JONATHAN KING: ‘SHE’S TOO

SWEET TO BE A MINUTE

OVER SEVENTEEN…’

BY

ANDREW DARLINGTON

Under-age sex is the last great taboo. The one that destroyed the

careers of Jonathan King and Gary Glitter. But they were far from

the only offenders. It runs like a perverse thread through the

entire history of Rock, perhaps they were just the most public faces,

the most visible fall-guys, the ones who got caught …?

‘EVERYONE’S GONE TO THE MOON…’

‘Streets full of people, all alone, roads full of houses, never homes…’ Jonathan King made his unlikely chart debut during the last week of July 1965, the week the Byrds “Mr Tambourine Man” was competing with the Beatles “Help” for the top slot. Over the next few weeks the tuneful plaintive nonsense of “Everyone’s Gone To The Moon” climbed into the top ten as high as no.4, and he duly appeared on ‘Top Of The Pops’, geeky and heavily bespectacled, to mime it. The lyrics snagged into the era’s blurry-edged ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ instant-surrealism, he had a Cambridge University background, and he was seen as some kind of intellectual, an academic with cultural credentials.
When the follow-up single, “An Icicle Fell From The Heart Of A Bluebird (Into The Concrete Machine)” failed, he razored the symbolism down to its simplest basics, but “Green Is The Grass” bombed too. Unphased, he took an unlikely group called Hedgehoppers Anonymous under his wing, and created “It’s Good News Week” using them as his template. Set to a metronomic count-down it flaunted Cold War paranoia – ‘someone dropped a bomb somewhere, contaminating atmosphere’, and it blue-streaked all the way to no.5 during September. He’d fortuitously lucked into a formula that would see him right, as Pop maverick, columnist, TV-personality, and eccentric fixer for some years to come, under numerous guises and pseudonyms – the Weathermen, Shag, Bubblerock, and occasionally even as himself. Then he graduated from the Pop-based chat-show host of ‘Good Evening’, into an oleaginous career as a TV-journalist with ‘Entertainment USA’.
All of this tedious history is here for one purpose, and one purpose only. Jonathan King has been effectively written out of Pop history. As has Gary Glitter. In an expunging as complete as Stalin erasing Trotsky out of the Soviet archives, they have been ‘disappeared’. Last Christmas every mouldy embarrassment of superannuated festive cack was disinterred for radio high-rotation. Everything – that is, except for Gary Glitter’s sad “Another Rock ‘n’ Roll Christmas”. ‘Dare we say his name on television any more…?’ asks New Order’s Barney Sumner. In a word - no, we can’t. It’s as though soon, there’ll be blank spaces in the ‘Guinness Book Of Hit Singles’ where once were listed their columns of hits. In a ruthless form of total censorship they have become the great unmentionables. And it seems to me that anything deemed ‘unmentionable’ is worth mentioning.
We all know the reason. We all know what happened. They crossed the line. Offended against the last great taboo. And it’s not as though I’m arguing for their rehabilitation. Because I’m not. Or even that there’s some great injustice to redress. It’s just that while Jonathan King and Gary Glitter were enduring their trial by media, and the public destruction of their careers, the shockwaves must have been reverberating throughout the music industry. Provoking as many night-terrors as there was schadenfreude. The ‘who’s next?’ effect. After all, from its very origins Pop music has operated by exploiting Sigmund Freud’s theory of infant sexuality. It’s always flirted with the ‘Lolita’ principle, dial it back in time to the days when the audience were called bobby-soxers, through the teeny-bopper thing, into kidulthood. That’s the way it works. That’s the way it’s always worked. Pop, and perversity, they’re joined at the hip. Where would Pop be without it? It is the pervy motivation that powers its best work as a Titan rocket boosts astronauts into orbit. Thank heaven for little girls, they grow up in the most delightful way. Sam Cooke wrote ‘she was only sixteen, only sixteen’, about how ‘she was too young to fall in love, and I was too young to know’. In other words, the object of Sam’s fixation was ‘barely legal’. If anyone thought about it at the time, which no-one seems to have done, they probably thought of it as being rather cute, in a gooey sentimental – rather than a pruriently perverse sort of way. Back then it was, as they insist on saying, a more innocent time. Entrendre’s had to come in doubles before they counted. When Chuck Berry wrote ‘she’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen’ – in “Little Queenie”, no-one took exception to its juvie inference. Or with his “Sweet Little Sixteen” in which his back-in-school lyric-poetry draws on the iconography of schoolgirl-porn as knowingly as those who would later manipulate that infamous Britney Spears video. Even when the mighty Chuck Berry was jailed ‘for transporting minors over state lines with intent’ no-one pointed out the dubious subtext of the ‘Marie is only six-years-old’ line in “Memphis Tennessee” – it’s a joke, a punch-line, a snap-ending, of course it is – isn’t it? And me, I love Chuck Berry. Always have.
Not that Chuck was the only offender. Flamboyant Jerry Lee Lewis’ career as a rival for Presley’s Rock ‘n’ Roll throne was brought to a juddering halt by juicy red-top revelations concerning his bigamous marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra Gale. The unorthodox arrangement might have drawn no more than mild pulpit tut-tutting in his home state, Louisiana – where such liaisons were not exceptional, but the storm hit with a vengeance the moment the happy couple touched down for their first UK tour. Journalists innocently enquired who was the Killer’s young companion, and once they learned the lascivious details, they went into such front-page spasms of moral outrage that Jerry Lee was forced to cancel thirty-four of his thirty-seven projected concerts. Retreating home they discovered the tidal wave had reverberated back across the Atlantic, where radio stations were dropping his records from their playlists as though they were radioactive. He took out a five-page trade-press spread putting his side of the story, but by then his career was effectively compromised, and never really recovered its momentum. Of course, Jerry Lee and Chuck Berry are music icons to whom normal social rules do not apply, aren’t they? While – whisper who dares, wasn’t there something distinctly dubious about the King’s marital arrangements too? Elvis was doing military service in Bad Neuheim, Germany, where – in September 1959, he met fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, the stepdaughter of a US Air Force captain. On their return to Memphis, Priscilla moved into Graceland with her parent’s full approval. Sure, it was into a full family situation with other Presleys in attendance to chaperone, but – to paraphrase TV’s Mrs Merton, what attracted the Beaulieus to this multi-millionaire Rock Star? Would Priscilla’s family have approved such a domestic set-up with any other GI-grunt but the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll? And of course, they did marry, in 1967. And there’s not necessarily any suggestion of pre-marital impropriety… surely?
The Gay subculture was also there from the start, even when it was unable to speak the name of its legally forbidden love. Pop was for kids. An adolescent fad. And Joe Meek, Larry Parnes… and Brian Epstein knew how to recognise the look of the guys the little girls would fancy, because they fancied them too. What the straight men don’t know, the little girls understand. ‘So you wanna be a Rock ‘n’ Roll star…?’ said the guy with the big cigar, we can help. Joe Meek made Heinz a star because he’d fallen in love with him. Larry Parnes created his stable of pretty teenage boys – Billy Fury, Vince Eager, Marty Wilde, at least partly because their sexuality appealed to him as much as he calculated it would appeal to their target pubescent audience. Brian Epstein was initially transfixed as much by the raw rough-trade leather-clad sexuality of the uncouth Beatles as he was by their talent as songwriters or performers. Where movie producers of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Era’ had the ‘casting-couch’ to negotiate naive star-fixated starlets out of their clothes, record managers used the lure of a contract, the promise of studio-time, that shiny seven-inches of black vinyl. It’s not to necessarily imply that their longings were ever entirely consummated. And considerations of under-age don’t really come into it, because the age of consent has been revised so that what is legal now was not legal then, and in fact doing it at all was illegal in those unenlightened time. But sexual manipulation of the gullible and vulnerable – even when a taste for post-pubescent youths make the perpetrators pederasts, not paedophiles, it was no more morally right then than it is now. Even though it’s safely side-stepped into a quaint window of the past. So it no longer touches us.
But soon it wasn’t even essential to hide your Rock ‘n’ Roll shenanigans. In fact, Pop – or Rock as it had by then become, was using edgy sexual content as a kind of dangerous flirtation, in much the same way that it was inserting cheeky drug references into its lyrics. It’s part of the game. The hidden language we recognise and snigger over. On ‘Beggar’s Banquet’ the Rolling Stones taunt by playing the groupie game, with a swaggering vinyl-dialogue that goes ‘I can see that you’re fifteen years old, no, I don’t want your ID’, then ‘you say you got a friend, that she’s wilder than you, why don’t you bring her upstairs, if she’s so wild she can join in too’. Once the girls are lured upstairs Jagger approvingly letches ‘bet your Mama don’t know you scream like that, I bet your Mother don’t know you can spit like that’, while slurring ‘it’s no hanging matter, it’s no capital crime’. Well – no, not exactly, but those groupies being debauched were supposedly fifteen-years-old – it specifies that age precisely, and the scenario they’re acting out would be a career-killer if it were proved for real. And around the same time, the Who’s kiddie-fiddling ‘Uncle Ernie’ - played with gleeful malevolence by Keith Moon in ‘Tommy’, is treated as no more than a slightly sinister figure of fun. While Donovan was blithely doing his “Mellow Yellow” live on-stage at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, where he inserts the playful lyric improvisation ‘I’m just mad about fourteen-year-old girls’, which gets a huge whoosh of audience approval. It’s there on the ‘Donovan In Concert’ CD. In Pop the Union Gap were no.1 and across-the-board loved for “Young Girl” in which ‘you led me to believe, you’re old enough to give me love,/ and now it hurts to know the truth’, but lead-singer Gary Puckett was tempted by the nookie on offer – ‘get out of here, before I have the time to change my mind’. If anyone found the scenario contentious, no-one mentioned it. In fact the general consensus was that the risqué nature of the lyric was only mildly titillating, and the reason for its million-selling success. While the Critters were in the American chart with Lovin’ Spoonful John Sebastian’s wistfully evocative song about an even “Younger Girl”, with its lascivious plan ‘should I hang around, acting like a brother?/ in a few more years they’d call us right for each other’, but ‘why, if I wait I’ll just die’ because he’s also ‘afraid we’ll go too far’. And as for heavier Rock, Blind Faith – the short-lived ‘super-group’ fronted by Eric Clapton and Stevie Winwood issued their solitary album wrapped in sleeve-art showing a nude pubescent girl, an image that still provokes uneasy responses. Is it beautiful? Of course it is. Is it more than just a little pervy…? Probably.
The era’s counter-culture press specialised in deliberately disturbing imagery. That was its intention. To confront staid and outdated morality with a provocative arsenal of contentious shock-graphics. Sex was confrontational. Under-age sex even more so. The designers of the Blind Faith sleeve were merely using the same technique to draw attention to their product. Brand-leading magazine ‘Oz’ was pilloried at the Old Bailey in a high-profile prosecution not so much for its use of explicit collages, but because there were ‘minors’ involved. The ‘Oz’ editors were championed as martyrs of the anti-censorship wars, John Lennon was part of their vaudeville street-support squad. And they got off on appeal. But flicking through those pages now, it’s easy to see that there’s stuff there that wouldn’t survive the hyper-tuned moral climate of today’s supposedly more liberal censorship. In mitigation, the underground press saw itself as part of the liberation-movement upsetting the prim certainties of the times. Before anyone else did, it was championing Gay Rights, ‘Green’ issues, anti-Racism, Gender Equality and recreational drug-use. ‘International Times (IT)’ even published an interview with a spokesman for PIE – ‘Paedophile Information Exchange’, tasking one of its hippie scribes with checking out its claim to be the next ‘forbidden’ and socially-excluded love. The unfortunate journalist dutifully transcribed the full spiel, about how child-love was a perfectly acceptable part of classical civilisations, how Greece and Rome saw nothing strange about it, how Shakespeare wrote about it in ‘Romeo & Juliet’, while non-Western cultures still conform to different definitions of where to peg the ‘age of consent’. The hippie scribe was wisely unconvinced…

