Progressive Rock has always been best served by the double gatefold album, but who was the mysterious man who wrote some of the genre’s greatest chart hits?

Topping the Christmas singles chart at the end of 1974, Newgate Blossoms was an unlikely, yet appropriately downbeat, coda to a year marred by economic depression and political upheaval: A baroque, Prog Rock song, underscored by an eerie minimalist string arrangement, it seemed to last far longer than its four minute length. The lyrics describe the final hours of an anonymous inmate of Newgate prison awaiting execution on Christmas Day, who mistakes snowflakes drifting past his barred window for spring blossom and imagines that he has escaped the gallows. This gloomy subject matter struck a chord with the downtrodden pubic. The single reached the number one spot a fortnight before Christmas and held off more boisterous competition throughout early January. For its performers – a Canterbury-based, Jewish Prog Rock group called The Golems, it provided a short-lived glimpse of fame.

Continues in comments...

Some bands break-up in public. Depending on the extent of their fame this announcement can make national headlines or languish as an unread email in the spam folder of the NME news editor. When Take That first called it a day in 1996 a helpline was set up to comfort distraught fans. Two years later when These Animal Men decided to go their separate ways, fans had to get by with the support of close friends and family.

Many bands never explicitly call it quits. A lot of them probably never plan to. It just so happens that somebody goes back to university, somebody else relocates further away, somebody gets married or has kids. The circumstances that allowed the group to come into existence and then flourish changes. The collective will that brought everybody together in the same place, at the same time, and with the same goal, isn’t there any more.

Two decades ago, unless you read about their split in the music press, there was no way of knowing whether a given band was still a going concern. Since then the world wide web has bestowed a purgatorial immortality on those artists who faded away but never properly said goodbye. Their abandoned web pages litter the unvisited nooks and crannies of the internet. The absence of new information on these sites implies a contradictory ‘still together/no longer together’ existence. These are careers lacking proper closure; the province of artists who are either unsure or unwilling to disclose whether their project is on a prolonged hiatus or at a permanent standstill.

Continues in comments...

The great thing about newspaper headlines that reference song or movie titles, is that an enterprising sub-editor can use their idle moments (referred to in the trade as “that bit of the afternoon when I get back from the pub”) to stockpile them in a rolodex or convenient drawer until a suitable event comes along:

THE HUMAN GWENTIPEDE – A story about an attempt by residents in the Welsh county of Gwent to form the world’s longest conga line.

COME ON BABY LIGHT MY BRIARS! - Local news story about a council’s decision to clear a small, overgrown patch of waste ground by means of a controlled blaze. Includes a photo inset of “Angry mum, Karen Peel” who voices concerns that the wind may carry smoke from the blaze in the direction of two nursery schools, both located five miles away.

IT’S RANING MEMES – Tech story about a new computer virus that causes it to rain popular internet memes down the screen of your web browser.

IN THE RAVY - News-light story from The Sun based around a photograph of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier photographed off the coast of Ibiza.

BAGGER JAGGER! – Glorified picture caption masquerading as actual news. Found towards the rear of The Sun underneath a large photograph of a dishevelled looking Mick Jagger putting out black rubbish bags for refuse collection.

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT HAKE? – Local news story about a Fish & Chip shop owner’s decision to switch from cod to hake in an attempt to promote sustainable fishing. A thee person vox pop of customers draws mixed, universally dull opinions. The headline comes courtesy of a junior sub who has just discovered The Smiths.

SMELLS LIKE GLEAM SPIRIT! – Another local news story, this one about a group of teenage volunteers who have given up their Saturday afternoons for the last three months in order to polish all the taps in their local hospital. Accompanied by a photo of the team, bearing dusters, buckets and other cleaning apparel, with their free hands held aloft in joyful triumph as they anticipate their reward – a chance to see Dappy play live at the O2 in a show hosted by presenters from E4. A table of factoids offers statistics about the number of taps in the hospital, the amount of water used annually, how many taps are turned on at any one time, etc.

THE PHANTOM TENNIS (player) - Predictable foray into the realm of the supernatural from The Mail on Sunday. A photograph taken by a retired Maine couple at a National Trust property appears to show the phantom of a 1920s tennis player. Tim Henman is invited to deconstruct the ghost’s serve, while a side bar offers three possible identities for the restless spirit. Could it be Lady Hayworth, whose leisure activities included being vigorously spanked with a tennis racket by rough coachmen who she picked up from Whitechapel?

“What’s crazy about this? Feeding steroids to gators. There’s nothing crazy about this. What could go wrong?”

I spent this afternoon watching a film called Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. If you are planning on viewing this masterpiece of ecologically-themed cinema in the near future, then now might be a good time to stop reading, as there are copious spoilers ahead.

