The Plan

During my brief time as a student, I spent my time wisely, by avoiding lectures and spending my government grant, the last of its kind, on cheap spirits and old computers. Specifically I had an old Amiga (computer). This thing had no right to work. It still has no right to work, especially when I started to bend my electronics expertise towards it.

It had one (dis)/advantage. And that is in the past I had learned how to use a tracker program on it to make music. However, despite having this computer for an age I never really made any, the catalyst was missing so none were forthcoming....

That was when I discovered what it was like to be in a inside-out zoo, where the dangerous creatures were outside the cage and I inside. The filthy wretched animals would climb onto the bars on the windows and shake them, making strange noises that would haunt my dreams, their small hands with poorly bitten finger nails grasped around the wrought iron bars, covered in the dirt of the streets, with black smears of the anti-climb paint, shaking and screaming, as if electrified.

There was not a single telegraph line within 10 miles without a pair of trainers hanging from by their laces from the lines, we swore when a brisk breeze blew, the trainers would jerk the line and the modem would drop connection.

The children would shout through the letter box, I would huddle in my cold room, with my ancient computer silently running, hooked up to a old stereo, inside my sleeping bag, drinking cheap vodka out of the bottle, the discarded clothes from weeks ago lying around me.

And I would make music.

Though that point could well be argued, so perhaps I should say I made sounds and noises on my computer, composing melodies that would switch from uplifting anthems then descend into mind-hurting dirges. The sound would throw itself between speakers from one to the other, the beat would break up, become random, then slow down, speed up, then too fast.

But that's just how the music came into being. Music is nothing without listeners, and so THE PLAN was hatched.

Every party, every house, every outing, at least one CD full of music had to be distributed. Ideally it should be placed secretly into a CD collection and a CD stolen in it place. The CD to be stolen should be the worst in the collection.

At concerts they were to be given out to appropriate person, like the oriental girl who ran her finger down my chest, then poked me in the eye, or the guy in the red shirt with a thick Scottish accent and two pints of cider.

But the story I am about to tell is about a small festival, one which I was invited to, but then told there was no room. So everyone else went except me, but they took THE CD.

It's unclear if they ever got to see any music, whilst there, but they did however manage to knock on the door of every chalet asking if the occupants were selling drugs, until they reached the one belonging to a band called "Sugar Rush." It's unknown how they actually got let into the chalet, but the sensible thing to do was to put the music on the CD player. But not before being told how fun it is to swallow pebbles.