‘I WANT CANDY…’

Of course, things were different then. Well, they weren’t – surely it can never have been right to take advantage of naivety and gullibility, but it seemed to be different. In the time-space following the widespread availability of the birth-control pill, and before the AIDS explosion happened, when heavy-Rock dinosaurs lumbered the globe, the groupie ‘Overnight Angels’ came as an integral part of the life-style package. And hey, you can’t always check out their ID’s to find out if they’re fifteen years old, you know how girls are – with their make-up they look older, don’t they? And yeah – the hint of jailbait does make it that bit more exciting. Same with Jonathan King. With him, there was never any inference that force was involved. It wasn’t necessary. Or that the relationships he was imprisoned for were anything other than consensual. He used gifts and inducements – often as low-cost as singles. Yet his victims came back for more. The tacky glamour of TV-fame, or his close proximity to glittery Bubblepop stars, was enough to make even the most greasily repellent record industry apparatchiks a sexually viable proposition. With his stylised sneer and irritating speech mannerisms, King could casually mention how he’d renamed Genesis and produced their first single “The Silent Sun”, or how he’d signed 10cc to his own UK Records label. When you’re young and stuck in suburbia where nothing ever happens, to be seen with a celebrity, to ride the chauffeured limo together, to stay over at the swish hotel – that’s worth the trade-off in grubby blow-jobs. Anyway, the sleazy Rock sub-world is meant to be decadent, androgynous, and deviant, isn’t it? It’s only now – sometimes decades later, with the advent of the compensation victim-culture, that the former sexual partners of one-time Pop personalities learn to blame their recovered-memories of abuse for all the subsequent failures of their lives. And perhaps it was. Of course, none of this is intended to excuse or justify what happened, because it isn’t. The essential inequality of power was the same, but it’s not difficult to see how it might have seemed different then, when the media, and people working within it, were less informed and sensitivities were less highly-attuned to abuse than they are now. When the wide-spread extent and long-term legacy of damage were less well-understood.
Jonathan King also had some claim to have ignited the career of the Bay City Rollers by pointing the unlikely quintet in the direction of “Keep On Dancing” – an overlooked American single by the Gentrys, a cover of which provided them with their first hit. He even sang backing vocals on the record. The Bay City Rollers were probably the most atrociously inept group in the history of pop – at least until the advent of Boyzone, but they nevertheless provide a random connection involving pretty much every element of this sad farrago. Beneath the Roller’s gauche, clean-cut milk-&-cookies image, rumours were circulating pretty much from the start, of certain band-members soliciting under-age youths for orgiastic parties. Until, after the band imploded – and within months of Gary Glitter’s release from prison after serving two months for possessing hard-core child pornography, drummer Derek Longmuir was pleading guilty to three charges of indecency involving downloaded Internet child-porn. He was found to have a large stash of videos, magazines and some six-thousand computer images, as well as a slim fifteen-year-old Portuguese boy staying with him. While, in the corrupt opportunistic tradition of Pop management – as they say, it was deja-vu all over again, the band’s some-time manager Tam Patton was also convicted in 1982 of ‘acts of gross indecency’ with underage teenage boys – what the net terms ‘twinks’. He served one year of a three year prison term. More recently he was re-arrested on child sex charges in January 2003, but was cleared of allegations. In a related universe, former group-member Ian Mitchell starred in a porn movie. Scandal-scarred and morally-muddled, the group briefly attempted to reform and tour in 1992 but mercifully an unemployed music fan stole their guitars and hid them in a derelict building. He later admitted his enlightened intention was to ‘save the world from the Bay City Rollers’.
Malcolm McLaren took careful note of the Bay City Rollers’ arc of juvie hits, and claims to have fabricated the Sex Pistols as a kind of dark reflection of their appeal. With his anarcho-Situationist roots he knew all there was to know about the power of agitational-propaganda as a counter-culture weapon against social complacency. Looking back at the publicity generated by the ‘Oz’ farrago, he provoked interviewers with ideas of launching his own ‘Chicken Run’ magazine, slang for underage models. He craftily steered clear of actually doing it. Instead he assembled Bow Wow Wow by putting lead singer Annabelle Lwin together with former members of Adam And The Ants. She’d come to England from Burma, and when McLaren discovered her, she was working in a dry cleaners. She was fourteen, and had the look he wanted. The correct sex-tourist Asian cool. For the band’s album-cover Malcolm contrived a photo-recreation of Manet’s painting ‘Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe’. It was taken when Annabelle was fifteen and – as on the 1863 canvas, she’s portrayed naked. McLaren was smart. He knew what he was doing. Manet’s original painting had caused an uproar of salon controversy. Now, he argued, he was not perpetrating juvie-porn, he was playing cultural-games, knowingly replicating great art. Attack Bow Wow Wow, you’re attacking Manet. A postmodern irony made all the more delicious when Annabel’s mother brought charges against him for exploiting a minor. But is it beautiful? Of course it is. Is it more than just a little pervy…? Most likely.
Malcolm McLaren knows how to play the game, he creates outrage, but stays just the right side of the line when the legal shrapnel starts to fly. Others were less smart, or less fortunate. More devious, more careless, or more evil. They paid with their careers. Without venturing too far into the legal morass that is Michael Jackson we’ll stop short by asking if the world media and justice system would have been quite so understanding if the ‘Prince Of Pop’ had been just the shifty guy from a council flat in Huddersfield and not a billionaire Rock god? Same maybe, for Pete Townshend’s brush with downloading notoriety. In our own more tolerant more understanding times we’re no longer, thankfully, permitted to vilify any religious, racial, or sexual minority. Even those who play S&M games sue, and win damages from the red-tops for invasion of privacy, rather than hiding from scorn, ridicule and prosecution. But society, and the media, nevertheless needs its hate-figures. And there aren’t enough serial killers to go around. So the predatory paedophile threat, amplified by their internet connectivity, has been inflated to fill the void. And who can reasonably argue in their favour?
There’s more. The problem is, there’s much much more. This extended exercise in muck-raking and gratuitous sleeze-dredging is – hopefully, something more than just that. Henry Kissinger called power the world’s greatest aphrodisiac. In Pop, deliberately aimed at youth, that power is held by the contrived anti-glamour of the band on stage, in the videos and on the net. And by those pulling their career strings. There are always those who are going to take advantage of whatever opportunities are there for the taking. And there will always be those who deliberately manipulate themselves into positions best suited to exploit those opportunities. Because a few high-profile offenders have been named and shamed doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Not Everyone’s Gone To The Moon.

FEATURE BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

BEWARE THE 

GOLDEN CRAZIES

(FOR STEVE SNEYD, WHO 

WAS SOMETIMES THERE)

Dialogue:-

‘What colour are his eyes?’

‘I dunno, he’s always wearin’ shades’

‘Is he tall?’

‘Well, I gotta look up’

‘Yeah, well I hear he’s B-A-D!’

‘He’s good-bad, but he’s not evil’

(‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’ by

Shangri-La’s / George ‘Shadow’ Morton

Copyright ‘Red Bird Records’ 1964

Beware the Golden Crazies
who quit their day jobs and lived to regret it,
who haunt M1 Services poring over juke-boxes searching
for their own name,
who sleep in the back of rusted Ford Transits falling behind

          on H.P. for Gibsons & Fender Strats, infused by
          thefted Chuck Berry runs and amphetamines...

Beware the Golden Crazies
the self-immolators of memory,
blazing airships consuming the night,
metallic dandelion-seeds spiralling down across the sky,
two-tone siren horsemen howling,
wading through elfin-pools of piss and tin-cans cranked up
high on electric decibels,
eyes growing like huge balloons
floating out of leprous faces upwards into the sky
above the office-bound clerk interiors-shrieking moon-scratching
          at sky-lights watching through thumbnail slits for
          spluttering galaxies and balloon-eyes hovering in
          lecherous carrion formations,
          beckoning...

Beware the Golden Crazies
coming at you with murderous intent
across headphones, treble-drenched transistors,
sound-systems, music centres, walkmans, thru walls & floors
and night air
lubricating cajoling silences with snatches of breath
and arteries spider-dripping sweat across billowing Bop-straining
          saxophone neck-muscles foreskin-knotted and folded
          cheeks-inflated to precarious aural limits of sound-tolerance,
          sticky-fingered Dayglo orange claw-toothed spirals
          spittle-gleaming, fret-crawling tarantula’s
          of pure noise...