Mega Python... is one in a genre of no-expense spared, trashy monster movies featuring over-sized versions of the world’s most deadly-predators, brought to life by cheap, low-quality computer effects

Unlike its predecessors the main point of interest here lies not in the giant reptiles, which are rendered in truly appalling CGI, but in the two female leads, played by the rival queens of late 1980s US bubblegum pop - Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. Despite growing up in the 1980s I sat on the fence during their short-lived battle for control of the American singles chart. My friend Angie, who’s judgement is pretty sound on such things, fondly recalls wearing Debbie Gibson’s fragrance 'Electric Youth' (named after her second album) and so would probably side with the Shake Your Love hit-maker.

Both pop stars are now in their early 40s and admit that the rivalry between them was largely manufactured. Despite this they seem more than happy to play it up for the cameras, and appear to take great relish in flinging the word “bitch” at each other.

The film opens with Gibson, in the role of the snake-loving environmental activist - Dr Nikki Riley – liberating captive pythons from a laboratory and then (following one of the lamest car chases ever committed to film) releasing them back into the wild. The snakes rapidly grow to enormous proportions and set about putting a serious dent in the local redneck population.

Dr Riley’s deranged attachment to all things serpentine is made clear early on. When she is saved from being eaten by a 20 foot python her angry response is:

“These snakes need to be released back into their natural habitat. Not run over by some murderer IN A TRUCK!”

This is representative of the dialogue throughout the film, which consciously apes the demented tone of the comments section on Youtube.

Tiffany plays the voluptuous, flamed-haired Everglades park warden - Terry O’ Hara, as she attempts to regain control over the mysterious influx of humungous pythons that” could destroy all wildlife.” When her fiancé is eaten by one of the snakes she does what anybody in her position would do: She injects an illegal steroid, that blocks the protein limiting muscle growth, into chicken carcasses, which she then feeds to wild alligators.

This one-upmanship mirrors the real life tit-for-tat in the careers of the two former pop stars. In 1987, Debbie Gibson released her debut album Out of the Blue (which contained three great singles – Only In My Dreams, Shake Your Love and Foolish Beat). Tiffany responded a month later with an eponymous album that included covers of I think We’re Alone Now and I Saw Him Standing There.

An attempt at imposing structure on what is essentially a series of dismemberments by giant reptile comes in the form of a subplot concerning an impending charity fundraiser, whose success will determine the future of the Everglades, and is contingent on the arrival of a mysterious monkey that is being flown in specially for the occasion.

“How’s a monkey supposed to raise enough money for the Everglades?” asks Tiffany, quite sensibly.

The primate in question turns out to be former Monkee, Micky Dolenz, playing himself in brief cameo, prior to his live solo performance being fatally interrupted by a passing Mega Python.

While the film’s title implies a one-on-one battle between two giants of their species, for most of the running time, the Everglades are lousy with Mega Pythons and Gatoroids, coexisting harmoniously as they plough through shopping malls and swallow oncoming trains.

All this devastation is really just a sideshow to the main event - a catfight between Tiffany and Gibson (dressed respectively in black and white, like Wild West gunfighters). It reaches a peak when Gibson empties a bowl of noodle salad over her rival’s head and then follows up by smearing whipped cream topping from a nearby pie into the park warden’s ample cleavage. The ensuing scuffle that takes place in waist-deep swamp water is undignified and unseemly behaviour for a senior US government employee and a woman who holds a doctorate in reptile biology.

Never-the-less, the film is an object lesson in how pop stars settled scores in the 1980s. Not with bitchy tweets or catty asides from the safety of the Never Mind the Buzzcocks studio. Tiffany and Debbie are both old-school extremists, prepared to thrash out their differences using genetically-enhanced proxies that wreak havoc on fragile ecosystems, result in hundreds of deaths and cause millions of dollars worth of damage.

Since I watched Megapython vs. Gatoroid I have pondered, for literally minutes, on what the film’s message might be. At a stretch it can be regarded as a retelling of Frankenstein – of two woman destroyed by their own creations. It could also be looked upon as a cautionary tale exploring the dangers of pop stars diversifying into other areas, although this is undermined by the quality of the performances given by the two female leads.

There are certainly lessons to be learned: When a giant python eats your fiancé the last thing you should do is take it personally ; The freshly decapitated heads of giant snakes remain dangerous; Tampons and whiskey make effective Molotov cocktails in defence against giant alligators; There are few problems that can’t be resolved by a trail of pheromones and a shipping container full of dynamite.

If the film does have a moral, it is that when a Mega Python fights a Gatoroid there are no winners. Certainly not Tiffany or Debbie Gibson who, prior to the end credits, both get what’s coming to them.

Among the landmarks that chart a student’s rite of passage through the American education system, the school yearbook is the one most likely to come back and haunt them at a later date. Ostensibly an annual record of academic and extra curricular achievements, it is also a repository of hopes and dreams and an archive of youth hair fashion, preserved for the amusement of future generations and as a warning from history. It is not a retrospective document, written years after the fact, when everybody knows that the nerdy guy with the wispy moustache called Marty went on to become the next king of Silicon Valley. At this stage nobody can say with absolute certainty how any of these kids will turn out. School might not might not be an entirely level playing field, but a yearbook captures a disparate group of people, thrown together by a common set of circumstances, on the verge of breaking free and scattering in different directions.

