Flesh Guitar (22 page)

Later Bob Arnold would write, ‘Few people have been lucky enough to hear the entire session from beginning to end, but those who have are stunned by the work's essential unity and coherence. Rhythms and chord progressions that are quickly passed over in the early hours of the session
are reworked and given full expression some twenty or thirty hours later. The three-CD set that was extracted from the tapes represents a distillation but also an enormous reduction. The complete work derives its strength and majesty from its sheer size and scale, and in a perfect world it would always be listened to as a whole.'

Given the way the recording was set up, it inevitably started in
medias res,
at the moment when the engineers happened to be ready, and the ending was similarly abrupt and arbitrary. After three days of continuous playing, Jenny was more than ready to call it quits. It was only Jon Churchill's relentless energy, her fear of letting him down, and her sense that she was part of something so very important that had kept her going for so long.

When Jon Churchill suddenly stopped, threw down his sticks and walked out through the french doors, she felt nothing but relief. She followed him, hoping that he might at last have something to say to her, some comment to make on what they'd been creating. In the event she was disappointed. He ran off down the beach and she was far too weary to chase after him. Dan, one of the engineers, offered her a beer and a bacon sandwich and that more than absorbed her attention. The crew turned off the recording gear and took a desperately needed break.

It was then that Jenny Slade spoke briefly to Beth. It had been a tough few days for everyone, but Beth looked particularly shattered and demented by it all.

‘This is not what I wanted,' Beth said, and she wandered off, amazed that silence had finally fallen on her house, and walked into the living room as though to savour
the peace and quiet there, but she didn't stay long.

Jenny didn't know whether the session was over or not. If Jon Churchill had come back from the beach and taken up his place behind the drums she would certainly have joined him. But he was away a long time and on his return he entered the house through a side door, thus avoiding everyone, and he went into the living room, to the makeshift studio and picked up Jenny's guitar, slung it round his neck and turned on the power to the amp.

The electric shock must have come immediately, since nobody heard him play any notes or chords. Instead he received a bolt of electric current that threw him across the room and dumped him on top of his drum kit.

The noise from the amp, followed by the sudden crash, the noise of colliding drums and guitar was truly terrible, and it was immediately obvious that something bad had happened, and even though Beth raced into the room, turned off the power and began immediate first aid, somehow everyone knew it was a futile exercise. Jon Churchill was killed by electricity in his own living room having played the most extraordinary music of his life.

There are those who say it was a merciful death, a quick, clean release from the lingering horrors of Alzheimer's, and there are those who say he engineered the death himself. Perhaps he had deliberately got his hands wet on the beach. Perhaps he had interfered with the power supply, certainly some of the cables were frayed and worn, and Dan the engineer swore they hadn't been like that when he'd first connected them. Jenny examined her guitar and amp and was all too aware that Jon's death might very easily
have been hers. The fatal shock had been there waiting for whoever picked up the guitar.

Beth was inconsolable, hysterical, half out of her mind with grief and exhaustion. She would scream at Jenny, blaming her for the death, saying it was all her fault, and then she would crumple with misery and say it was all her
own
fault. Everyone assured her that she mustn't blame herself, but it did little good.

After the ambulance and the doctor and the police had gone there was nothing left for Jenny and the crew to do but pack up and go home. Dan the engineer was unusually quiet and broody. The death seemed to have affected him profoundly despite his never have met Jon Churchill until the beginning of the session. Jenny tried to console him but he didn't want to be consoled.

‘I have no right to call myself an engineer,' he berated himself. ‘The first rule of recording is to always keep the tape running. And I didn't. That noise, the sound from the guitar when it electrocuted him, that drum crash, if only I could have got that on tape, I'd have made a fucking fortune.'

Jenny slapped him hard across the face with a bundle of twisted guitar leads and made her own way home.

