Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

What point was there in tuning a guitar with only three strings? What point in polishing it? What point in even opening the case? Greg’s sister began to neglect him. She did not come to clean his room and it soon began to gather dust, and for a time it became a depository for old boxes and pieces of furniture not wanted in the rest of the house.

But then Greg’s mother decided that since Greg was no longer making much use of his room she might as well rent it out. The lodger she found was a bearded, duffle-coat-wearing saxophonist, leader of a jazz trio. Like many jazz players he was rather dismissive of the electric guitar and certainly didn’t want one cluttering up his room. So Greg was moved into the living room, where for a brief time he lived behind the television set, propped up against the hostess trolley, but when Greg’s father developed the theory that the guitar’s presence was affecting television reception, Greg was moved again, taken out of the body of the house and condemned to a damp corner of the utility room.

Greg was now apparently well out of the way, and yet he was still a grim reminder to the family of their own dysfunctional state.

‘It has to go,’ Greg’s sister said, with resolve. ‘It’s the only way. We must try to stop thinking of it as Greg. The Greg we know is gone forever. I’ll take it to some second-hand music shops and try to sell it.’

She began at the store where Greg himself had worked, but Frank, the manager, took one look at the guitar and said he didn’t want that thing in his shop. And so it went at other music shops. Although the buyers couldn’t quite put their finger on what was wrong with the guitar, or why they wouldn’t take it off her hands, they all made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the instrument.

In despair Greg’s sister explained her plight to the family’s lodger. Was there perhaps someone in his circle of musicians who could find a use for an old but little-used electric guitar? He was not optimistic but came back later and said there was a band called the Flesh Guitars who could probably make use of Greg, although of course he had not mentioned to them the guitar’s anthropomorphic nature. A deal was agreed.

It was at a time in musical history when Jenny Slade and the Flesh Guitars were in their most nihilistic, confrontational phase. It was a period when they were getting through guitars at a frightening rate, smearing them with pig’s intestines, attacking them with strimmers, electric sanders, caulking irons, beating them against walls, floors, ceiling, and finally smashing them to pieces against the speaker cabinets of the PA. The semi-naked bass player might then rub her crotch with fragments of the guitar neck in a mood of Dionysian abandon.

It was not what any self-respecting family would have wanted for their son. Fortunately Jenny Slade knew a good instrument when she saw one. She played a couple of chords on it and saw at once that it was too good to abuse and destroy. She wanted that guitar, and wild horses wouldn’t have taken it from her. Naturally, Jenny would have been a great guitarist whatever guitar she used, but there was something about the Greg Wintergreen guitar that was perfectly suited to her technique. It became her main instrument, and she never looked back.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 8 Issue 3

Perhaps after the fiasco of their ‘tour’ and the Psychology Club gig Jenny Slade should have stayed well clear of Tom Scorn, and no doubt she would have if he hadn’t kept coming up with such weird and exciting music. She had watched with fascination as he changed from a young, naive upstart into a major player in the world of experimental music. He met up with Jenny again while waiting for a plane to fly to the Greenland Thrash Elevator Festival, where they were both making guest appearances.

Dispensing with pleasantries he slid a tape into a DAT player and asked Jenny to listen. She had never heard anything quite like the noises that came out. There was lots of space and silence, great pools of inky stillness in which there was little or no music, but then there would be an explosion of percussion or a streak of dissonant piano chords followed by more silence. Next there would be a thud of bass guitar noise, again brief stabs and attacks of sound, music wrestled out of the very craw of the instrument, followed perhaps by the thin rasp of a high hat, then silence again.

‘Check out that extended technique,’ Scorn blurted, ‘that non-canonical praxis.’

He was right. Jenny could hear that conventional technique had been discarded. Notions of good playing had been sent packing, and yet there was something compelling in the music. For all that the music rejected the easy pleasures, it drew you in and was surprisingly easy to listen to.

‘It’s something special,’Jenny said. ‘Who is it?’

‘The Hormone Twins,’ Scorn said. ‘They’re real twins.’

‘And is that their real name?’

‘Sure. Bobby and Walter Hormone. I think maybe it’s French.’

‘Are they new?’

‘Very. I was hoping you’d play on their debut album. I’m producing it. I thought your presence would give them a bit of stature, and help you keep in touch with the younger audience.’

‘I’m in touch with all sorts of audiences,’ Jenny assured him.

‘But you’ll do it, yes?’

‘OK.’

‘Promise you won’t change your mind?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because Walter and Bobby are only eight years old.’

‘Jesus.’

‘You promised.’

‘OK, I promised.’

Jenny believed in keeping her promises.

The recording studio, in a converted garden centre in Telford, was retro to the point of antiquity. The microphone stands were rusty, the baffle boards were marked with many generations of muso graffiti, the control room was inside a greenhouse that had once been used for growing orchids.

Jenny’s own equipment was set up neatly in a corner, while that belonging to the Hormone Twins was laid out haphazardly all over the rest of the studio. There was a drum kit, tubular bells, a glockenspiel, a piano, Hammond organ, some cheesy early synthesizers, an array of trumpets and flutes, a siren, a vast Chinese gong, plus huge baskets full of miniature percussion instruments, penny whistles, Jews harps and kazoos. The place looked like a musical playroom.

There was no sign of the twins but Jenny could hear boys’ voices coming from outside the studio, from the area where the fruit trees and garden statuary had once been kept. The trees were now blackened and denuded and the statuary was in ruins but the twins were finding it a great place to play. They were grunting and screaming and throwing stones and chunks of broken statue at each other.

Jenny was no great lover of children, and these were less lovable than most. There was something stunted and porcine about them, something lumpen yet violent. Scorn rounded them up and dragged them into the studio. Once indoors their exuberance disappeared and they stood awkwardly saying nothing and sniggering like imbeciles. Jenny said hello and the twins’ replies were inaudible.

Scorn shrugged. ‘Hey, they’re kids. They’re musicians. They speak through their music.’ And with that he went into the booth.

The twins were wearing an approximation of school uniform, but from a very weird school. They wore short trousers, very Angus Young, blazers and school caps; but the uniforms were made of some weird metallic material and edged with hide. The boys wore motorcycle boots, five or six sizes too large, and instead of school ties they had nooses hanging round their necks.

‘So what would you like me to play?’ Jenny asked.