In 1988, the Seattle-based record label, Sub Pop, released a compilation album that showcased some of the bands on their roster, alongside others who had a passing association with the label. This anthology was titled Sub Pop 200 and quite by accident it captured many of the leading lights of the Seattle grunge scene in their larval stages. At the time nobody could have guessed that, within a few years, featured artists like Nirvana and Soundgarden would be among the biggest rock bands in the western hemisphere. As a recognisable movement began to form and record companies scrambled to own a piece of it, a raft of less charismatic, but by no means less talented, bands, such as Mudhoney and Screaming Trees found themselves enjoying greater success than they had probably imagined. Others, such as Cat Butt and The Thrown Ups would find fame and riches mysteriously elusive. While the running order on Sub Pop 200 does seem to shunt the more commercial prospects towards the front of the album, it remains an honest document of an underground music scene the moment before it erupted and went global.

I bought my first copy of Sub Pop 200 in 1991, almost three years after its initial release. Nirvana had just put out Nevermind. As soon I heard that album I knew that I wanted to hear more like it. At the time I didn’t read the music press and only learned about Sub Pop 200 from reading an article about the poet Steven Jesse Bernstein, who I idolised and still do. I ordered the record from the branch of HMV in the corner of Keddies department store and I remember very clearly going to pick up. Standing by the counter I turned the CD jewel case over and scanned the track listing. With the exception of Nirvana and Bernstein, I had never heard, or heard of, any of the other 18 featured artists.

One clue to the contents of Sub Pop 200 lies in its black and white cover art: Drawn by Charles Burns, it depicts a mutant teenager, dressed in his socks and underpants. His oversized head, weighted down by with a drooping Elvis quiff, is dripping with sweat and acne. A swollen tongue pokes lasciviously from between his lips. Bent almost double over a pile of trash that could easily represent the floor an adolescent’s bedroom, he conjures a weedy note from an acoustic guitar, while a demonic monkey lashed to his back yowls into a microphone.

The more that I studied this puerile image and listened to the music that it represented, the more it felt right. In the past dropping out had required some sort of effort from the disaffected party, usually a tedious commitment to a fashion regime intended to express individuality and in some cases superiority. Goths had their silver jewellery and their all-black dress code. Even the Ravers and the fans of Madchester had their signature hairstyles and favoured clothing brands. The message that I, rightly or wrongly, took from the cover of Sub Pop 200 and the music contained within, is that it was acceptable to wear the same pair jeans for a fortnight without washing them. This was something that I did already. Finally the stars had aligned in my favour. Suddenly, without expending any energy, I was cool.

Continues for the duration of an ice age in the comments...

Not for ten years.
Not since the Hackney Ocean Two, in 2002.

Framed in vista,
at the end of that long room
we watched them recede
from the shores of Great Britain,
their northern range diminished
but broadened in Europe.

(Once I saw a German fan,
at the Bloomsbury Theatre,
punch the air in time
to the chorus of
‘Prayer For You’
And thought:
“They feel it
more than we do.”)

For a while our fingers
traced the lines of
scaled-down text
in the listings of
Time Out magazine.
Our eyes scanned the
black and white ads
in the NME.

Albums, solo albums and side projects
crossed the English Channel belatedly
in ones and twos
to slouch in the racks of
the HMV on Oxford street.

And the next amps to be plugged
in at The Borderline Club
belonged to an Alt Country collective
from West Ruislip:
Four lads who used to play Death Metal
under the moniker IN CURSE SION
before their cover of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’
shed its cynicism and became
the best thing in their set,
and the guitar player acquired a banjo,
and the lead singer claimed
inspiration from Marty Robbins
and The Go-Betweens.

And when they were gone,
and the Indie club
was over for the night,
a moonbeam, sliced by a vent
into thin zebra stripes,
slowly crossed the empty stage
like a broken searchlight.

If there is a more horrifying song than Dancing with the Captain by Paul Nicholas, then I have not heard it. The lyrics give an account of a party that took place on what we can infer to have been a large cruise liner. You may have noticed that I am speaking of the vessel in the past tense. All we know of the ship’s final hours is that the passengers and crew alike were worked up into a bacchanalian frenzy by their rock and roll-obsessed captain. This man who, for reasons we will never truly understand but can only endlessly speculate upon, chose to abandon the duties associated with his position. The disregard that he demonstrated both for the ship in his custody and the lives of those who had placed themselves within his care hints at a suicidal personality, albeit one with the charisma of a cult leader, hell-bent on taking as many souls as he could on his personal voyage into damnation.