Beware the Golden Crazies
who grew their hair a little longer,
who wore pointed-toe shoes with buckles,
who switched from purple hearts to acid to animal nitrate to E,
who arrive in Leeds at 3am when the rain has abated and the
          night is star-shocked clear, and are shot down in
          ritual flames disintegrating across the dance-floor in
          ecstatic chaos, crouching among the dust & battered
          cigarette-packs & condoms beneath ancient monitors
          programmed in at each footstep & each vowel of
          disjointed conversation...

Beware the Golden Crazies
who died before they got old
like the last Mod in ‘Quadrophenia’,
who went smashed blocked over the sky to see beyond endless
          bad gigs, good gigs, gigs of terminal monotony
          and transcendental magnificence,
          gigs in Student Union Halls where
          you watch through plate-glass and
          gesticulating Bouncers while bands stagger
          through barriers of paint-peeling amps
          sniffing out functioning mikes,
          and those who are still waiting
          with Rock ‘n’ Roll half a century strong...

Hail dem Golden Crazies
dem groove-talking jive-dancing crazies,
dem tribal dancing electric crazies,
dem scaling chordal chains of riffs towards high-ceilings
beyond faded woodwork beams sound-vibrating
          beyond slates & telegraph power-lines & ozone
          epidermis-layered with soot & chemical smog pollution
          and out into planet-roll silences
          of Rock ‘n’ Roll vinyl forevers,
tactile as sleeve-designs intricate with coffee rings,
eternal as one breath in a lifetime,
one ejaculation in a never-ending all-night stand...


Published in:-
‘SLOW DANCER no.7’ (UK - December 1980)
‘BOX OF RAIN no.13’ (UK - March 1984)
‘THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT: POETRY NOW ANTHOLOGY’
in Hard & Softback (UK - October 1995)
‘BAKER STREET IRREGULARS: MINOTAUR no.33 - Vol.5 No.3’
(USA - July 1999)
Also on Cassette:-
‘SLITS IN AEROSOL GREEN’ (January 1981)
‘S4 - SUPER COMPILATION’ C60 (July 1981)
‘NEW SYSTEMS : WORKING MEN’S TAPES’ (December 1981)

'BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS'

- EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY -

WORLD ONE:

THE TIME-MARSHES OF

PACANTIC

CHAPTER ONE: 

A PRESCIENCE, A MADNESS, 

AND THE MACHINE RELICS MINE

Weird Scenes inside the Relics Mine,

in which a seemingly accidental escape is 

engineered, resulting in the discovery of 

strange and unexpected worlds beyond

THIS HASN’T HAPPENED YET. BUT IT WILL...
A door opens. It lets two men into a large vault illuminated by a single dusty oriel set high in the wall. The outer periphery of the room is cluttered with the tools of alchemistic research, the hermetic, geomantic and cybernetic arts. They form a confusion of astrolobae, cucurbics, thaumaturgical artefacts, retorts, a caged lizard, an orrery, a crystal hemisphere, a monstrously deformed skull that may or may not have once been human, screens and keyboards, thuribles, mortars, amputated organs suspended in coloured chemicals, row upon row of phials, philtres, and bottles of apothecaries’ lushly pigmented liquid.
At the centre of the vault the floor opens out into a shallow well sunk into deepest blackness. “Wait here” instructs the Elector of Luna. He disappears into a branching network of frayed cables and twisting tubing. Through a distorting barrier of shaped glass and wiring he can be seen throwing a series of onyx-handled switches and depressing control keys to answering clicks as relays trip deep within unseen power sources. Movement is the crick-cricking of small feet far above him. Spindly bodies on cold legs, a half-life of multi-jointed rods keening in the gloom. Then the two men stand together again. “Watch the blackness. There. At its centre.” Taad does as instructed. It seems the blackness of the well is darker than before, connected to unseen points about the vault by slender traceries of lancing ebon, as if the last particles of colour and warmth are draining from the great crucible.
A chill of disquiet. A superstitious unease whispering that he’s in the presence of a proscribed and blasphemous science. Yet at the same time he’s drawn to the squirming half-shapes forming and condensing before him. A sprinkling of diamond-hard points of light against a velvet night. Then a shimmering tissue of mist, silvery, faery-like, gradually vortexing out from the centre of a void that is now richly three-dimensional, filling the chamber with insubstantial, but mesmeric images. The vapour contrails reach a limit of expansion, defining itself as a large lozenge that gradually assumes shifting concentrations and vortices of independent centres, each assuming its own character. It is impossible to look away.
“This,” announces the Elector of Luna, “is the Cluster. At its centre - Earth, Tellus itself.” An orb solidifying, as if sculpted from ice. Now becoming a mottled green sphere flecked with dirt-brown merging into incinerated areas of ash-grey. He can crudely identify the rough geographies, animated by fine outlines of raw light, as the planet’s tripartite divisions. The ethereal Pacantic territories of the Nine Blind Waterlords. The encircling belt of the Deadland. And the massive sprawling Spirit Domain with the towers of Ashiri at its centre. The longer he stares the more detail separates out, as if his act of concentration is causing the artificially projected ideoplast to clarify into finer focus.
“The planets.” A triangulation of phantom apparitions, a spin of crystalline spheres in fixed positions about the eidolon of Tellus, each one less than a hundred-thousand k from each of its companions, all of them enclosed within the same enveloping lozenge of air. The fish-eye centre of the fattened disc faces the sun that neither of them has ever seen. There’s Luna, silver-green with sparse cities and huge emptiness. Ochre Mars, a world the red of old blood, fretted with its pattern of canals. And metallic blue Venus divided by its equatorial magma flame-belts. Between the worlds run cascading swirls and currents of wind, the hazardous riptide set up by the conflicting gravities that plague Skyship traffic. And around the rim of the gaseous lens are the minor worlds - Deimos, Ceres, Pallas, Phobos, Juno, and a wealth of other private estates, reserves, and uninhabited planetoids far from the main routes of commerce and culture. Everything blurred by the feathery scum of Sky-Islands. Originally drifts of micro-organisms caught up in gravity null-pockets, billions of micro-plankton netting themselves together into web-like biomasess, they’d multiplied and spread, extending down into planetary skies trailing weed and insect accumulations like vast amorphous aerial continents.
They can see it all.
“Has it ever occurred to you that all this might not be a natural phenomenon...?” says the Elector of Luna.

--- 2 ---

THIS IS HAPPENING NOW...
As he steps through the iris he’s thinking of the burial in the sky... and he’s thinking of Mareeh.
At the heart of Leviathan is stillness and a cold that is, at least in part, supernatural. And beyond its curved outer shell the Drhazilsk still spirals in near-null gravity, back into flux. War Chao removes his helm, hunches it precisely beneath his arm. His uniform pressed sweat-damp against his skin despite the cold, against the thousand small laceration scars on his abdomen. There are screens that are also spheres set into organically moulded walls, banks of them in frozen tides of foam. They’re flecked with the colours of dream and nightmare, swirls of cloud vortex, butterflies, circuit diagrams, images of torture, snowflake crystals, neural patterns, mathematical symbols, Tellurian, Marsian and Venerian topographies, city street grids. A woman whose memory has been altered, sitting in the Nonogon of Worlds. Two men connected by an ankle-ligature deep in a Penal Colony Machine Relics Mine.
The embalmed figure was shoved from the runnels of the Command Platform’s Docking Bay with canvas cracking, hawsers straining, and the dynamos low burr thrumming up through the floor. He’ll be drifting now into an ocean of air that goes on forever, more fathoms deep than Chao can imagine, encompassing all the planets, islands and moons that lie between him and Mareeh. The simplicity of the burial ritual, the continuity and the eternal renewal it represents, comforts him now, when he most needs such reassurance. Insurrectionists will die for this outrage. Of course. Retribution must be a precise science. Or it is nothing. And yet, and yet...
The spheres are shimmering, refocusing as if a series of lenses are slotting into place, a multi-image forming, faces superimposing one upon the other. ‘Something disturbing’ she’d said. ‘Some vague foreboding, tremors of unprecedented fear, a threatening indeterminacy’ that’s rippling through the thousand-cortex complex of the Ashirian Omphalos like panic through a crowd. She’d known it was coming, she’d been there in the trackless vaults beneath the city milking its terminals, using his authority to penetrate deep-zones few had access to - and even fewer knew how to interpret. Using techniques he could hardly guess at to pick up on their formless terror, tuning and retuning through their incomprehensible dialogues.
And what she’d intuited, he was now to be informed. And the actions he must take to counter their unease.
The Drhazilsk will soon be slow-motion cartwheeling through the fringe of filamentine tendrils, the spores and helium bladders of the Sky-Islands, gradually becoming enmeshed, movement arresting imperceptibly until there’ll be no movement but the crawling, slithering, scrattling and writhing of insects, grazing aero-krill, and other vile organisms, and he’ll cease to be distinguishable from the chlorophyll green. Then there’ll be little to differentiate between human flesh and plant flesh.
But for Chao, “the planned break-out is about to begin...” He extracts the fist-sized sphere that slides smoothly from the screen-mass. Its touch is chill.