Tom Scorn drove himself to the
San Germano Correctional Facility; a high-tech, high-security prison, thick, high Victorian walls, built in the middle of swamp and wasteland, where he was booked to do a solo gig, part of a rehabilitation scheme. He pulled up at the electronic gate and showed the necessary documents to a guard in a black uniform spattered with red fringes and braid, and was waved through to a central courtyard. Two more uniformed men took his equipment out of the van for him and he was conducted through a sort of portcullis into a metal chamber where he found yet another guard. This one was apparently higher ranking, the uniform more ornate.

‘Ready for the strip search?' the guard asked nonchalantly.

‘Actually, no,' Scorn replied.

‘It's just a formality,' said the guard. ‘We know what musicians are like.'

‘You really think I'm going to come in here carrying drugs?'

‘Drugs is the least of it,' the guard said, still cheery.

Scorn saw no point fighting. If you wanted to play to a gaol full of dangerous criminals then you had to make some compromises. Having nothing to hide, he started to undo
the buttons of his shirt.

‘Hey, I'll do that,' the guard shouted, and he made Scorn remain motionless as the clothes were peeled from him.

The guard was brisk, without being rough, thorough without being invasive. He found plenty of opportunity to lay his hands on Scorn's body and the red fringing of his uniform brushed repeatedly against Scorn's bare flesh.

‘What sort of music do you play exactly?' he asked.

‘Well,' said Scorn thoughtfully, ‘it's certainly not easy music. It's challenging, thought-provoking. It makes the listener reassess his own position with regard to the world, as does all art, of course.'

‘A bit like that Jenny Slade, then.'

‘Not entirely unlike her, I suppose,' Scorn said drily.

‘We tried to get her to come here but the governor thought it was asking for trouble bringing a woman to play in a men's prison.'

Scorn grunted.

‘Well, good luck,' the guard said. ‘You might need it.' He peered inquisitively into Scorn's holes and crevices and said, ‘OK, you're clean.'

‘I
know,'
Scorn replied.

He put his clothes on. The guard dusted him down, slapped him on the buttock and accompanied him through an electronic door into a featureless corridor beyond.

‘You'll be playing in the Beckett Theatre,' the guard said.

Scorn had already been told this, although he didn't know and couldn't quite imagine what kind of theatre they were likely to have in a high-security prison. Maybe the talk of fierce discipline was exaggerated. Maybe in reality
it was all concert parties and amateur dramatics.

‘There have been some spectacular acts performed in the Beckett Theatre,' the guard remarked. ‘The place has quite a history. It dates back to the time when the San Germano was a hospital and madhouse.'

‘Hospital?' Scorn repeated, light suddenly dawning. ‘It's not an operating theatre is it?'

The guard laughed at the very idea. ‘Of course it's not,' he said brightly. ‘It's a former dissection theatre.'

Before Scorn could express surprise they had arrived. Two wooden swing doors were set in the steel-lined corridor and the guard pushed him through into the theatre. It was reminiscent of a bear pit. The space was circular, not large, with steeply rising banks of seats on all sides. The ‘stage' where the dissections would once have taken place was in the centre, the performances here would always be ‘in the round'. The dissection table had gone but there was a distinctly medical air to what had been left behind: white tiles, a sluice and overhead illumination as fierce as searchlights. There was not going to be much of an atmosphere, Scorn thought, and the acoustics were bound to be horrible.

‘Nervous?' the guard asked.

‘A little,' Scorn confessed. ‘I think a few nerves help improve a performance.'

‘Yeah, well I'd have nerves too if I was going to stand up on my own in front of a roomful of druggies, murderers and bum bandits.'

The two guards who'd taken Scorn's equipment now arrived and set down the four electronic keyboards and amplifiers that he was using for his set.
There was also a small, square card table, whose function at this stage was obscure. Scorn set up the gear himself, while the guards watched him with bored curiosity. Ostensibly they were here to help, to provide what he needed, but when he asked for a cup of coffee or a bottle of mineral water all three assured him these were unrealistic and unrealizable requests. Scorn got the impression that the guards were there as his captors rather than his protectors.