Consider the opening couplet:

“It was full steam ahead, destination unknown
I asked our position, the crew didn't know...”

Stripped of jaunty backing track this reads like a solemn testimonial given in the sobering gloom of a courtroom at an inquest into a nautical disaster of unprecedented scale. In the annuls of Victorian shipping, reports of this kind invariably end with the phrase “In total seven hundred and thirty three Christian souls were lost, including an unknown number of women and children, with the remaining spoils divided unevenly between the sharks and marauding bands of pirates.”

Now reflect upon the line: “Everyone cheerin’ nobody steerin.’” Note the omission of the ‘g’s at the end of cheering and steering, mirroring the anything goes vibe of a party that is now in full swing. Then consider how quickly those cheers could have turned to a collective scream that would have swept across the decks like a Mexican wave as the unnamed disaster unfolded.

The line “Well we all had fun the whole night long” suggests that the inevitable tragedy occurred at dawn when the party would have been winding down and the sharks would have been at their most active.

I know some critics who have expressed a lack of sympathy for the passengers; they could have easily overpowered the captain who by Pauls’ own admission was “out of control.” They could locked him in the brig and placed a responsible crew member in charge. By continuing to party they submitted to the disaster that lay in wait for them along the shipping lanes of their collective destinies.

What then of the families unable to reach the lifeboats, penned-in by the throngs of revellers, and doomed to share their fate? We cannot know of the fortunes of the dissenters to the captain’s music policy. What happened to those who expressed a preference for house music or dubstep? Were they locked in their cabins? Were they thrown into the ocean? Were they set adrift only to wash-up on a deserted island where even now they await rescue. We haven’t heard anything from Carl Cox in a while. Was he on board? Can anybody vouch for the present whereabouts of Finlay Quaye?

The most gut wrenching thing about this song is that the ship’s fate is never explicitly spelled out. There are no verses that describe the moment when the vessel broke in two. There are no lines that describe loved ones being wrenched from each other’s grasps, their screams gagged by the waves. If Paul Nicholas recalls the survivors being plucked from the floating wreckage by the hungry sharks then he does not speak of it.

When a tragedy of this kind occurs it is human nature to learn from it. Here we are left with questions that we cannot answer.

One anonymous Sunday afternoon on the cusp of autumn, I made a dreary pre-amble to the working week, skirting the curtain wall of the big Sainsbury’s supermarket on Camden high street to acquire some last minute groceries that would get me through the next few days. The grey steel columns driven into the pavement, that established the store as a permanent fixture on the landscape, were flanked by bus stops where people lined-up a step away from the curb with their orange carrier bags, waiting to be ferried home. Above their heads the darkened plate glass of the first floor reflected the upper storeys of the brown brick terrace opposite.

While waiting in the queue for the self-checkouts with my wire basket and it’s meagre contents – a loaf of sliced white bead, a packet of wafer-thin ham, a two pint carton of milk - I checked my twitter account, saw ‘Nathan Cotton’ high up on the list of trending topics and in that moment knew that he was dead. There was no other earthly explanation for his name to have been there; the spark of his fame that dimmed and then went out during the mid 1990s had been momentarily rekindled by the grief of those who had not otherwise given him a second thought in years.

Outside the store among the aimless crowds of Sunday shoppers, I spied Keith Bateman, who I hadn’t seen in person in almost five years. He was leaning up against a lamppost smoking a cigarette. I only recognised him because he was wearing the same well-worn, designer, brown leather jacket that he had purchased two decades earlier with his share of an EMI development deal.

“Have you heard about Nathan? “I asked him:

CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS...

Jonathan Coe’s erudite teenage deconstruction of the Yes album - Tales From Topographic Oceans reminded of my own, less eloquent, juvenile attempts at music criticism. These date back to the early 1980s when our school music teacher required his pupils to keep a music appreciation diary which we were supposed to write in once a week. I generally did this last thing on Sunday evening, drawing on my brother’s small collection of tapes, our communally owned Now That’s What I call Music... compilations and the vinyl from my parent’s record collection.

Our teacher tried to get us to focus on identifying the different instruments in a piece and the way in which they interacted. In essence he was attempting to teach us the basics of composition; something that was completely lost on me at the time and, as a non-musician, didn’t really interest me. Even now I’m still more pre-occupied by what music does to me than how it does it.

Below are selected highlights from my music diary:

The Brighouse and Rastrick Band - The Floral Dance
“This music has lyrics but in this version they are not sung.”

The Beatles – While My Guitar Gently Weeps
“A guitar is playing in the background while someone sings about life.”

The London Symphony Orchestra & English Chamber Choir - Tommy: Overture
“It starts in a classical way and mounts up into a opera with beaty rock music. The record has many tracks telling the story of a boy.”

Mozart - Symphony No. 40 in G Minor
“There are lots of instruments in this.”

Bach/August Wilhelmj – Air on a G String
“The music is slow and heavy. It is orchestral and is the theme for a cigar advert.”