--- 3 ---

WHILE THESE THINGS HAPPEN SIMULTANEOUSLY...
First impression, a pulse.
Nothing more.
Next impression, worms of awareness quivering up through shock, and that pulse of soft warm pain. Pain tells you you’re still alive. But fear says don’t move lest the nightmare begin again. So you pause even breathing for as long as you can. Afraid to disturb the equilibrium, as memories storm at you. An explosion kilometres deep beneath the earth. Sharper more concussive than thunder. No warning. No sound preceding the blast. No premonition of impending disaster. Just, one moment working the face. Then waves of collapse corrugating the ceiling. Tides of acid dust skewing you sideways, sprawling winded, eyes clammed shut, awaiting that final roof-fall that must slam you through the floor. But instead... noise ebbs, its wake receding.
Now, you’re here. Raising one eyelid a cautious crack. Blackness. Dust grimes your hair, plugs your nostrils, lines your mouth. Sweat patterns it to your forehead and exposed areas of skin. Shaken, and crumpled. You smell bad. And all the while there’s that pulse of soft warm pain ticking from the restraining ligature. Awkwardly buckled, and bleeding, gouging a blood-blue welt into your ankle. The semi-organic ligature flexing like a decapitated snake. It’s a bad situation. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get worse. And the numb calm is too still, too perfect to hazard with movement. Yet.
Although, after infinite delay, the discomfort outweighs the lure to inaction. Anticipation saps courage. Don’t think. No more procrastination. This is it. He applies pressure to his ankle, wincing. Careful. Heaves up. Gets as far as a kneeling position, then something in his knee snaps, and he goes down again, inhaling dust-particles. But on the second try he slouches up, bear-like, supported by the wall. And nothing implodes.
A dropped globe gutters. He scoops it up, nurses the trapped bioluminosity until its bronze glare washes darkness back. Walls are bewilderingly complex, their ill-defined shapes forming through a slow haze of drizzling silt. The usual stratification of components impacted into each other, solid veins of silver wiring, wedges of black printed circuits, lattices of raw filaments and webs of microcircuitry. The regular carbons and alloys flaking with verdigris, congealed and fused, running together like melting flesh around skeletons of hair-fine corrupting aluminium. He can taste and smell the persistent pungency of partly fossilised plastics and dust-dry silicons mixed in with the toxic fumes of acids and rotting solvents.
Only now a newly revealed face created by the roof-fall, stretches up vertigo-high, obsessively reticulated, until darkness swallows it.
He tugs nervously at the metre-long ankle-connection to Ansor A-Hylca. “Hey, Dung-head, move.” He’s often wished him dead. But what if he’s now siamesed to a corpse? But no, the older man rouses.
“Are you alright? How do you feel?” “I feel dead. Thank you for asking. Help me up anyway.”
For the moment they’re alone, the rest of the labour squad either killed or bolted in terror. “So what happened?” Taad’s breath is foul, his mouth coated with a fine dry acid dust. He’s breathing strangely. His voice pitched at little over a whisper. Even that sounds blasphemous.
“I’d have thought that much was obvious. Even to a fumblewit.” A-Hylca slumps to his feet, shaking his head irritably. The movement dislodges swirling eddies of carbon dust from the ruptured ceiling. Taad ducks reflexively as it sprays him. “Perhaps we should find out more, hmmm?” With no trace of indecision he shuffles forward, the ligature forcing Taad to hobble more reluctantly alongside.
The Machine Relics mineshaft is roughly hewn and cramped. Its air is thin and dry. But now it has been abruptly extended where - seconds before, they’d been working the face, excavating a rich new seam of dead circuits. The opening breached by their tools, and enlarged by the roof-fall, leads into unnatural emptiness. Taad forces himself through, feet pacing loose grit, senses alert to every shift of nuance, the stink of decay, the taint of metal corrosion. He raises the dark-dispeller so its luminance leaks away, his eyes adjusting to relentless twilight. The newly opened grotto is vast, constructed of ferrocrete tiers supported by rigidly functional pillars. It stretches away in a monotonous repetition of arches and rippling concrete for as far as he can see, broken by squatting slabs of rusting vehicles, shallow lakes of trapped condensation and patches of white sunless weed growing in tangled forests knee high.
“I don’t like this place. It carries the stink of a tomb. We must go back.” But Taad makes no move to return to the mine complex. “The Lhyrill will be here soon anyway, hunting our corpses.”
He glances sideways at A-Hylca. Catches impressions of frailty and rapid bird-like movements in the glow. The light emphasises every line of a fleshless face, turning short white hair - close-clipped to the skull, to ochre. But there are other qualities there too. Fierce intelligence. A bias to scrutiny and reason. A sharpness of perception now being applied to this new, unexpected environment. “Sure, they’ll come,” he snaps abruptly, “but they won’t find us!” A-Hylca lunges forward, the snaking ligature wrenching Taad ludicrously in his wake, light swaying, its patterns spasming. Despite their grotesquely impeded gait, and Taad’s pronounced limp, they cross to the first line of pillars in a moment, and begin circling the metal husk of an antique powered vehicle. There’s a strident yell from somewhere behind them, Taad chances a glance over his shoulder. The first of the Lhyrill are struggling awkwardly through the opening, followed by a second and a third. A confusion of voices. A ring of black armour. An impression of dark metal-headed soldiers fanning out behind them.
Taad’s instinct is to obey. To freeze. But A-Hylca’s already moving off rapidly up an inclined ramp towards the next tier, Taad scuffing furiously after him, hobbling and lurching, skidding wildly on slime and moss. They splash through a wide effluence-way of fetid water, pausing on the edge of a new plateau even more densely populated with cars.
“Why... run?”, grabbing huge gulps of laboured breath. “We can’t... escape. Wait, or they’ll kill us for sure.”
“No. We’ll get through this, and when we come out the other side, you’re going to be very grateful to me.”
“I’m going to be grateful to you?”, an incredulous bellow. “If we get out of this alive, I’ll probably kill you.”
A high-pitched scream. A fletched handbow dart impacts above their heads in a fine spray of white powder and sharp splinters of stone. “It’s already too late” instructs A-Hylca evenly. “Move.”
And Taad is dragged, weaving from cover to cover, defensively crouching, through a dense maze of decaying vehicles. The immediate fear of the Lhyrills’ cold steel temporarily strangling his terror of the catacombs. The labyrinth seems limitless. They run blind, the sound of pursuit goading them. Temples pounding, breath fast and painful at his throat, legs nailed with lead from months of prison rigour.
Then A-Hylca is brought up sharp, eyes wide, racing the limits of visibility. Taad slouches against the cold metal of a car, sucking clean air gratefully. They’ve reached cul-de-sac. Only a sheer wall scabbed brown with lichen ahead of them. Realisation comes slow. Taad’s eyes whip back the way they’ve come, over the curved roofs of cars in neat rows. The incline to the next tier, the ramp their desperate flight has missed, now cut off by an implacable line of encircling Lhyrill. Eight, maybe ten of them. A-Hylca slumps visibly, all energy gone.
“Do I thank you now? I don’t understand. Where was there to run to?”
“You’ve got senses? Use them. Weed grows here. There’s movement in the air. Feel it? - that’s coming from somewhere outside. There’s a way out. To the surface. A way to escape the Penal Colony. Reason says there has to be. Only now it’s too late.”
The logic digests slowly. The hunters are still a good way off, but their semi-circle is complete and closing relentlessly. The fluctuating halo of their dark-dispellers, faces showing as white ovals, and the flash of plasteel cut sharply onto night. He looks down. A glass insert in the body of the vehicle. A window, or windshield. Dark. So he finds himself studying his own reflection. The face of a stout middle-aged man of unprepossessing appearance. Beard, and long untidy strands of greasy hair in a tonsure, the mark of an inoffensive craftsman or farmer. Rotund, loose-limbed, big scarred hands callused and blistered. Is this the image of the rebel documented in the charges laid against him? Is this the insurrectionist in the charges that led to incarceration?
A sneer of bitter amusement. Then his head comes up angrily. No. The Lhyrill mustn’t win. They’re drawn to the beacon of his light, so Taad swings it round his head, releasing it in a comet-tail, bouncing and caroming across vehicle roofs before flaring down into damp weedbeds. It dims instantly, but continues glimmering for long moments. The light no longer betrays their position, but they’re in darkness, on hands and knees now. Crawling, towing A-Hylca behind him.
The ring tightens as it closes. They must break that ring. A-Hylca catches Taad’s intention and follows stealthily, muffling sound as best he can. Ahead, as they circle the vehicles, the Lhyrill move more cautiously, sensing activity. Now they’re more clearly visible, conscientiously polished breastplates, oxygen tubes, and visored helmets catch globelight and fling it back in violent chromatic explosions. Some prime handbows, barbed metal darts strung on taut wire, others couch ornate razor-edged Prayerblades. Taad selects a target, a break-out point. Slinks furtively to meet him. In the shelter of rusting hulks tall white weed turns to rotting slime which soaks through his coarse hose at the knee, its disturbed aroma rich and fecund.
Desperation settles into ice-sharp logic. The two escapees move as one. Their objective now so close they can hear the squelch of his heels as the hunter paces, recognising the lazy gait, the fidgety movement. Cumaryll. A Deimosian over-fond of ruby wine. If they move fast they can club him down and escape encirclement, reach the gradient to the next terrace, lose pursuit in its vastness. A-Hylca slithers to one side of the aisle, Taad the other, the half-flesh connecting them concealed by unhealthy weed.
Cumaryll closes. Moving between them. They hear the amplified rasp of his cramped breath. Not yet, not yet. Come on. A little further. Now. Now. Now. At the same moment the ligature jerks up, snagging viciously with the shock of physical impact. The man lurches and falls, but for once his co-ordination is impeccable. He rolls sideways, already alert, serrated blade drawn and angling. Taad leaps heavily, and misses, sprawling in vile sludge, grabbing at flailing plasteel-clad limbs in dumb ballet. A-Hylca fares better, he’s got the weapon arm prised back. They tumble together in absurd shadow combat, grunting, thrashing, and cursing. Taad slams his knee up hard into unprotected groin, hears the ragged exhalation of breath as the Lhyrill doubles up. A-Hylca pinions the muddied Prayerblade, gnawing at the exposed wrist with his teeth as Cumaryll wrestles, then A-Hylca begins shifting the weapon gradually back to his own advantage. Their dual assault is gaining, but it’s taking too long, months of imprisonment eat their muscles.
There’s movement and confused yelling in the grotto beyond.
The trapped man bucks in writhing contortions, whimpering now as A-Hylca forces the blade in beneath the fanged muzzle of his helmet. A sudden hiss, severed aerator oxy-tubes wheeze and fish-tail frantically. Oesophagus. Then there’s an obscene gurgling sound as the jugular opens. Aorta. Crimson blood pulsing and spouting until spasms cease, the head sagging to a dead weight, and A-Hylca’s hands are welded to a sticky-warm hilt. Tubes still exhale limply, dribbling blood and saliva. The leaking life is crimson. Domain crimson.
“Is he...?” “Dead? Yes, very.”
But it’s too late. The aisle fills with Lhyrill, handbows levelling.
Taad’s stomach drops a long long way and he waits, cringing, throat dry.
And impression piles on impression in bewildering rapidity. There’s a nerveless shriek. Taad takes it for A-Hylca, and looks up with dread expectation. But sees a creature uncoiling from the solid wall, the Lhyrill transfixed in horror by its sudden appearance. At first it seems to be a snake, monstrous head swimming and darting above the roofs of collapsing autos, impenetrable hooded eyes like wells of perfect blackness, forked tongue flick-flickering faster than the eye can trace, scales gleaming with blue mother-of-pearl sheen. Then there are webbed feet, stubby by comparison, but each one taller than a man, ending in razor-sharp scimitar claws. The monster slithers from the wall, head poised, sampling alien scents in the air before striking, questing for prey.
The first of the Lhyrill breaks. Scurries screaming back for the excavations, his howl shattering their spell of frozen horror. A few badly aimed quarrels leap at the demon as they retreat in a disorderly rabble, pushing and gouging past each other in their haste to escape. Taad lies breathlessly over the bloodied corpse, he can only watch. The giant lizard moves in jerky lunges, unblinking eyes absorbing all but reflecting nothing.
A foot arches above them. Now it’s descending. Talons glisten with moisture. Each overlapping scale clearly delineated. And it’s coming down to crush them. His vocal chords freeze, incapable of sound, his brain is numb. The foot comes down. Makes contact... And goes through him. Is this death? The amphibian foot can be seen translucently through his stomach, but there’s no blood, and no pain. Taad holds a hand before his face, perplexed.
A-Hylca scrambles slowly to his feet as the spectral limb retracts. Tugs the ligature to activate his stupefied companion. And they lurch unsteadily up the aisle towards the incline. The Lhyrill are nowhere to be seen, while the giant lizard recedes up the catacomb oblivious to human activity, its gargantuan tail scything insubstantially through cars, pillars, and solid ferrocrete structures.
The fugitives scrabble up the ramp to the next tier of vaulted cathedral vastness, where dissolving verticals of ochre light shaft down from an undetectable source. They pause to grab lungfulls of air, supporting each other’s sagging bodies, then move on more slowly. The vegetation grows more densely here, pale contorted things tall and unnatural bristling with bayonet leaves. As they pass, something like dandelion gives off plumes of gossamer seeds that hang on the air and on their prison fatigue uniforms. Taad’s grizzled beard quivers with droplets of sweat. He moves automatically, following A-Hylca’s impatient guidance through the cloying growths, across the grotto of dead machines and up the final terrace.
Ahead the route forks, one path winding higher to yet more identical levels of ferrocrete, the other leading directly to an austere gateway, a monolithic arch framing an oblong slab of blood-red sky. It has to be a mirage - like the lizard. But they shamble towards it anyway, drawn hypnotically, until they stand on the threshold and look out across the two worlds beyond....

