Authors: Phil Rickman
Who would the sound engineer have been? Someone he knew?
The songs were good, although they didn't make a lot of sense,
especially a hard blues piece, gruffly sung by Storey about a man with … two
mouths, was that? A man with two mouths? He wished he'd seen those papers Steve
had taken away, probably a track list.
But there was one song he could get the measure of, This was a
live take, the whole band playing together, instead of the usual jigsaw.
This number was over seven minutes long, about a prophet of some
kind with a Welsh-sounding name, who
...
came down from the mountains
with a harp on his shoulder
and dreams of the future ...
It was one of those songs like Led
Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven' which got bigger and more complicated, more
violent,
a male and a female singing
alternative verses. No mistaking the voices; Dave Reilly and the Cairns woman.
Prof changed the reel, found another version of the same song,
even longer. But this was a quieter version; he could hear all the words. There
was this very gruelling episode in the middle where this prophet bloke
witnesses what seems to be a multiple murder in a stone-walled banqueting hall
during a meal, swords and knives and axes coming out, people getting stabbed
and hacked to death over the table, dishes running with fresh blood.
Not too pleasant.
Also the woman was singing in a very curious wav, as if she
wasn't thinking about the words or the tune or the rhymes or the timing. I was
as if she was
watching
the dreadful
scene happening in front of her eyes as it were, and describing what she could
see in words which just seemed to fall into place.
Like improvising, but it couldn't be.
Afterwards, the prophet guy was running away, accompanied by
lots of pounding bass, chips of acoustic rhythm guitar, streamers of lead
guitar like bird calls.
And then, after a long, tense silence, it all started to get
very
peculiar.
'We ran a few feet of tape first - don't worry, we
weren't trying to listen to it. There was a lot of wow, as you'd expect and one
awful smell, like overcooked liver or something. So we gave up and put the
reels in the ovens, divided them up between all three ovens, turned on the
heat, locked the room. As normal. You don't want anybody going in there messing
up your settings, turning up your levels … it could be disastrous, right?'
The quality of the silence
altered. It had become like ... like a vastness. As if he was standing not in a
tiny studio but in a huge ballroom with all the lights out.
There was a hollow resonance. The
hollow resonance of death, Prof thought suddenly.
What the bloody hell did that mean?
He'd seen the word
DEATH
in capitals on the paper Steve
had taken out of the envelope they'd found inside the box.
Now, obviously, some of this was his imagination, due to the
location of the grotty little studio, this tatty, plastic room buried in the
earth or whatever passed for earth in South London, no windows, no slit of
light beneath the door - not even a tiny red pilot on the tape machine, which
was the cast-off he'd asked for to test the gunged-up tape, and its pilot light
was broken.
So the darkness in the cellar was absolute.
And the music was darker still, if you could call it music.
Listen. Work it out.
OK, several people are breathing, hollow yawning breaths, like
haaaaaaaaaaaw
, a cavernous sound; you
feel yourself drifting into it, like slipping backwards into a pool; closing
your eyes, throwing your arms back over your head.
Then one of the breathers' pitch alters, constructing uneven,
fitful notes, notes like small boats on a dark sea.
Slowly a tune begins to form in the background, a cold, brittle,
repetitive tune played on an acoustic guitar, plucked by the fingernails,
plucked close to the bridge, where the strings are tight.
An image that came out of this music in a kind of vapour
drifting into Prof's mind, was of a woman's waxen face, dwindling tendrils of
breath from parted lips, eyelids fluttering as feebly as a moth in winter.
His own lips felt dry. He licked them; his tongue was even
drier.
The music softened into mush.
Out of this reared a discordant cello followed by a sonorous
bass, sounding as if they'd been recorded in a vault or a church crypt.
Prof felt the studio floor tilt beneath his feet, felt he was
falling through a series of echoing passages of sound. Would there be light
down there?
No. Only a deeper darkness.
So put on the light, you stupid bugger!
I can't do that. It would be wrong. It would not be
professional. I have to stay with this.
Prof found himself shuddering with a very unprofessional
dread. And wanting a drink, badly.
'So, I'm at home, Prof, in bed. This is the third
night, the tapes should be baking nicely, ready to come out like fresh buns in
the morning. So. It's about half past eleven, we'd just watched Newsnight on
the bedroom set, and the phone rings. Angela gets it. "It's the
factory," she says. "The night watchman." Well, if I've told the
guy once … don't ring me, ring the police, ring the fire brigade, don't disturb
me unless … Anyway he says, "You know that room with the metal door?"
"The bakery" - this is what we call it, obviously,
He says, "The one I haven't got a key to?" I say, "Yeah,"
he says, "Well, is there supposed to be somebody in there at this time of
night?"'
'Help me,' a woman's voice
sang distantly and then, off key,
'Help me ... please …'
He was shocked. It sounded as if something had disrupted the
session, like she was being attacked, like when she cried out
help me
, it was for real.
And then her voice trailed off into
an achingly melodic whimper.