Cliff Richard & The Shadows – Living Doll
“Very heavy music. It sounds a lot different from the more recent version.”

Grange Hill Cast – Just Say No
“Rap towards the end of the music. Trumpets playing. Lyrics about drugs. Money goes towards trying to stop people taking drugs and helping people who are already taking them.”

Gerry Rafferty – Baker Street
“Some sort of wind instrument at the beginning, then a saxophone is playing. It is probably about poor people travelling around.”

Fleetwood Mac – The Chain
“Lyrics at the beginning but at the end there is the music that introduces the Grand Prix sometimes.”

Bob Dylan – It’s All Over Now Baby Blue
“There is a guitar playing. The person sounds more like he is shouting instead of singing. There is also a mouth organ.”

Nik Kerhsaw – What The Papers Say
“This music is pop and could be played at a disco. The lyrics are about what a pest the papers are.”

Shirley Bassey – Goldfinger
“”The singer (female) sings in a cruel cold voice which is probably the personality of the person she sings about. The music ends with the first four notes of the James Bond THEME!”

Frank Sinatra – Jingle Bells
“There are bells ringing at the beginning. The record does not last very long.”

The Beatles – Money
“MUSIC IS POP!”

I think Peter Gabriel misses the point of ownership of music and albums, which (in the new issue of WORD) he dismisses as an attachment to “lumpy bits” and something that we all need to get over.

In my mind ownership equates with control. Last week I bought Bananarama’s third album True Confessions on CD. I can listen to it whenever I want, however many times I want, and there is not a damn thing that anyone can do to stop me because it’s my property. If you come into my room and try to take it away from me I swear to god I’ll throw a cactus at you.

When music sloughs off the earthly bonds of the physical format and ascends into the cloud you won’t own it anymore and you won’t control it either. The company who rents you access to their music library will hold you to ransom: They can hike up the price, they can alter the terms and conditions, they can introduce adverts and promotions where there were none. Their servers might go down or your internet connection might fail. They might even go out of business. Artists can choose to remove their work from the service or even replace original tracks with new mixes. Those who rent music will be held hostage to the whims of companies who will always be looking for new ways to turn a profit from it. The songs that you love will always be a mere button push from being taken away from you.

Gabriel dreams of a system that can accurately read our moods and play us appropriate music. His “box of pills” analogy for this system is apt since it brings to mind a residential care home where people who are no longer able to effectively manage their own lives have them managed on their behalf.

I believe that freedom entails taking responsibility for your own happiness. Not ceding control to someone or something who, for the sake of your convenience, will decide what is best for you. I want to go out into the world and walk though the rainy streets of Soho to Fopp, Sister Ray or HMV. I want to flip through racks of scuffed CD cases. I want to enter a record shop with a fixed idea of what I want and then leave an hour later with something I’ve never heard of that looks like it might be good. I want my tastes broadened by happenstance – a song heard by chance, or a throw-away sentence in a bad review that tells me that, regardless of what the critic thinks, I will like this album.

I don’t want to pay for my music via direct debit like you might pay a water bill. I don’t want a benign prototype A.I. to offer me music that it thinks I will like, in the same way that a cat might deposit a dead bird at my feet as a sort of gift. Maybe when I’m too old and doolally to do all of these things for myself, but not right now. If I want a sparrow for breakfast I’ll catch my own.

I understand that I am fighting a losing and ultimately futile battle against the tide of progress, but I’ll take the lumpy bits - every last gristly mouthful - over Gabriel’s disengaged utopia, where we remain static like plants and absorb our music from the air.

The old men of Grand Rapids
still raise their hats to Larry
though their hearts have
been broken many times
since that first time.

Like old sideboard vases
they rattled through
Pearl Harbour and Vietnam.
Were shattered and
put back together.

Now in their dotage,
scarred by epoxy,
held together with strips
of yellowing scotch tape,
with glimpses of clay showing
through deep chips in the pattern,
a repository for odd keys
that outlived their locks,
rubber bands and hard candy,
their hands tremble with arthritis
as they recall the girl who
dealt that first hammer blow
and made that first fracture.
How they each put
on a brave face
and said that her
name didn’t matter.

Now they say that they
can’t remember
what she was called.

In Adelaide, Runaround Sue
recovers from hip replacement surgery;
updates her facebook
while she babysits her grandson;
plans a trip back home to the Bronx;
buys compression stockings
on Amazon Marketplace.

There’s an attic in a
house in Penn Hills, PA
that bears the weight
of a full half century.
A wall of buckled cardboard boxes
with caved-in sides.
A million framed autographs
behind cracked and grimy glass.
Faded ink the colour of tarnished metal.

Sweet little sixteen
turned 70 in April.
Two floors down in the den
she works out to an
Angela Lansbury exercise video.