CHAPTER TWO: 

THE TWO WORLDS 

BENEATH A MARS RED SKY

Being about Grenaman Taad and Ansor A-Hylca

finding themselves lost in unanticipated landscapes

beneath a foreign planet

A memory-etching sight. Mars too clear and too glaringly bright to be natural. Its immense dome of planetrise eclipsing half the sky. But through narrowing eyes shapes etch themselves against the too-perfect brilliance beneath it. There, wedges of shadow slowly emerge, growing architectural proportion and, later, detail. Taad and A-Hylca look out over a deserted city of black buildings in solid squares, gradually melting into decay. There are punctuations of blind glassless windows and crawls of parasitic ivy spidering charred fascias. There are thick infestations of tall grass, moonweed, closed buttercups, and flowering magenta vines growing over piles of rough-edged rubble, softening and rounding all abrasive angles. Soon, Taad senses, the city will be gone, masked in swarming green terrain and forgotten.
The second world is superimposed over the first. A place of primeval starkness, a rich aroma to its air. A slope of ferns and low undeveloped trees with large flat leaves - no flowers, running down to a shingle ocean shore. The sluggish water, glinting faintly, extends around and through the buildings. The two scenes have no point of contact, neither dominates the other, they merely co-exist in the same space. Taad sees jewelled dragonflies hovering over unsophisticated jungle, shoals of multi-coloured lizards playing in the shallows or basking along the stony perimeter of grey-green water. He gets an impression of unhealthy humidity, but whether that’s real, or merely implied he’s not sure. The murky sea level is several metres over his head, he can see the waves glimmering. Mars-light prisming like planished copper in silvers and ruby above him.
Taad exhales sharply, besieged by superstitious fear. Washes a big grimy hand over uncomprehending eyes. “I don’t understand. It’s not possible. We should be underground. We should go back.” The statement absolves him from the need to find reason or explanation.
“It’s as well the Lhyrill are as stupid.”
Taad backs off into the shadow of the arch, quasi-flesh springing taut between them. While A-Hylca holds his ground, benign smile solidifying into inflexibility. Taad answers the challenge, his urgency fuelled by a growing panic beating inside his ribcage with predatory wings. “I don’t like open spaces. Open skies.”
“So what do you dream of, Taad? Tunnels. Caves. Corridors. Dark places in which to hide? The sky goes on forever and you prefer to grovel underground?” A-Hylca speaks fast in an unbroken flow of persuasion. “You know the Penal Colony is built on an inlet of the Marshes of Time? You know that it is connected to the Deadland, and - through it, back to the Domain, by a slender peninsula of normalcy? Well, now - finally, the excavations have extended out beneath the Marshes. An accident. A miscalculation on their part from which we will benefit.”
Realisation dawns gradually. “So all this stuff isn’t real?”
“Oh, it’s real enough. Just that the city is merely 48,000 years old. From shortly after what they call the Supernatural Wars. While the primeval landscape is considerably older, several hundred millions I’d guess. Hence it’s less strong and can’t influence us as directly. But it’s real enough. The lizard that scared off the Lhyrill was part of this landscape too, so it’s real, only less real than the autodrome we first emerged into, or this city. Or the machine relics we grubbed for.”
Earlier conversations regurgitate into Taad’s head, about the enchanted Marshes that form the Prison’s ultimate escape barrier. A constant meshing of past ages washing into and over one another. A temporal phantasmagoria that either drives escapees mad, or loses them hopelessly in an endlessly refocusing maze of time. But it’s one thing to be half-listening as someone tells scare-tales of the Marshes, another thing to become part of them. They were prisoners working deep underground. Then suddenly they’ve blustered into a ‘now’ when the rise and fall of geological stratum dictates they are at the surface. And a contradictory ‘now’ in which they are several metres beneath a prehistoric sea. “So we’re as good as dead.” The words form slowly and carefully so as not to betray his panicky fear.
A-Hylca seizes the negative tone as his own triumph. “Not necessarily, Taad.” A voice contrastingly light, playful, conversational. More suited to debating theological minutiae in the cool academic cloisters of Calyx University. “Beyond these Marshes we have friends. We have contacts in the city of Baal-Shadaam. From there we can ship out to Selene, or to the Ceresian Estates. There we have allies”.
“I’ve no friends there. Or anywhere”.
“You were imprisoned by the Domain? Ergo we are allies. We met in the Penal Colony. You probably know me only by my reputation as a leading dissident. An important insurrectionist against the Last Empire and the Wyzeird who holds it in thrall.”
Taad nods, baffled.
“For me, Taad, modesty would be tantamount to dishonesty. For you see, I’m a scholar too. I’ve learned much, and forgotten more than you’ll ever know. A man such as I, with detailed knowledge of Geohistorical events, should be able to interpret the Time Marshes. And map his way out of them. For I use ideas as my maps. I see all this as merely a novel form of intellectual challenge”.
“So we can escape?”
“I consider it probable. Yes.” He concedes the point with carefully contrived modesty. “The application of intelligence can resolve most predicaments. And anyway, we can’t go back. We killed Cumaryll”.
“We killed Cumaryll? WE? It was YOU who killed him!”
“Well... whatever. It was unfortunate. He was stupid. A buffoon. But by no means the worst of them. The ruby wine tended to have a... shall I say - ameliorating? effect on him. But the end result is the same. He’s dead. So we can’t go back”.
Looking around, Taad becomes conscious of the sickly-rich scent of bell-like purple blooms that hang thickly on the air. The symptom of a fantastic alteration to his escapist imaginings, bringing the first inkling of hope he’s had since arriving at the excavations in chains. “I suppose someone has to come and keep you out of trouble” he mutters dourly.
A-Hylca straightens, indicating they should walk. A school of blunt ugly human-headed fish dart in a burst of incandescent colours through and around his head in graceful gyrations. Reluctantly Taad acquiesces, and the two men hobble awkwardly through the crumbling city of large empty buildings, A-Hylca offering a constant commentary. “This looks to be a region of Merique, supposed to be the lost continent destroyed in the Supernatural Wars. Now part of Pacantic, the territory of the Nine Blind Waterlords. They say men mated with the Old Ones here. Spawned god-hybrids, omnipotent entities huge and awesome.” He rolls the phrases carefully around his mouth, tasting the eloquent sarcasm of his agnosticism.
The words mean little to Taad. He’s heard most of the terms at one time or another but they impart no real meaning. He’s thinking instead of the stories he’s heard about the Marshes, of how the body adjusts internally to the transition from zone to zone by accelerating ageing - or the reverse process, by growing back to childhood, and beyond. Shedding years and bodies like lizard scales with each pace. Of how the Marshes are haunted by the shells of lost men, and the deep mires congeal with discarded human skins empty and translucent as cast-off snakeskins. What is really important about A-Hylca’s carefully measured flow of words is the strong undertone of confidence, of understanding, that they imply. He concentrates on matching his stride to the older man’s, attempting to minimise the discomfort from the connection that continually hampers their progress.
At length a subtle reorientation takes place. They emerge above the waterline to scramble up the stony shore skirting groups of basking lizards. The air is steamy moist, the lap of waves a continual ululation behind them. Taad looks back the way they’ve come to see the gaunt hulks of buildings extruded from vermilion ocean like ghostly island. Already the more distant ones are fading, the nearer ones losing definition, blurring into uniform grey masses, and as it - and Mars above it, dissolves, the primeval land becomes by contrast harder and more tactile.
They continue up the draw until the half-submerged city is gone, and they ford dense banks of cycad and fern, brittle fronds snapping in sparking showers of milky sap. The lizards frequent the beach, and there’s no sign of animal life as they reach the crest of the hill, which becomes the brink of a steep cliff looking down through endless ravines and awful chasms into a bleak red country of rock, sand, and magma. Rows of fire-mountains and flame-spouts space the horizon, their smudges of inky smoke outlined flickering orange, slurring the sky above constellations of sulphurous lava-pits. Gradually, as they follow the lip of the cliff, the smoke spreads to obscure the strange sky, darkening the landscape. Geysers and traceries of lava become the sole source of light, gushing highways of spilling flame casting their own tall shadows. Several peaks are ablaze, the ground trembles alarmingly beneath their feet. Vegetation is gone now, replaced by an aridity of dry fissured basalt sprinkled with pockets and screes of loose grit and crater depressions. A world lit only by fire.
