Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

No one ever implicated the Steve Miller Band in this practice, as far as I know, yet the opening of ‘Industrial-Military-Complex Hex’ sent a strong message to a number of people at King’s Bop. The song told them Commandeer John’s wheelchair and propel it at high speed from one side of the stereo image to the other. Grant him the joy of embodying this king among riffs .

If I had known what was coming, I would have put on the wheelchair’s brakes, so it’s a good job I didn’t, because that would have made things worse. We were off.

Be careful of what you wish for — I had wished to ride the Ghost Train, and my wish was coming true in debased form as I was flung about in deafening darkness, all the more alarmed because no conscious attempt was being made to scare me.

After the performance there was an outburst of applause, which wasn’t really for John the human riff, the riff on wheels, though some came my way in the form of rough handshakes and shoulder-pats, but for whoever had abducted me. Nobody seemed to find it strange that I had so little say in my part of the floor show.

The disc-jockey responded to the happy hubbub by encoring the beginning of the song. Apparently I hadn’t been shaken up enough yet.

There was a scuffle behind me, presumably for control of the wheelchair. Everyone wanted a turn. Some beer slopped down my back. The worst part of the ordeal was the instant U-turn required to reposition me for the next guitar entry, and then the next. The wheelchair slewed sideways, as the struggle for control became more heated. I don’t know who won, I only know it wasn’t me. The blast-off to accompany the final guitar note was delayed by several seconds.

Now there was a concerted call for the song to be played a third time, insistent shouts of ‘Again! Again! Once more from the top!’ This time, though, I was spared. I think the disc-jockey must have seen the horror on my face and perhaps even regretted his part in a joyride with the joy taken out. I could hear people grumbling ‘Unfair!’, which seemed a bit much. What was so unfair about giving me a reprieve from being shaken to pieces?

No diamonds at all

Then the disc-jockey soothed the mood of the room by playing a single, and one that was even in the charts at the time. John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, that rather tentative anthem. ‘War is over’, yes, but only ‘if you want it’. A man and a woman danced together for a few moments, and then the man said, rather roguishly, ‘May we?’ Meaning, include me in the dance. I said, ‘Why not?’ and then they did. They really did include me. They pushed the wheelchair back and forth between them, but always smoothly, always with consideration for what it was like to be sitting in it. They didn’t seem quite student-y, though I don’t know in what way, exactly. They seemed like a proper couple. Then the man whispered in the woman’s ear, she shrugged and nodded, and then he was asking, ‘So what are you doing for Christmas, little man?’

‘Little man’ isn’t a phrase I’m any too fond of, but they seemed nice, and if it wasn’t for rough diamonds I wouldn’t have any diamonds at all. Sometimes the wheelchair acts as a lie-detector, and I certainly didn’t think they were messing me about. ‘Nothing much,’ I said, not thinking anything of it. ‘Come to ours, then,’ he said. ‘I’m Frank and this is Shirley. It’ll be a laugh.’ As I say, I didn’t take it seriously in the slightest bit, but Frank was very insistent, asking for my phone number (and getting Shirley to write it down on her hand). He said, ‘I know I’ve had a drink, mate, but I mean it. Come to ours for Christmas. That’s twice I’ve asked you drunk, and I’ll phone tomorrow to ask you sober. That’ll make it official.’ Just then a groan went up, not from me but from the whole packed room. The disc-jockey had followed ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ with Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’. Frank didn’t seem surprised, saying, ‘Bill said he’d do that, but I didn’t think he’d see it through.’

It was a minor outrage in relative terms. One legendary night ‘Bill’, assuming it was the same character, played Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’ (an evocation of a bad trip generally agreed to be more damaging than the real thing) four times in a row, then followed it with ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, which by all accounts began to sound equally sinister.

People groaned at the Osmond song partly because they knew there was a fair chance they would wake up the next morning with that tune in their heads, and would have to be vigilant and avoid humming for the rest of the day.

Blow me down if Frank didn’t phone the next day and repeat the invitation, and by this time I was beginning to take him seriously. He said he and Shirley lived in a basement flat on Victoria Avenue, but we’d all manage somehow.

And in fact my first experience of a family festival without a family was a fair success, though once was probably enough for all parties.

Frank and Shirley’s basement was below a barber’s (Alley Barber’s, if you must know). I was expecting it to be dark, but hadn’t entirely reckoned on the cold and the damp. There was only an outside lavatory, across a little yard, which was a bit of a shock to the system. There had been indoor plumbing on Coronation Street for years. Frank’s record collection was enormous, though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see moss growing on the vinyl of records he hadn’t played for a while.

He worked in the record department of Miller’s music shop on King Street, an old-fashioned sort of business which sold instruments and hired pianos to students. He was in charge of the pop record section, which was smaller than the classical one, and his real interest was the even smaller section labelled New Wave & Progressive. There were only two racks, New Wave & Progressive A — L and New Wave & Progressive M — Z , though he was hoping they would expand to three.

The discount he got as a Miller’s employee explained the size of his collection. ‘I like a good beat,’ he told me, ‘but why settle for one when you can have two or three, all going on at the same time?’ We listened to Gentle Giant, to Caravan, to Gong, and of course to Frank Zappa, not only my host’s namesake but the uncrowned king of New Wave & Progressive M — Z .

The only sentimental moment of my stay came on Christmas Eve, when Frank played ‘Lucky Man’, a track from Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first LP. It was a sort of soulful folk song, with an anti-war message, and it acted on him like a thousand Christmas carols rendered down. He had been rolling a joint when the song started and he froze, though he must have known what was coming since he had just put it on. He wept openly all the way through and then sat still, wiped clean of emotion. If he had wanted to give that joint a festive touch he could have moistened the edge of the rolling paper with tears rather than the traditional saliva.

Shirley worked as a secretary at a firm of solicitors. I told her she should become a lawyer herself, but she just laughed. It seemed to me that once you got a foothold in the world of work there was nothing to stop you, but that wasn’t how Shirley saw it. She was very sure she wasn’t clever. ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘Frank bought me The Naked Eunuch for my birthday in June, and I still haven’t got past Chapter One.’ It was tantalising not knowing which of two famous books of the period she actually meant.

Shibboleth nut roast

Frank did most of the cooking, and came up with plenty of vegetarian basics. I had told him in advance that he should stick to his normal style of eating, and for form’s sake he had decided to roast a bird on the day. I was really agitating against that strange shibboleth nut roast, something that nobody much likes, a misunderstanding that has turned into an iron-clad ritual, with each party convinced of making a concession to the other.