At Highland Hospital in Oakland
surgeons passed a real live wire
through Bony Moronie’s right ventricle.
Her fingers fumble in the
shallows of a plastic pill tray.
A Golden Wedding in June.
A marriage that outlasted
the apple tree it blossomed under.

Pre-Katrina,
Johnny B Goode goes
back and forth
along Metairie Road
To Charity Hospital
bemoaning the missing ‘E’
from his surname
on his appointment letters.

Post Katrina he tightrope walks
a narrow strip of grass
the length of Bienville Street.

In the San Fernando Mission Cemetery
the Leader of the Pack
has been overtaken,
his flattened marker
a rectangular footprint
absorbed into the
rank and file of the dead
on their orderly march towards
a row of California pine
that screen off the horizon.

Dillinger - Crabs In My Pants

April in the Everglades. The Bearded Pelicans return from their summer nesting habitats in the trailer parks of New Jersey. As these majestic birds touch down upon the water, another migration is beginning. The Hucknell Crabs are leaving in their hundreds of thousands. Their destination lies almost 3000 miles away in Jamaica. Between here and their spawning grounds in the underpants of the reggae artist, Dillinger, they face an arduous journey by road, sea, and on foot.

It is February. Richard Burrell - a ranger for the Everglades National Park - has come to the Jamaican embassy in Washington DC to organise a tourist visa for the crabs. He has spent the winter months painstakingly photographing each crustacean. Those crabs who have missed the application deadline and attempt to travel, risk being fed to Wendy the alligator if they are caught.

One month later the crabs board a Greyhound Express to Fort Lauderdale. They join a party of retired lobsters on their way to the coast. A hard life of lobstering has left many missing claws and antennae. This lobster had its tail shot off by a German sniper at Omaha Beach. The initial tension between the two species slowly evaporates and by the end of the journey they part as good friends.

As the spring rains kiss the eastern seaboard, the crabs begin their ocean crossing to Jamaica. Some are unused to the motion of the cruise ship and experience nausea and sickness. Others seek to alleviate their boredom by making use of the onboard amenities. This crab has staked itself on a hand of blackjack in the casino. It is a potentially lucrative activity but not without its dangers. This time the house wins. The crab is taken to the galley where it will be cooked and made into cakes.

In May, Dillinger notes the arrival of the first crabs. He has purchased an extra large pair of underpants to accommodate the many thousands that will soon cluster around his groin. It is a wise investment. By June his pants are bulging. Even in the company of Dillinger the crabs will not be safe from predators. This seagull has been following the reggae artist for two weeks.

July is carnival season. The Kingston Crab Grab Festival thins out the numbers of adult crabs. Some will be eaten. Others will be made into crab pot - a blend of cannabis, crab meat and tobacco. It can be chewed or smoked and produces a pleasant lightheaded feeling.

In August the young crabs board a taxi to the Norman Manley International Airport. On their flight back to the United States those occupying window seats may catch sight of flocks of Bearded Pelicans on their way to New Jersey. Next year these young crustaceans will make the same journey as their parents, as the Jamaican Crab Stroll marks their passage to adulthood and the arrival of a new generation of Hucknell Crabs.

LAMENT OF GOLDSBY FINANCIAL SOLUTIONS, LAINDON,
FOR THOSE STAFF MEMBERS WHO WERE LOST AT
THE GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL OF 2011

Kevin Goldsby,
Founder and Managing Director of
Goldsby Financial Solutions, Laindon:

The drum circles and campfire rounds
will sing of your prescience
when insuring against the success
of the EuroMillions lottery syndicate,
and the mass evacuation of core personnel
to ghastly mansions in Barling and Billericay.

Yet, even you were blindsided by Glastonbury.

Your five employees
who took Thursday and Friday off
to attend the festival
are lost to you now,
never to return
to their rented two-bedroom flats
and starter homes in Basildon,
Benfleet and Westcliff-on-Sea.

In the Field of Avalon
Michael Eakins from Accounts
pulled a sword from a stone.
He was last seen entering a barrow
beneath a sacred circle
pledging to rise again
in the festival’s hour of need.

He will not be there on Monday
to pick up your voicemail
regarding Andrew Dangerfield.

Susan Norris had her face painted
black, white, and orange
by a man who juggled pots and brushes
in the Theatre and Circus field

She can no longer resolve
your staff conflicts
in her former capacity
as Director of Human Resources.

She is a Tiger now
roaming the tors and ravines
of the West Country,
carrying off sheep
and student hikers.
Rarrr!

Steven Bishop’s PowerPoint
presentation for the
South-eastern Financial Goods & Services Conference
at The Holiday Inn, in Maidenhead,
now less than one week away,
resides upon his laptop
like an unfinished novel,
to be picked over
in the Weekend Review
section of The Guardian
by Sebastian Faulks
who will dwell upon
its implied sadness,
and by Margaret Atwood
who will compare it to Pompeii.

Its author fell from a lavatory seat
into the foul pit below
where he clung to a raft made from
digital cameras and mobile phones.