“How can you be sure we’re heading in the right direction?” says Taad dourly. A-Hylca has grown silent. The scrunch of dead pebbles underfoot unnerves him.
“Linear distance doesn’t mean that much” the older man responds. “Directions are only relative to each Time area. Segments are set diametrically opposed to each other so that no amount of straight-line travel takes you nearer escape. It’s a maze. It’s deliberately built to baffle and confuse”.
“Built? By whom...?”
“The Waterlords” he snorts. “Do you know nothing?”
“There are more useful things to do than learning.” For a moment Taad flees back decades, retreating into warm and luminous thoughts. To Nonocastria - his extended family of the giant agricultural Warren now worlds away. Memories painful in their sweetness. But close enough to reach out and touch. Memories encased in the massive idiosyncratic collective of nine labyrinthine lucite and steel domes, each as huge and populous as a city, interconnected and shot through with aerial skyways. Nonocastria. It was already thousands of years old when he’d been born into it, and he’s as much a part of its continuity as the sky and the soil. In its tangled acres of sealed terraces he’d grown through childhood and spent an entire adult life that allowed little time for non-productive activity, as much a part of its permanently renewing continuity as the crops that link the seasons.
He breathes deep. “Work. Eating and sleeping. ‘Blade Rituals’...”
“Taad, you are mercifully untroubled by the burdens of intelligence” snipes A-Hylca. “I’d heard how tediously dull Warren-Brood are. But could never quite bring myself to believe it was true. Perhaps you could save your fascinating reminiscences for some other time...?”
Taad hardly hears the sarcasm. He’s already trapped in inescapable cycles of recall. “Warrens are complete self-contained worlds. Under direct Domain authority with exact quotas to fill. But it’s not important where the stuff goes after we harvest it. Because nothing outside the Warren is real. I don’t understand why it ended. What laws we transgressed that demanded annihilation. But they fell on us - Throndups, Drhazilsks, Gyalas. They came to Nonocastria to seal off and tear our dome apart totally. We fought back. So they hit us harder. Those who survived the Black Terror were put in chains, branded subversives, brought to stand showtrial.”
“What of the other domes?”
“What do you mean?”
“You say they sealed off your dome for annihilation. And that you fought back. But what did the people of the other eight Nonocastrian domes do to help you in your hour of need?”
“Do? They could do nothing. They had their own work to accomplish. And anyway, why should they provoke the Domain into new retaliations which they could not possibly survive? The question has no meaning.” But even as he speaks, other questions resurface. Questions of guilt and self-recrimination. By surviving he’d betrayed the thousands who’d died. There had to have been some way to intervene, some way to stop it all. To save Solleen... at least. He’d learned to hold the accusations at bay, but once begun, there’s no way to staunch the flow of images. Skyships descending through aerial Islands towards dark multi-levelled Ashiri. The protean polyglot ruling city of the Presidium set in its ancient land. The air above Ashiri black with Skyships. Endless vistas of hangars, docks, repair shops and marshalling yards alive with smoke, lights and toiling figures. A whole metropolis vaster and more populous than he’d dreamed possible, all raised on piles above the poisonous surface of the planet. “You are Earthian? Born here, on Tellus?” he prompts, attempting to derail the conversational direction.
A nod, but there’s no reply.
Taad pauses. Glances across at A-Hylca. Sees several strangers. Chimeras in studded leather and snoods. The shock is almost physical, and even as he watches there are Dust Serpents shimmying the air into contrails of distortion, snapping at the strangers who twist away from their wraith-like attackers, hands over faces to protect their eyes. Fingers become bloodied, flesh raw and glittering to the white naked bone. They scream but there’s no sound other than the rolling waves of wind. Now limbs are playfully snapped away.
Taad blinks hard, and when he opens his eyes sees only A-Hylca. “Is this the same time as the Lizard beach?”
“I’m not sure. Think we’ve crossed over and it’s even earlier.” The doubt in his voice is frightening.
There’s a fine silt of volcanic ash drifting. It is snuff-dry and faintly warm. At the same time, it’s also raining. In places the two fall separately, patches of ash stirring into lazy clouds as they walk across it, clinging to folds in their coarse worsted uniforms, or areas where rain falls clean into irrigating pools and gullies, swirling and hissing, targeted by colliding intersecting rings of fresh torrential droplets. Elsewhere the two fall together, congealing into smoky rivulets of sludge and tides of scum. The volcanic light dims.
It is night, an evil blackness. They eat up a few more muddy kilometres, hands and faces loamed with grime, bare feet soaking, warm and uncomfortable. Then light spills over a ridge and they descend through chill morning and waist-high pampas grass towards a wide sluggish river. Huge tripedal animals cluster in the shallows but amble away across the veldt as the escapees near. There’s a grove of trees with small mauve berries, and orange thickets of oblong-leafed bushes bearing barbed orchids. They rest in its shade. Taad washes as leisurely as the ligature allows in the dull water, a discoloration of mud and white volcanic dust swirling away from him as in some purification rite.
A-Hylca sits watching him critically, chin on one drawn-up knee, chewing messily on a cluster of berries. “Could you imagine a more absurdly miss-matched pair on one yoke than you and I?” he taunts. “They must have considered it a fine jest,” he shakes his head in mock disapproval. “Perhaps they intend your extra weight to compensate for my lack of it.” The barbs become more pointed as Taad does his best to bathe. When at last they sit together the older man coughs self-importantly as though signalling a change in tone. Taad over-concentrates on picking an edge of dead skin from his ankle, a slight rill of pain as he worries it away from an ooze of puss and raw flesh, the metal spine along the ligature’s core just visible through the wound.
“Never fully realised” A-Hylca begins in a more patrician manner. “These worlds are so hoary with years. And humans have been here for eternity. The planets are so layered with their remains that wherever we excavate we find traces of lost technologies and sciences.” He clears his throat theatrically. Taad prises an area of dead white skin from his ankle, the size of a coin, and considers it carefully.
“ ... and yet in the lives of worlds the whole sequence of human history is so brief.”
Taad waits. Rolls the detached skin into a tight ball between thumb and fore-finger, and flicks it in the vague direction of the river. As the silence lengthens, he offers a stimulus. “What you’re saying is that you don’t know where we are?”
“Correction, you ingrate. I don’t know where, or when we are.”
Taad emits a high-pitched keening noise and, despite his considerable bulk, is on his feet in one smooth movement, wrenching insanely at the column binding them together, tearing at it so its deep roots writhe painfully, resentfully ripping chafed and bleeding skin, deliberately using the pain to stoke his anger. “You... said... you... could... get... us... out. You lied. I was mad to listen. I should kill you!”
A-Hylca meets his accusations unflinchingly. “Would you rather still be in the Penal Colony? Worked to certain death? No-one gets out of there alive. Why do you think the Lhyrill wear masks and armour - so that they’re not offended by the stink of their prisoners? No - it’s so they don’t have to breathe the poison that passes for air down there, that’s why. Here at least we have a chance. A slender one. To escape, to fight back against vile tyranny.”
The moment passes. Taad’s murderous rage evaporating. Replaced by a great void of emptiness. “I’m no insurrectionist” he says softly. “I’m no hero. This is all a mistake, just a mistake. I’m a Farmer. I want to go home.”
“If we continue like this...” A-Hylca moistens his thin lips, “if we continue like this... it seems highly unlikely you’ll live long enough to luxuriate in the self-indulgence of your wretched homesickness.”

TO BE CONTINUED...

‘DEAR MISTER FANTASY, PLAY US A TUNE…’

Album Overview of:-

‘MR FANTASY’ by TRAFFIC

(Island IMCD264 546 496-2)