Soon sounds came from the corridor outside and the captive audience began to arrive. They shuffled into the theatre and took their places in the wooden seats. They seemed reluctant, repressed, as though they had been dragged there unwillingly, as though attendance at this concert was just another aspect of their continuing punishment. Certainly, Scorn noted with some relief, there appeared to be enough guards in attendance to ensure the prisoners behaved themselves.

He was used to facing an audience, but this time half of them were behind him, and he could feel their hostile stares boring into his back. He was also accustomed to waiting for an audience to settle down and quieten before he started playing but this audience was already absolutely silent and still.

The piece he had decided to play was called ‘Absent Kings', one of his more recent, and in his opinion, less demanding compositions. The performance began as he produced a pack of playing cards, removed the four kings and tossed them into the audience. This caused the most muted of ripples. He then dealt out the rest of the pack face-down on the card table. He paused theatrically, then turned over the first
card, looked at it briefly and ran to one of the keyboards where he played a single note of D.

The composition fell broadly into the category of ‘systems music' and someone familiar with the genre might instantly have realized what Scorn was up to. Each card on the table represented a note of the chromatic scale of A, so that an ace was A, 2 was A sharp, 3 was B, 4 was C, and so on: twelve cards per suit corresponding to the twelve musical notes. Each of the four suits in turn corresponded to each of the four keyboards on stage, so that if Scorn turned up a heart he'd have to play on keyboard number one, a spade meant keyboard number two, a diamond was number three and so on, each keyboard having a different, though equally cheap and cheerful, tone. Thus if he dealt the cards three of diamonds, queen of hearts, eight of clubs, he would have to play B on the third keyboard, then G sharp on the first keyboard, followed by E on the fourth keyboard. The keyboards were deliberately set just out of reach of each other so he had to dash from one to another leaving silences between each note. The music was thrillingly spare and thin.

The sight and sound of Scorn dashing around the stage playing apparently random notes might have appealed to a fan of the more ironic avant-garde. It might even have caused gentle amusement to those with a sense of the ridiculous. However the prison population at the San Germano Correction Facility contained neither of those types. After thirty or forty seconds of ‘Absent Kings' the audience in the Beckett Theatre erupted in passionate, violent booing.

The prisoners were on their feet shouting, heckling, cat-calling. The prison guards tried to remain
unmoved and unimpressed by the reaction, but that was a difficult act to pull off. They suddenly looked terribly outnumbered and ineffectual.

Scorn, who had never been one to seek easy audience approval, thought there was something rather wonderful about the directness and vehemence of the response, and he was still feeling that way when the prisoners rushed the stage, knocking prison guards unconscious as they came. They seized Scorn and dragged him out of the theatre. As he lay on the floor in the corridor outside he could hear the sound of his keyboards being smashed to pieces, but he tended to think this too was a valid aesthetic response, and he was still having these charitable thoughts as he was kicked into unconsciousness.

A scrum formed around him and he was manhandled into the toilet block, while other prisoners engaged in a pitched battle with the guards. There was an amount of wounding and maiming on both sides, and honours remained even in terms of combat, but having Tom Scorn as a hostage gave the prisoners a definite edge. Before long a state of siege obtained throughout the prison and the circus could begin in earnest.

Outside the walls armed police arrived in numbers, along with a crack negotiating team, some SAS men, fleets of helicopters and armoured cars, ambulances, fire engines. And of course the media came too, teams of reporters and film and television crews, along with a throng of amateur gawpers who'd braved the swamp and wasteland to be there.

Communication was established with the prisoners and after some hours of intense, complex see-sawing
negotiations, the prisoners finally made their demands clear.

Jenny Slade was watching the whole thing on TV, thinking that it couldn't happen to a nicer guy than Tom Scorn. She hadn't touched her guitar since the death of Jon Churchill. Music seemed an all too melancholy activity. That was when she got a phone call from a senior member of the negotiating team, one Major Warren. His voice was clipped, unemotional, narrow in range. She somehow assumed he had a trim toothbrush moustache.