The stench will not leave him now.
He will join the similarly afflicted
at their encampment
which is removed from society

In a parting phone call
to his family
he said:

“Forget me.”

In Strummerville
Angela Flack was carried off by stilt-walkers.
In time she will adapt to their strange traditions
never again to walk unbowed
through a normal-size office door.

A man-made giantess,
her very existence challenging
those passages of the
Disability Discrimination Act
relating to rights of access.

What of Ryan Mathers -
the callow office junior
due to sit his accountancy exams in October?
A mooted replacement for
Matthew Stokes
who is moving to Grantham.

He was last seen dancing
to Mumford & Sons.

He has converted to
the Druid faith.

He has run away
to join The Kills,
or The Thrills,
or The Chills.

Will his girlfriend, Charlotte Harris, parade
the widow’s walk of Talk nightclub
on Southend seafront,
like John Riley’s betrothed
forsaking all other suitors?

No.

She will marry Darren from the Kursaal estate.
She will sell her story to Love It! magazine
and go on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

“In these challenging economic times,
with ours aces out of the deck,
we must evaluate our key strengths,”

says Kevin Goldsby
addressing his depleted head office
like the general of a defeated army.

“We erect this brass plaque,
ordered from the
Viking office stationery catalogue,
to our departed colleagues,
and pledge to honour their memory
by consolidating the growth
of the last two financial quarters.

“My second in command –
Derek Livermore
will now read a letter of condolence
from Fearne Cotton.”

In an era when other, less ethical, music monthlies buoyed their circulation figures by kidnapping family members of subscribers a few months before the renewal date, The WORD magazine adopted the moral high ground:

“I’m proud that we didn’t go down the kidnapping and extortion route favoured by our competitors. I think history will prove that we were right,” says Editor Mark Ellen.

It was an uproarious 25 year period: The Leighties, Nineties, Noughties, and nacesnt Onesies witnessed the birth of new bands, new technology and new super powers. David Hepworth revealed that he had been able to fly since 1983 but rarely did so as he much preferred walking. For a few years Fraser Lewry inexplicably balanced his duties as WORD Digital Watch correspondent with a nocturnal existence as a crime-fighting cyborg, before quietly stepping down from this role sometime in 2005.

“I am no longer a nocturnal crime-fighting cyborg,” he said when we asked him.

1996 (Issue 85)

CUT-PRICE COCAINE POWERLESS TO SAVE NEW GENERATION OF DREADFUL BRITPOP GROUPS

The gutter music press christened it the ‘Columbian Spring’ but, 3 years on, the blizzard of inexpensive cocaine that helped to kick-start a revival of the British music scene is being tested to its absolute limits by a new wave of awful, home-grown bands.

Over 5000kg of cocaine, formerly the drug of choice of the wealthy and elite, was smuggled into England from Columbia by the powerful Pato Silvestre cartel, in the hope that its potency, ubiquity, and relatively low cost would galvanise a generation of British groups influenced by The Beatles, The Jam and The Kinks.

“Initially the cocaine was a success beyond our wildest dreams,” says shadowy cartel boss, Juan Morales when I meet him by chance in the audience at a Dubstar gig. “A tide of hubris swept across your tiny island nation. Mediocre pop groups immediately believed that they were the greatest bands who had ever walked the earth and that, with the simple addition of a basic string section or gospel choir, they could produce masterpieces that were the equal of A Day In the Life or Waterloo Sunset.

“Unfortunately our chemists have failed to keep pace with a new wave of dreadful second and third-tier Britpop groups. The mind-altering effects of cocaine at its current levels of concentration are insufficient to create the suspension of disbelief necessary to blot out the awfulness of the music that is being produced in the UK. There is no drug available anywhere that can turn Menswe@r into a credible act, or transform Being Brave - the fifth single from their debut album - into anything more than the limp, tuneless ballad that it is.”

The widening gulf between hype and perceived reality has created confusion among record buyers, with the foot soldiers of music journalism being among the hardest hit:

“Deja Voodoo by Heavy Stereo will go down in history as the greatest debut album ever released. I give it 4 out of ten,” says a tired and emotional staff writer on a weekly music magazine, before digressing into a rant concerning the evils of Thatcherism.

Meanwhile, Morales remains confident that the problem with his drug’s potency will soon be resolved:

“Already my men are hard at work synthesising compounds so powerful that they could launch a solo album by Liam Gallagher into the Top ten. You look at me as if I am mad, but what I say is true.”

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The dawn of the 1960s brought about not only a social revolution but also a technological one. The rise of space age materials were soon to change forever the way that The WORD magazine was assembled.

“I don’t know what they were using to glue the spine but you could usually get a decent contact high off it,” said one reader, swatting at a cloud of imaginary dragonflies, that became such a common fixture in the hallucinations of readers that they were eventually granted full species status and made the subject of a Wildlife on One special, narrated by David Attenborough.