The close of 1967. ‘The Skyline Ballroom’ perched atop the main Co-op supermarket in Hull city centre. And Traffic are on stage. Pale frail Stevie Winwood stooped protectively behind the keyboards. Chris Wood off to the right blowing flute, the hulking form of Jim Capaldi behind a barrage of drums… which restricts Dave Mason to centre-stage. He’s singing “Hole In My Shoe”, and when he gets to the mid-point little-girl poem about riding on the back of a giant albatross through a crack in the clouds, he hopefully extends the microphone down into the audience so that someone can grab the opportunity-of-a-lifetime to recite it live – but there’s no takers. Eventually he retrieves the microphone and does it himself, hesitatingly, as though a little self-conscious. When the vinyl gatefold ‘Mr Fantasy’ album was originally issued in December 1967 its ten tracks did not include the time-related singles. Now, with the expanded CD version drawing in the altered track-listing of the US revision, the singles are there, making this the perfect package telling the full tale of that first Traffic phase, while constituting one of the most evocative albums of that strange adventurous era. Flip open Chris Wood’s soft-red lens-filter artwork of the band sitting in the bohemian sparsity of their rehearsal retreat in Sheepcott Farm, Aston Tirrold on the Berkshire Downs, roaring log-fire in the grate, candles, and the pierrot figure intended to represent the title character. And the stylus hits the side-one groove with honking sax buffeting into “Heaven Is In Your Mind” through stereo pulsations rippling from speaker to speaker. The lyric advocates the cod-philosophy of the George Harrison “Inner Light” school, a god of simple things, ‘water the flowers that grow at your heel… an apple is simple and real’, truth is found in these anti-materialist things, ‘capturing moments of life in a jar’ and ‘playing with children’. “Berkshire Poppies” extends the mood, set to a faltering beat, interrupted by the ignition-flare of someone lighting up – presumably a joint, and eloquent burps. A day in the city, ‘oh what a pity’, it’s a phoney over-crowded place where ‘murderers crawl after girls in the dark’. A sing-along paean to the simple-life, its drifts of random half-audible conversation suggest that other elements are also at play. Isn’t there a connection between ‘Poppies’ and narcotics, or is that to take it one step too far? “House For Everyone”, the first of three Dave Mason songs, is followed by Winwood’s stark acoustic “No Face, No Name, No Number” about his yearning to find a lover who will answer his deep spiritual needs, limned by Chris Wood’s sympathetic flute. The side closes with the 5.42-minute title track, again utilising Stevie at his most vocally pleading across an improvisationally stoned pastoral vibe. Whether the ‘Mr Fantasy’ figure is an escapist high, a heightened level of consciousness, or just dream-escape from reality, it’s free-flowing and powerfully inventive. Jim Capaldi’s “Dealer” opens side two with nimble-fingered Spanish guitar and flute, de-romanticising – but by doing so, romanticising ‘the man who feels nothing deep inside’ just as certainly as every other druggie anthem of the period by Lou Reed, Arthur Lee, or Steppenwolf. Then Dave Mason’s “Utterly Simple” recapitulates the album’s arcadian rural theme that truth is found in fairy-tales, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the back-to-nature hermit sitting in his cave, but despite the repeated assertions of simplicity there’s cluttering sitar and portentous telephone voice-over effects. “Coloured Rain” is the perfect jazz-literate antidote, an intuitively tight musical organism built around strong soulful Blues lines. After Dave Mason’s third dose of whimsy with “Hope I Never Find Me There” the album closes with a stoned jive-talk jazzy instrumental “Giving To You” with passages of wide-ranging effortlessly-fluid telepathic extemporisation periodically reined back to Chris Wood’s signature flute-phrase (‘a bouncy rhythm’ comments ‘NME’ ‘with modern-jazz overtones’). This is probably where Winwood feels most at ease. In total, ‘Mr Fantasy’ is wistfully psychedelic in that very specific English sense of the term. If it’s indefinably flawed, that’s part of it too. An aspect of its time. They were charting unpaced sound. Making up the genre as they were evolving it. Traffic’s was an accidental art. They would survive through a number of future incarnations, but they would never sound quite like this again. Produced by Jimmy Miller (who would go on to work on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Beggars Banquet’), on its first release for the pale-pink Island label the album reached no.8, the highest album chart placing Traffic would ever achieve. The expanded CD-version valuably draws in the singles and omitted ‘B’-sides too. Collecting the quintessential “Paper Sun” which clocks in at 4:10-minutes. ‘New Musical Express’, struggling to come to terms with the new music, and still a decade away from its ‘Bible of Hip’ mantle, called it a ‘humdinger’ with ‘a steady mid-tempo beat, and a tune with a strangely haunting quality’, as though it was the latest by Herman’s Hermits. It broached the chart 8th June 1967 – the week “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” made no.1. Propelled by heavy-rotation pirate radio-play it peaked at no.5 three weeks later. “Hole In My Shoe” followed into the chart 13th September, and it went higher, all the way to no.2 within a month. Its ‘B’-side, “Smiling Phases” is a close fit and powerful link to “Coloured Rain”. A third single (not included on the CD) – the title song of the likeable teen-movie ‘Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush’ made it to no.8 the second week of December, with the Beatles “Hello Goodbye” at no.1. It had actually been one of the first pieces the group worked on together, its release delayed to coincide with the movie premiere. A celluloid girl-chasing romp based on a story by Beatles-biographer Hunter Davies’, cinema-goers could watch Barry Evans and Judy Geeson, and hear music by both the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, who also contribute Dave Mason’s “Utterly Simple” to the soundtrack. Finally, the haunting “No Face, No Name, No Number” was belatedly spun off as a single, to climb no higher than no.40, making it Traffic’s last hit. They performed it with spine-tingling intensity on Alan Freeman’s short-lived all-action TV show, wearing headphones. Dave Mason hung out around the ‘Skyline’ bar, wearing soft suede boots and an embroidered Cossack jacket, talking to fans. By the time the album emerged, and just seventeen days after this gig, he’d quit the group, although he’d periodically return. The Winwood-Capaldi-Wood triumvirate were embarrassed by the whimsical “Hole In My Shoe”, buoyed up by six-year-old Francine Heimann reciting the poem (she was the stepdaughter of Island Record’s boss Chris Blackwell). Of course, the lyric was a distant relation of ‘semolina pilchards climbing up the Eiffel Tower’ or ‘skipping the light fandango, turning cartwheels ‘cross the floor’, but tipped over into lysergic-cartoon nursery rhyme buffoonery which doesn’t require much of a nudge for it be redone by ‘Young Ones’ Neil as a comedy send-up. Although the album contains other tracks almost as floridly skewed. “House For Everyone” opens with a neat clockwork wind-up device, with Winwood singing Mason’s lyric about a ‘pop-up book village with treacle roads’. The song goes on to relate a fairy-tale journey from his ‘bed made of candyfloss’ in a ‘house made of cheese’ to finally confront a choice between two doors, plain ‘truth’ or florid ‘lies’. Well, it was the close of 1967. Stevie’s first visibility had come with the Spencer Davis Group, a band that – as writer Brian Hogg points out in the insert, ‘bore his character, but not his name’. The day after he appeared on ‘Top Of The Pops’ in a check lumberjack shirt, I recall every Mod in the Hull ‘Gondola’ club wore a check lumberjack shirt. And it’s indicative that he achieved such status under the auspices of another’s name. An immensely talented musician, one of the most exceptional in an exceptional period of time, he would never feel easy with frontman status, preferring to work within a band structure. Traffic was, in theory at least, an egalitarian collective. Even later, following a highly successful arc of solo albums, in 1994 he re-teamed with Jim Capaldi to tour and record under the ‘Traffic’ brand (Chris Wood had died 12th July 1983). As a footnote, Stevie Winwood’s single “Valerie”, became a 1982 American Top Ten hit, but failed to chart in the UK until DJ Eric Prydz took a vocal sample from it, ditching the rest of the song, looped the single phrase over a dance-track, and it became no.1 for five solid weeks in 2004. The first and only time Stevie would top the charts, since his Spencer Davis Group beginnings. So much for musicianship! Back on 6th December 1967, ‘The Skyline Ballroom’ date - promoted by the College of Technology, was part of Traffic’s first national tour. Their set also included “Coloured Rain” with Chris Wood switching flute to sax, a song I wrote down as “New Day, New Dawn, New Life” which I can’t subsequently place, and a standout “Mr Fantasy”. Support was by the Victor Brox Blues Train. My ticket number was 276. Traffic would survive through a number of future incarnations, but they will never again sound quite like they do this night.

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

‘MR FANTASY’: THE RECORDING HISTORY
‘in memory of Len Tibbits / brother of Harry Tibbits / he died shuvling(?) gravel…’ (on-sleeve graffiti)
‘Paper Sun’ c/w ‘Giving To You’ (Island WIP 6002)
‘Hole In My Shoe’ c/w ‘Smiling Phases’ (Island WIP 6017)
‘Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush’ c/w ‘Coloured Rain’ (Island WIP 6025)
‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ c/w ‘(Roamin’ Thru the Gloamin’ With) 40,000 Headmen’ (Island WIP)
Original LP ‘Mr Fantasy’ (Island Mono ILP961)
Expanded CD ‘Mr Fantasy’ (IslandLC00407)

‘TWO SIDES TO EVERY ECHO...’

Book Review of:

‘MR TAMBOURINE MAN:

THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF THE BYRDS’ GENE CLARK’

by JOHN EINARSON

(Backbeat Books, April 2005 - £14.95 – ISBN0879307935)

