Geoff Nicholson - Flesh Guitar

I smiled appreciatively but at last I thought it was time to end this verbal jousting. I looked her straight in the eyes and I said, ‘Who do you play for, Ms Slade? Yourself or others?’

Arching one carefully plucked eyebrow, she said, ‘I play for the nice guys, the filing clerks and computer nerds, the deceived and exploited, for the dysfunctional and the confused and the just plain wrong, for those who are unsure about their identities, their body politics, their genders.

‘I play for the decontamination squads, for the firework scientists, the mutants and sleepers. I play for the homely girls terrified by their first sight of menstrual blood, and for the sad boys suffering the attentions of their mothers’ special friends. I play for the number crunchers and the atom splitters, for the deformed and the brain dead, for the emotionally drained, for the synaesthesiacs (they make terrific listeners). I play for germ warfare enthusiasts, for the genetic goofballs, the Apple mystics, the road whores, the insurrection grrrls, the nylon broads, the fishnet lads. I often play for the tone deaf.

‘I play for those with extra senses and extra heads, for the bad mothers and the cheerful patricides, for the wreckers and the recyclers, the scanners and cyberniks, the video jerks, the steeplejacks of middle space, the boys in the bunker, the hyper-drive cadets, the ovary barons, the born-again crucifiers, the twang bar princesses, the wah wah dudes, the radon lovers, feedback addicts, fuzz theorists.

‘I play for the cryogenic fetishists, the orgone punks, the cosmetic surgeons with the shaky hands, the thrash throngs, the synth siblings, the napalm fanciers, the nuclear Klansmen, needlegun gangs, anarchs of the old school, neurone handymen, death metal alchemists.

‘I play for the people next door. I play for people like us. I play for people like you, Bob’

It was a tender and touching moment, but of course she was only telling me what I already knew.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 4 Issue 3

Jenny Slade could no longer remember which magazine had first referred to Jed Rhodes as a ‘drug-crazed bass player’. The epithet had stuck, but she’d always found it absurd. There was no denying that Jed had a lifelong appetite for, maybe even a lifelong love affair with drugs, but it seemed to her there was nothing even remotely crazed about him. He played bass, he took drugs and he remained an utterly sane, rational, ordinary individual. There were times when he became rather quiet and introspective, other times when he might see and talk to things or people or monsters that weren’t actually there, but these were small, forgivable eccentricities. The basic, down-to-earth personality always remained. His sense of rhythm never faltered and he never played a bum note.

Jenny sometimes thought Jed didn’t deserve to look so good, so healthy, shouldn’t be such a walking advertisement for the joys, or at least the essential harmlessness, of drug abuse, but it was an aesthetic judgement not a moral one.

‘Drug abuse!’ Jed would sneer. ‘That’s such a pathetic term. What can you do with drugs except abuse them? That’s what drugs are for .’ He’d spent a lifetime just saying yes and he’d done fine, but Jenny knew he was lucky. It wasn’t always like that. Few people in the world had the constitution, the inner or outer strength that Jed had, and she certainly did not include herself in that number.

So when she ran into Jed Rhodes in the car-park of a club that was being held in a converted pasta factory just outside the M25 and he offered her an untried and untested chemical, her first reaction was not necessarily to knock it back without hesitation. She also saw that Jed was not alone. He was with a curious young man: a wire-thin, jumpy, wasted-looking, top-of-the-class-in-science type.

‘This is Tubby Moran,’ Jed said. ‘We call him Tubby because he’s not. That’s drug humour for you. Tubby designs designer drugs, like this one.’

Jed held up a phial about the size of a chemistry lab test tube containing a baby-pink liquid. Tubby Moran looked at the tube and swelled with pride.

‘What drug is it?’ Jenny asked.

‘We call it “Bliss”,’ Jed replied.

‘That’s such a dodgy name for a drug,’ Jenny said, and she noticed that Tubby looked hurt.

‘What’s in a name,’ Jed insisted. ‘It’s good. I’ve taken gallons of the stuff.’

He waved the phial again. The contents certainly looked cute and harmless enough.

‘What does it do to you?’ she asked.

‘Better if I don’t tell you,’ Jed said. ‘That way it’s a surprise’.

‘Oh, come on!’ she protested.

‘I promise you it’s not harmful, it’s not going to make you believe you can fly or want to have sex with the first eighteen truck drivers you meet.’

‘I promise too,’ Tubby added reassuringly.

Jed put the phial to his lips and drained a good half of the pink liquid. ‘Last chance,’ he said, and made as though he was going to swig the rest.

‘Oh, all right, damn it,’ Jenny said. ‘But you’re sure I’ll like it?’

The two men nodded enthusiastically and Jenny drank half of the remaining dose. Keeping up with Jed’s intake was not a game she intended to play. She handed the phial back to him, expecting him to pass it on to Tubby, but he finished the rest himself and the designer-drug boy didn’t complain.

‘You feel OK?’ Jed asked.

‘I feel fine, no different.’

‘Good. Wait till we get into the club.’

Two bouncers, broad as air-raid shelters, waved them into the club. They looked dubiously at the tragically unhip Tubby Moran, but being with Jed Rhodes was passport enough. They made for the bar.

‘Is it OK to drink on top of this stuff?’ Jenny asked.

Tubby assured her that it was. As they stood in the crush trying to get served, Jenny became aware of the music. It was something she’d never heard before, a techno beat, a black woman warbling in a high register, not the sort of stuff she normally listened to or liked, yet tonight in the context of the club it sounded really good. And before long she couldn’t be bothered to fight her way to the bar; she just wanted to get on the dance floor and immerse herself in the music. Jed followed her and they danced together briefly, but she didn’t really notice him. She was dancing with and for herself.

The sound system was fantastic and Jenny took up position next to a speaker, felt the bass and drums ripple through her body. It was truly great. What was this music? It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. She wanted it to go on forever, she wanted to swim in it, drown in it. And then suddenly a guitar kicked in, digitally enhanced no doubt, sampled and sequenced probably, but it was so perfectly done, so fully on the money, that it hit her like a hammer. But maybe the hammer simile wasn’t quite right, maybe it was more like a landslide, an earthquake, a shifting of tectonic plates that cut the ground from under her and let her drop towards the centre of the earth. Jesus, this was a band she’d like to play in.

She didn’t know how long the track went on for, but suddenly it was over; it stopped and some other music started to play. Jenny was desolate, and furious as well. What was this crap they’d put on? Why did they take off the good stuff, the great stuff? How could they? She pushed her way through the crowd and found the DJ at his console.

‘What was that you were playing?’ she demanded.

He named a title and artist that meant nothing to her.

‘It was fantastic,’ she said. ‘Play it again.’

‘I just played it.’

‘Play it again.’