The spinal adhesive turned out to be a highly venomous jellyfish, native to the Great Barrier Reef, which was rolled-out into a sausage-shaped strip and then pounded flat before the pages were attached. Amazingly some of the jellyfish survived the process. Following a number of fatal stings the WORD ditched the glue and switched to the polonium staples that are still used to bind the magazine today.

1967 (ISSUE 57)

WHO AMONG US HEEDS THE SILENT CRIES OF THE STAR DAISIES?

An editorial by Mark “Sun Child” Ellen

Jasmine Blossom; Lotus branch; Mighty Buddha; Tiny mouse. Where does mankind figure in this vast tapestry, intricately woven from the fabric of the universe? Or has he already been removed, cast-out from the garden of Eden for his shameful hang ups about his own naked body? Will there be a return from cold exile to the nurturing bosom of innocence? Will there come a time, dear reader, when, once more, the wheels of our cars break upon contact with butterflies? Will we ever cease our plunder of mother earth’s finite resources and instead stop to ponder the fragile existence of flowers; their sad journey through life from seed to wilt, for aren’t we all just flowers?

Today I meet a pair vision-questers - importers of divine insight from those far-flung celestial courts of transient wisdom, accessible by means of Dr Leary’s miracle food pills for the mind, or (for the staunch traditionalist) via the more arduous route of rigorous daily yoga sessions and the enthusiastic consumption of lentils.

On an unassuming suburban street in Walthamstow I peel back the corner of a corrugated iron fence - a curtain on reality exposing a deeper truth - to reveal a broken tract of waste ground. The so-called weeds that make this wilderness their home offer some insight into the way that nature chooses to express itself when freed from the oppressive trowel of the landscape gardener. At the centre of this wild island, deemed unworthy of being grazed by the surrounding cattle, squat two visionaries sharing deep communion with the soil.

The frizzy-haired flower child in the voluminous, lime green pantaloons is none other than Mellow Yellow song-smith and cosmic truth-sayer, Donovan. His companion, David Bowie - a relatively new head on the scene - is a dapper dandy, like some kind of far-out city banker who has turned his head from mammon and licked the all-knowing face of the Godhead.

“We chanced upon this urban oasis one night and immediately realised that it was part of the moon,” says Bowie. “Of course we immediately summoned the world media. So far you are the only person to have responded.”

“It is a gift,” says Donovan, affecting the reedy tones of a medieval warlock. “As part of the earth ascended spaceward so too did a piece of the moon descend upon east London.”

“How many miles high are we at the moment?” I enquire.

“Miles are a human notion tied up in the ownership of land and property,” preaches Bowie. “The Lunar Gnomes have but one unit of measurement – the accumulated deeds of a good man.”

My follow-up question, regarding how one of these so-called Lunar Gnomes goes about getting measured for a suit is lost, engulfed in the mind-blowing revelation about to issue from the lips of Donovan:

“The Star Pixies have 5000 words for love but no concept of war.”

“Right on.”

“I shall summon them,” he says removing a telescopic wooden flute from the breast pocket of his pied-piper jacket.

As Donovan trills a spritely melody, I join Bowie in staring intently at a distant mound of disturbed earth that I take to be the terrestrial residence of the Star Pixies. Suddenly he grabs me violently by the lapels.

“There! Can you see them!”

“Yes! Yes!” I lie, excitedly.

“Notice how the music guides their movements, which in turn inspires the music.”

“They were drawn to the moon by the whispering of the Star Daisies, which are the repositories of all universal knowledge,” says Donovan, resting his flute.

I look askance at a forlorn patch of daisies that I inadvertently trampled in my haste to reach this pair of visionaries.

“There is wisdom in the Star Daisies for those who have the ears to hear it,” continues Donovan.

As the three sit in silence, straining to hear the barely audible teachings of our interstellar plant brethren, our reverie is abruptly shattered:

“Oi!”

Two burly men are approaching from far side of the field.

“It’s the man!” bleats Donovan like a panicked sheep. “Two of them! Run Mr Ellen! Run for your life!”

With our exit blocked the three of us take off in the opposite direction across the broken ground, Bowie uncharitably shoulder-barging me into bronze medal position, causing me to stumble momentarily. As I haul myself over the corrugated iron fence, a pair of hands grasp hold of my green velvet jacket wrenching it off my back. Dropping down once more into metropolitan suburbia, I flee like a lizard who has amputated his own tail to escape the attentions of a predator.

POSTSCRIPT

You can never go back dear reader, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

The following morn, peering through a gap in the fence, I observe a gathering of suits congregated around a bright yellow digger. My green velvet jacket hangs limply from the roof of the cab like the flag of a defeated nation.

Where have all the flowers gone, I hear you ask? What was once a flowerbed for the Star Daisies is now a burial mound of bulldozed earth.

When will they ever learn, dear reader?

When will they ever learn?

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