The Byrds, ah yes – Roger McGuinn. Except no, not quite. ‘In 1965 Gene Clark was the Byrds’ writes John Einarson in this excellent rigorously detailed biography. The strongest original songs on the first three Byrds albums – the finest debut trilogy in Rock, were by Harold Eugene Clark. McGuinn seems to agree. Talking at the Leeds ‘City Varieties’ he admits how ‘blessed’ the group was to have so fine a writer aboard. But Gene’s were slow-burn songs, initially relegated to ‘B’-sides in favour of Dylan or Pete Seeger covers, because they lacked radio immediacy, revealing their beauty only through repeated plays the airwaves couldn’t afford. But “Feel A Whole Lot Better” – later peerlessly covered by the Flamin’ Groovies, and by Tom Petty, “I Knew I’d Want You”, “Set You Free This Time” and the rest, are class compositions. Coming from a thirteen-kid Catholic family with Irish and Cree Native American blood, Gene was rugged and athletic, but also intense and wired. A complex, insecure, troubled man, prone to swings in temperament that Einarson’s investigations now interpret as evidence of a bipolar condition. His sister Bonnie recalls how his music began, ‘after Gene saw Elvis, all he wanted to be was a Rock star’. During his fresher year he joined high-school band Joe Meyer & the Sharks, moving from there into the ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’ coffeehouse folk-thing with a doctored ID. By 12th August 1963 the eighteen-year-old Gene was recruited into the wholesome hit-making New Christy Minstrels alongside Barry McGuire. He cut records with them (the first called “Saturday Night”), and appeared on ‘The Andy Williams Show’. They did a special White House performance for new President Lyndon Johnson in January, but to Gene, the group’s cheerful family-friendly choreography was frustratingly ‘square’. At around the same time he heard the Beatles for the first time, on a jukebox in Norfolk, Virginia, and pumped nickels all night to hear them again. He was not only listening, but analysing their dynamics, how they did it, and why what they did worked so well. It was the catalyst he needed. He quit the Cristy’s – before he was fired and headed for LA, and fame with the Byrds. Einarson clarifies the group’s fractious internal politics in ways that my reading of Johnny Rogan’s ‘Timeless Flight’ never quite did. Jim McGuinn, Gene Clark, with David Crosby were three strong-minded creative wills tied into uneasy compromise and permanent simmering contention. With McGuinn’s icy intellect, and David Crosby as the impish meddler, all complicated by their collective envy of Gene’s writer-royalty cheques. Until, unsettled by the sudden status afforded them – as the American Beatles, Gene was the first to quit, shortly after initiating their finest-ever record, “Eight Miles High”. He was the character in David Crosby’s “Psychodrama City” tale where the Byrds got on a plane, and ‘one of my friends got off again’, Crosby adding ‘to this day I don’t know why’. The reasons included tensions and group rivalries amplified by their stratospheric celebrity. For Gene, ill at ease with stardom, there were to be a series of solo albums, groups, lost opportunities, and new beginnings. He went on to pioneer ventures into roots and country that would be more lucratively exploited by others. But he would forever be an ex-Byrd, living well on Byrds-royalties. His solo work was varied - from the textured density of ‘No Other’ (1974), to the stripped-down ‘Two Sides To Every Story’ (February 1977), but nothing he did would produce a signature ‘Gene Clark sound’ strong enough to replace what had gone before. Never quite ‘in synch with his time,’ his albums tended to be overlooked, only to be subsequently recognised as influential and reclaimed by music historians later. As the Byrds ‘Younger Than Yesterday’ (1966) LP emerged, its high-profile launch eclipsed Gene’s first solo work ‘Gene Clark With The Gosdin Brothers’ which includes his enchanting “Echoes”, and features sidesmen Clarence White and Doug Dillard. ‘The Fantastic Expeditions Of Dillard & Clark’ (October 1968) with Doug Dillard and Bernie Leadon met a similar fate, even though it premiered “Train Leaves Here This Morning” which co-writer Leadon would take forward onto the Eagles mega-selling debut LP (Gene’s jokey ‘B’-side version of Elvis’ “Don’t Be Cruel” would be added to the 2001 Edsel-label CD reissue). The second Dillard & Clark album ‘Through The Morning, Through The Night’ (August 1969), recorded with an expanded line-up of Donna Washburn, Byron Berline, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke contains no less than two hauntingly beautiful Gene Clark originals which would achieve acclaim as part of Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ ‘Raising Sand’ album in 2008 (it also includes covers of Don Everly’s “So Sad” and John Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down”), yet at the time his reluctance to play the industry game, his unwillingness to tour, to do interviews and promo meant that such albums consistently failed to reach the audiences they deserved, and generated little more than critical respect. His initially stabilising marriage to Carlie, and the country-comforts of Mendocino ran aground. There was a damaging relationship with Terri Messina, and roaring lost months of booze and narcotic excess with Doug Dillard and Jerry Jeff Walker. While touring, their bar bills far exceeded their weekly takings. There was a shaky Byrds reformation in which old grudges, animosities, and antagonisms resurfaced, David Crosby – as the most commercially successful survivor of the ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ line-up, revelled in assuming production duties, mixing McGuinn’s jingle-jangle low and excluding all but two new Gene Clark songs. There were also contentious McGuinn, Clark & Hillman reunion dates, but the rigours of touring itself forced Gene back into chemical dependence. Contracts lapsed. There was litigation over the rights to the Byrds name itself, even as Gene was reduced to touring as a kind of Byrds tribute band. There was stomach surgery, then, when – for the final time, all five original Byrds were together for their induction into ‘The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame’ – 16th January 1991, there was a partial reconciliation, of sorts. Shortly after, during duo recording sessions with Carla Olson, Gene was finally found dead, aged 46. The coroner’s verdict was heart attack. But to Einarson, Gene Clark ‘had a fear of success and whenever it came close his self-destruct mechanism activated’. ‘He couldn’t handle fame’ agrees McGuinn. But when I saw Gene at the Wakefield ‘Pussycat Club’ shortly before he died – playing support to Lindisfarne, he did the full version of “Mr Tambourine Man”. And it was mesmerising. This fine book is all you need to know about the ‘Life and Legacy of Mr Tambourine Man’.

REVIEW BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

www.backbeatbooks.com

THE GIRL WITH THE LAUGHING TEETH

THE GIRL WITH LAUGHING TEETH /

A CONTEMPORARY LOVE SONG 

Since I saw her smile on the in-store screen
in the counter display for facial cream
I’ve known that we’ll be more than friends
- until the promo campaign ends.
She’s in an ad. for Mary Quant,
got everything this boy could want,
I’d give my T.V. with remote control
to drive my motorcade to the soul
of the girl with the laughing teeth.

Got legal pills to wreck my head,
an electric duvet and a water-bed,
a 48k with four-colour graphics,
an electric Segway for use in traffic,
but in that ad. for Mary Quant
she’s got everything this boy could want,
and I’d trade all my consumer possessions
for just a hint of sweet affection
from the girl with the laughing teeth.

I watch the smile that curves her lip,
the smallest flick of her tongue-tip,
then I wait till she comes round again
on the in-store tape that never ends,
and as she smiles my pulse beats faster,
I know I’m heading for disaster
but before she’s gone I’ve got to touch
that flawless skin I love so much,
the girl with the laughing teeth.

…and through a cascade of facial cream
I climb to touch her on the screen
and despite the crowd we’re isolated
as our love is consummated
as our love is consummated
as our love is consummated…

(Perhaps if I’d have kept my cool
I could’ve half-inched the video spool?)
…but as I’m escorted from the store
I turn to glimpse her just once more,
my girl with the laughing teeth.

She’s in an ad. for Mary Quant
got everything this boy could want,
a seamless dream on a video screen
in a counter display for facial cream,
that girl with the laughing teeth
that girl with the laughing teeth.


Published in the collection:-
‘POWER LINES’ (Unibird Publications, October 1988 - UK)
Published in:-
‘ETHOS no.9’ (December 1995 – Eire)
‘BOGGERS ALL no.5’ (February 1989 – UK)

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS

EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY

(A Novel of 124,000 words)

BY ANDREW DARLINGTON

3,000

WORLD-WIDE

PUBLICATIONS

LATER, AND NOW

THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH NOVEL

- COMING TO THIS WEBSITE SHORTLY

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS

Rebels at the End of Time. Insurrectionists of Earth’s Final Days. But are they the unwitting agents of the coming chaos - or the force that will provide ultimate salvation? They must journey to the lost Lunar City Of The Dead to discover the truth... about themselves, and about their doomed ‘Cluster’ of worlds...

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS is a vividly detailed richly imagined Science Fantasy in the tradition of Michael Moorcock’s Elric sagas, Robert Silverberg’s epic ‘Majipoor Chronicles’, and Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’ novels

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS is a novel of the third millennium. Yet it is also one that makes real the mythopoeic dreams of Science Fiction’s lost worlds.

The novel stands alone as a single volume, complete in itself: but also forms the first third of a trilogy of self-contained but interconnected novels.

When, as an adolescent, I first began reading Science Fiction, I was seduced by rich poetic imaginings set in a Solar System that the advancing blade of science and the technological magic of long-range space-probes has laid to waste. The beauty of Mars as envisaged by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stanley G Weinbaum, and Leigh Brackett - an ancient world of dead sea bottoms, planet-wide canals and fantastic cities, has receded further into impossibility. Just as the jewelled jungles, volcanic flame-belts and bizarre civilisations of Venus have been inexorably extinguished by the same process. Even asteroids and the tiny Martian moons once harboured a surrealist phantasmagoria of fictional life-forms...

As JURASSIC PARK resurrected dinosaurs, scientific potential now makes it possible to recreate the Solar System’s lost worlds...

With BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS I have written to the expectations of the third millennium...

The framework of The Cluster, its Last Empire, and its history, is internally consistent. It is grounded in science-based speculation and not fantasy (while drawing on the symbolism that gives fantasy its psychological lure). But the concept of The Cluster validates an unobtrusive sampling of the Science Fiction image-banks by setting various stages of the novels on worlds as mysteriously beautiful, as magical, and from the same continuity as those that seduced my adolescence.

Hence this first novel reaches its conclusion on the kind of Lunar surface that H.G. Wells’ protagonists of ‘THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON’ would not find unfamiliar. The second novel uses the asteroid Ceres and a Mars reverted by future Terraforming to the conditions imagined for it by Nineteenth Century Astronomers like Percival Lowell, as its location. The third novel visits Venus before returning to Earth for the final confrontation.

...excerpts from ‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ have already appeared as works-in-progress and short stories in various magazines, while related short stories drawn from the same continuum continue to appear...

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS

EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY (Précis)

...with the aid of ARTANIS VAS KRATZ, GRENAMAN TAAD realises the significance of his, and ANSOR A-HYLCA’s journey through the TIME MARSHES. That significance lies not in their fragmentary and confusing conversations with the ‘Waterlords’, but in the things they saw and experienced during their journey. All of which are ‘clues’.
...ANSOR A-HYLCA is being held in the NAWS TENRAB Hold, where WAR CHAO finds himself increasingly repelled by the methods used by the ELECTOR OF MARS to extend CHLOREL ET-SNAAR’s life.
...DYESPAAR is using NAWS TENRAB’s experiments to infiltrate ‘FORTUNATES’ into BAAL-SHADAAM in preparation for a coup.
...meanwhile, MAREEH is contacted by TENGIZ MKHEDRIONI, former leader or her insurrectionist group - and former lover. Deprived of the signature drug imprisoning her in the corrupt imperial city of ASHIRI her memory returns, but such deprivation will also kill her.
...far from being the important revolutionary figure he has intimated himself to be ANSOR A-HYLCA was deliberately seduced and recruited - on MKHEDRIONI’s specific instructions, with the single objective of using his family connections to bring about the assassination of A-HYLCA’s father, who supplies narcotics for the routine interrogation, torture and control practised by the SPIRIT DOMAIN.
...rather than face death through drug-deprivation MAREEH absorbs through TERMINAL CONTACT into the ASHIRIAN OMPHALOS, where she is able to influence WAR CHAO through the COMMUNICATION GLOBE to release A-HYLCA (and GRENAMAN TAAD who is also, by now, NAWS TENRAB’s prisoner) in an attempt to destroy the ELECTOR OF MARS’ project.
...released from his duties in BAAL-SHADAAM by the destruction of his rival (NAWS TENRAB), ARTANIS VAS KRATZ carries ANSOR A-HYLCA and GRENAMAN TAAD to Luna, where - using the ‘clues’ from the TIME MARSHES, and DYESPAAR as ‘Trancer’, they discover the truth about themselves, and intimations of the imminent FINAL CHAOS.
...GRENAMAN TAAD decides at last to join ANSOR A-HYLCA in the continuing insurrection against the LAST EMPIRE as the AGE OF COMING DARKNESS begins...

‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ is a novel for the third millennium. Yet it is also one that makes real the mythopoeic dreams of Science Fiction’s Lost Worlds.