Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

18) the Free-Range Solo

The player takes half a dozen hen’s eggs and smashes them at various places on her guitar. She then takes an egg whisk and beats the eggs, and to an extent the guitar as well, until small peaks appear.

19) The Considerate Solo

The player holds a guitar in one hand and a house brick in the other. She considers the myriad possibilities, but does nothing.

20) The Prophylactic Solo

A large, opaque plastic bag is placed over the guitar and the player must wrest sounds from the instrument through the plastic.

(In a minor variation of this solo the plastic bag may be placed over the player instead.)

21) The Tarmac Solo

The player uses a two-hundred-yard-long lead to connect the guitar to the amplifier. She then picks up the guitar, leaves the stage, leaves the auditorium, and goes out into the nearest road, which should be only intermittently busy with traffic. The player sets the guitar down in the centre of the road and returns to the hall. The solo is ‘played’ when the first vehicle runs over the guitar, an incident which is not seen and is heard only as electrical noise conveyed along the lead. The player may be in or out of the hall when this happens.

(If the player only owns one guitar it is recommended that this piece be played as the last solo of the evening.)

There were another nineteen or so ‘compositions’ in a similar vein. When she had read them all Jenny Slade put down the pages, smiled and said, ‘I’ll gig.’ She tracked down Tom Scorn and agreed to play a series of solo concerts in which she would showcase these creations of his. She thought of it as a way of giving a helping hand to a young, up and coming musician.

Somewhat to her surprise he said he had already taken the first steps towards booking such a tour and had used her name to obtain an Arts Council grant. The guy was obviously quite a hustler. He was also decidedly well organized and well connected. He booked her into a variety of cabaret clubs, avant-garde jazz venues and small concert halls. He insisted on travelling with her and attending every date on the tour, saying he might need to rewrite or modify the compositions as they went along. She thought this was a mite over-conscientious and it certainly upped the travelling expenses, but she didn’t complain.

Neither did she complain when she saw that the posters for the early concerts read, ‘Jenny Slade plays the music of Tom Scorn’. As the senior partner she thought that her name ought to be bigger than his, rather than equal size, although at least hers came first. But as the tour progressed (and it was not a very long tour) the poster was redesigned so that it read, ‘Tom Scorn guitar solos, played by Jenny Slade’. This was, she supposed, factually accurate but she still believed that she was the draw, rather than this young, unknown composer. When the tour hit Amsterdam, Scorn decided that ‘guitar solos’ was not a sufficiently beguiling title so he came up with another, and now the posters read, ‘Thomas Scorn’s First Guitar Symphony’, and then in much smaller print, ‘Soloist, Jenny Slade’.

At this point Jenny did complain, loudly and at length, but Scorn seemed so young and enthusiastic, so naive, that it was hard to be very angry with him. And besides, she did enjoy playing the music; it was challenging and different, and audiences liked it. You could forgive a lot as long as things were going well on stage.

But things came to a complete head in a club in Wiesbaden when, two minutes before Jenny was due to go on stage, Scorn announced that he intended to conduct her performance. He’d bought a baton and a tailcoat specially for the occasion. It was too late to have a full blown argument about it and, short of kicking him off stage, Jenny didn’t know what she could do. She played her way through the solos, ignoring him as much as she could, refusing to make eye contact, and trying her best to make it clear to the audience that she was not being in any way conducted.

As the final chords of the last solo trickled away, Tom Scorn stood directly in front of her and bowed grandly to the audience. It was as if she did not exist for him any more, as if he alone had created the music out of nothing. He lapped up the applause and didn’t even offer a gesture of acknowledgement towards Jenny.

When she could stand it no longer she kicked him hard in the backside, so hard that he had to acknowledge her presence. He spun round, and she spun round too and she was holding her guitar at head height so that it swung like a tennis racket or indeed a frying pan, and Tom Scorn’s face made hard, sickening contact with the guitar, just a little way above the bridge, so that the strings started to vibrate and set up a long, aching discord.

‘That was a composition of my own,’ Jenny said. “The Dickhead Composer Solo.”’

When his face had stopped pulsating Tom Scorn said coolly, ever needing to take credit, ‘No, Jenny, that was a duet. ’

‘All right,’ says Kate, ‘you’ve given me the historical background, but I think there’s a paradox in all this, don’t you? Wouldn’t you say that we’re discussing the intellectual background to what is an anti-intellectual form?’

‘I don’t think rock music is anti-intellectual,’ Bob says passionately. ‘And as a matter of fact neither does Jenny Slade. Neither she nor I have ever really believed in the guitar player as noble savage. We believe in instinct, of course, but it’s surprising how much better a player’s instincts can get when he’s got a brain that’s in working order. It seems to me that those years Jenny Slade spent at the Sorbonne, at Oxford, at Harvard, they all went into making her the shithot guitarist she is today.’

Kate says, ‘You make Jenny Slade sound like a blue stocking.’

‘A blue stocking maybe,’ Bob admits, ‘but blue stockings worn with high heels and a suspender belt.’

Kate is amused. The kid has a way with words. He also has a way with Scotch. His glass is already empty again and she fills it up. He looked like such a shy, sober lad when he came in.

‘OK, so you’ve explained the significance of the electric guitar,’ she says. ‘Now explain the significance of Jenny Slade.’

Bob takes a deep breath. He’s been waiting for this and he’s more than ready.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘So the electric guitar has been around for, say, sixty years. The modern idea of pop music, by which I suppose I mean rock and roll, has been around for maybe a couple of decades less. In that time various women performers have been strident, brilliant, self-destructive, tragic, outrageous, unreasonable, suicidal. They’ve been all the things that men have been, good and bad, and yet the idea of a great female guitarist, the guitar heroine, remains an untried concept.

‘Now you may say look at Jennifer Batten or Lita Ford, in which case I’d say get real. They’re just drag acts, bad male impersonators. Or you may say that the electric guitar just isn’t a girl thing. You’ll say that the acoustic guitar is a girl thing (look at Joni Mitchell or Suzanne Vega), you’ll say the bass guitar is sometimes a girl thing (look at Suzi Quatro, “lewd in leather”, look at Tina Weymouth, “tempting with a trust fund”). But skronking female lead guitar, you’ll say, it’s a rare bird. And all I can say is it’s also a damn shame.

‘That’s where Jenny Slade comes in. She comes down the front of the stage, turns the volume to twelve, puts her foot up on the monitor, gives it some welly, and just does it. And she does it right, for real, like nobody else, certainly not like some man.