A hand seemed to close inside Prof's chest. His eyes felt hot.
He was glad he hadn't-chickened out and put on the lights, suddenly grateful
for the darkness, discovering he wasn't frightened any more, simply … quite
profoundly moved.
He thought, she's dying. This woman
is dying.
He could at once sense the pitiful
desolation of something small and vulnerable being absorbed into something
massive and indifferent. He held his breath.
Years since he'd responded emotionally to any kind of music.
Music was
product
, a commodity.
Realising he was clenching his fists, he opened them out; his
palms were wet.
Also, his eyes were moist, which was ridic—
There was a stuttering of strings,
viola maybe, a fragmentation and then a frozen second or two of... well, no
identifiable sound, just a kind of vibration, dancing waves of electricity in
the air.
'She's going.'
He realised he'd said this aloud.
For almost a second there was complete, hollow silence. The
studio had become a ballroom again or a giant indoor stadium.
Prof felt cold, he felt bereft. He
needed a ... Oh God …
'So I come in ... after midnight by the time I get
here. The watchman is rushing to meet me, oldish guy, I mean, seasoned, you
know? Come on, come on, we have to get her out. Her? Her? What the bloody hell...?
I get the keys from my office, we go down there. I unlock the metal door ...'
When the music resumed
there was a subtle difference, a change of key, an acoustic rhythm guitar
chugging patiently along, a slow horse-and-cart rhythm, the woman's voice
reaching out.. A hesitant remission? Some hope in here?
A second of silence, the ballroom ambience again, and suddenly
she's getting battered about, tossed from one speaker to the other in a dark
wind of sound.
The sense of build-up, of
foreboding
,
is suffocating.
Prof made himself take a couple of
long breaths, but he couldn't seem to fill his lungs. He clutched at the tape
machine. This wasn't the music, this was him. He was ill, he was a sick man.
Music alone could not do this to you.
What he should do now was very carefully switch off the
machine, put on the lights, clear his head, go back upstairs - taking it very
slowly - go and find a cafe, get a mug of sweet, milky tea.
Only, to do this he would need to breathe.
Oh, Jesus. He felt the floor tilt
again beneath his shoes, stumbled to his knees. Breath ... Breath and ...
alcohol .
When it happened, he was down on the floor, his heart banging
away like a jack-hammer, his sweating face upturned towards the invisible
speakers.
What happened was a hiss of power heralding a cruel, jagged
electric chord sequence - Tom Storey, in full rage - which ripped from one side
of the black void to the other.
The breath exploded into Prof Levin.
And then
'God al
mighty
,' he croaked,
as it chewed her up.
The electric music chewed her up, the dying woman, with the
dispassionate fury of a chainsaw.
'Of course, there was nobody there. The night
watchman, you could tell he was torn between terror and acute embarrassment. I gave
him a good rollocking. Getting me out of bed. What was up with him? Had he been
drinking? This kind of stuff. I'm shouting at the poor old git for a good two
minutes, rollocking him while I'm surreptitiously checking out the bakery,
checking the levels on the ovens, making sure everything is as left. Which it
is, all set to fifty-five centigrade, nothing tampered with. Nothing.
'And
why am I doing this?
'I'll
tell you why. It's not a big room - I'll take you down, Prof, give me a couple
of minutes - it's not a big room, as I say, and with three substantial ovens in
there it's always what you might call nicely warm, or in summer, bloody
suffocating.
'So why
- you explain this to me - is it freezing cold in there, with three ovens still
going at fifty-five C? Why is it cold enough to freeze the whatsits off a brass
thingy?
'And
why am I still shouting at the night watchman? Because suddenly I believe him.
The thing is, he's never been in there, he doesn't know it should be warm. Now,
me, I know there is no scientific reason at all why it should be freezing cold.
With three ovens on, over three days and nights? Prof, I'm a religious man, an
Orthodox Jew - I'm telling you this, background information. I do believe in
certain things, although I am not gullible. OK, I take the night watchman up to
my office, I apologise for losing my cool, I give him a whisky, I ask him what
he heard, he says, "A woman, I swear there was a woman in there, gasping,
suffocating, although at first," he says, "at first I thought it was,
you know, sexual." I say, "Listen, maybe you fell asleep, it was a
bad dream. Maybe it's better we say it was a bad dream, keep it between
ourselves, yes? He gets the message, finally, and we drink to it.
Uncomfortably. This is an end of it.
'I should
be so fortunate. I arrive this morning for work - late.
I'm afraid, I make no excuses for that - and I walk
into bloody uproar. People outside my door, admin people, technical staff,
secretaries. Who's been in here, messing things about, turning out drawers,
kicking chairs over and ... and tangling everything in tape? Miles and miles
and fucking miles of high-quality Audico recording tape worth thousands of
pounds, binding the place ... there are whole offices strangled in tape! It
seems like there is not a single reel in the building left unrolled! What the
insurance people are going to make of this is quite beyond me. Not a single
reel unrolled!