…”’ said the young man on my right, one of the dangerous types I had noticed earlier. He took off his leather jacket and aimed GIVE WAR A CHANCE at the anapaest man who shook his head but said nothing.
After a while there were green and blue-green lights on the stage and a projection of water patterns on a screen. The lighting was dim and I couldn’t be sure how many performers constituted Fathoms. They were so close together that they became a single unit from which radiated tentacles of blue light. Their music was very low-frequency and was felt as much as heard, grinding its way up from the bottom of the sea. Their song or chant or whatever was something growled and gutturalised almost below the hearing threshold. The refrain seemed to be, ‘Nnvsnu tsrungh, nnvsnu nngh, nnvsnu rrndu ts’irnh ts’irnh ts’irnh nngrh.’
This was repeated over and over until it filled my mind and I began to feel very deep, very dark, with billions of tons of water bearing down on me. I must have fallen asleep and missed their other numbers, because what I saw next were green, blue, and purple lights playing over clouds of mist rising from the stage. Under a blaze of white light a wall of body drawers appeared, the lighting became a great deal more so, the body drawers slid out and the band emerged from them. There was a blast of many decibels from which Jimmy Wicks separated himself to address the audience. ‘Hi!’ he said.
‘Hi!’ said the crowd with whoops and whistles.
‘This is a time,’ said Jimmy, ‘when it’s hard to know what it is and what it isn’t. So we’re going to open with a song for this time: “Did It Wasn’t?”.’ The band went into the intro and Christabel picked up the microphone and sang:
Did it wasn’t, did it was?
Did we walking in the wasn’t,
did we strolling in the park?
Did we wasn’t in the isn’t,
did we dancing in the dark?
Did it always, did it never have to
did it was for ever?
Did it will or did it won’t,
did it do or did it don’t?
Did it ever come out straight?
Did it always was too late?
Am I fuzzy, is there fuzz?
Did it wasn’t, did it was?
When she had only begun the song there were cigarette lighters flaring in the audience and some attempt from the crowd at a backing vocal at varying distances from the beat, rather like the way I used to sing in Music class in elementary school when I followed the lead of the girl in front of me who could read music. I couldn’t. I had no trouble with ‘A Spanish Cavalier’ and ‘Juanita’ and other schoolroom standards in Morning Exercises but in Music class Miss Schwer was constantly breaking new ground with notes that had to be read. I digress.
The cigarette-lighter bearers were peaceful enough but at this point some of the militant haircuts exposed more GIVE WAR A CHANCE T-shirts; pushing and shoving took place as scuffles broke out. Security people and cooler haircuts quickly prevailed and Christabel finished the song uninterrupted.
The next number was ‘Birdshit on Your Statue’. Christabel and the band were only a few bars into this when the middle-aged and bespectacled anapaest devotee next to me rose to his feet and shouted, ‘Hear that, Blair! ‘You beware!’ Not surprisingly, this aroused a young haircut to his left whose T-shirt flashed, PEACE IS A 4-LETTER WORD.
‘You watch it, you bleeding-heart pacifist!’ he said.
‘You want war? said the bleeding heart, and kicked him in the shin with a non-prosodic foot. These two now squared off as various T-shirts became active elsewhere while the music was making the ground shake and the lights rotated their colours over the stage. The anapaestic chap turned out to be something of a milling cove, and in a short time had tapped the haircut’s claret. Once more into the breach!’ said the elderly one, lapsing into iambic in his excitement.
‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ I said to the young orthographer.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, and produced one that had seen long service.
‘Hold it to your nose and tilt your head back,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we need to call an ambulance.’
‘That old bloke is a ringer,’ he said. ‘He come here looking for a fight.’
‘Politics not uncommonly leads to bloodshed,’ I said. ‘If you can’t stand the heat you should get out of the Hammersmith Apollo.’
‘You some kind of bleeding heart too?’ he said.
‘Probably. I’ll have to think about it.’
While we were having this dialogue Christabel and the band finished ‘Birdshit’ to much applause and many cigarette lighters and launched into ‘No More World’:
When I dialled the speaking clock