‘Good evenin’ Kilmarnock. We’re The Miraculous Vespas…’
Maggie’s drum thudded into action and Grant’s casual strum built up speed afterwards. They had tried to vary their cover of ‘Where Were You?’ but it was such a strong song that the band inevitably retreated back into a more faithful rendition. Max Mojo was standing at the back of the Metropolis, trying to gauge both sound quality and audience reaction. Both fell into the ‘mediocre’ category. The band had no mixing desk to speak of; for future gigs that would have to be rectified. In a quarter-full club context, their sound was muddy. It was distorted and the volume was difficult to set as a result. More bass but less amplification would have been the starting point, Max now reckoned. The club was partially underground and had a mass of concrete surrounding it, but the crispness Max heard in his head was totally missing. One thing that did stand out though was Grant Delgado. He moved like an anaconda, draping himself around the microphone stand, rhythm guitar barely used after those opening chords. Max heard a few girls in the crowd talking favourably about Grant, and what they’d like him to do to them.
The band’s covers of ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’, and ‘Run, Run, Run’ – which Max had advised against – sounded only marginally better. Then Grant introduced ‘Your Love Is a Wonderous Colour’; the first of their two original songs. Grant had written it a month ago. Maggie liked it because she assumed it was about her. The Sylvester brothers also liked it, as they both had interesting parts. Eddie had a cyclical guitar part not dissimilar to the Beatles ‘Dear Prudence’, and Simon had a bass line that took a few twists and turns of its own. Admittedly, he had relied on his brother teaching him the nuances, but Simon Sylvester was definitely improving. For a first song, it was pretty accomplished, and while lyrically, it wouldn’t be giving Leonard Cohen any sleepless nights, the band considered it to be a cut above the dross being peddled by the Club Tropicana set.
The three-and-a-half-minute song ended with the same apathetic response as the three that had gone before. It had been Grant’s task to introduce The Heid, but he’d forgotten, and they’d walked off calmly but in a descending storm of ear-splitting feedback. The Heid was not amused.
‘Big hand fur the band, lays an’ gennulmen…’ The Heid sarcastically slow-clapped until the squealing sound had gone. He strode to the DJ booth and angrily flicked a switch. This was to have been Max Mojo’s job, but he was still at the back of the club eavesdropping. A burst of dry ice covered the stage, briefly obscuring the black-clad hypnotist with his shirt now open to the navel.
Max saw this and laughed at the thought of the skinny, whiteleather tie being his everyday-wear. He emerged through the fog to the sound of the theme from Star Wars. It would have been reasonably impressive as an entrance had The Miraculous Vespas not fucked up the illusion.
A deep voice that reminded Max of the Wizard of Oz burst through the Marshall amps. ‘I am the amazing and mysterious Heid,’ it said. ‘Prepare to be shocked and astonished at my powers of suggestion.’
‘Ah’m fuckin’ shocked an’ astonished any cunt actually pays tae see this!’ whispered Max to an adjacent stranger who had earlier paid to see it. She moved away from him.
‘You’re gonna see people do things you’d never believe possible…’ said the Heid.
‘…like eat a bastart onion, thinking it’s an apple?’ whispered Max, to no one in particular.
‘You’ll see them act out their fantasies … with no inhibitions at all,’ said The Heid. ‘You’ll be telling people about this next forty-five minutes for the rest of yer life…’ The Heid stepped back a few paces, to be briefly obscured again by the diminishing mist. With the majority of the fifty or so people in the audience currently smoking, this was less impressive than it might otherwise have been. The Heid re-emerged to a brief burst of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’. Another fuckin’ desperate cliche, thought Max.
‘I want you all to think of a happy place,’ said The Heid. He twisted his long grey beard with his right hand and appeared to Max to be scratching his arse with his left. But The Heid was looking for a 50p coin; performance prop number one.
‘Ah’m gonna toss it…’ said The Heid, waiting patiently for the laughs and sniggers that always followed this line. ‘And, because my mind is controlling yours now … those that can answer my question are gonna be the stars of tonight’s show.’
‘Aye, right’, ‘Tosser’ and ‘Ya prick’ came back at him from various standing hecklers.
The Heid flipped the coin and it landed. Max cynically assumed he’d simply ask people whether it had landed heads- or tails-up, but the old entertainer surprised the teenager by saying, ‘Those who know the identity of the person on the side facing upwards … step forward and come to the edge of the stage.’
Max sniggered. There was no stage, just a rough edge where sticky carpet met wooden dancefloor. The Heid had a rehearsed script though, and context didn’t alter it.
Max watched four people from different parts of the crowd move forward. It was, perhaps predictably, an equal gender split. He was sure that one of the women was the same woman that he saw earlier, on her knees and administering head to The Heid. She was now wearing a different top, though, and since Max hadn’t seen her face in the cleaner’s cupboard, he assumed he was mistaken.
The four made their way to the dancefloor where four wooden seats were now waiting for them. Out of the corner of his eye, Max noticed Eddie being restrained by his brother. Max headed down through the crowd to join them.
One by one, the four wrote the words ‘Britannia, seated with a lion’ on pieces of paper The Heid had handed them. After he held each piece up for the audience to examine, he asked the four what they had just written. One by one, the four said that they didn’t know. They had a look of total bemusement on their faces, as did most of the audience. The Heid declared them to be the most suggestible people present, and that he had planted the words. They were ignorant to the question but that he … The Mysterious Heid … was now controlling their minds.
Another simple mind seemingly being controlled was that of guitarist Eddie Sylvester. He was now being bundled by the rest of The Miraculous Vespas back into the same cleaner’s cupboard that had earlier doubled as The Heid’s un-dressing room.
‘Whit the fuck’s up wi’ him?’ shouted Max Mojo.
‘He wants tae be oot oan the dancefloor,’ said Grant. ‘That auld prick’s hypnotised him.’
‘Has he fuck! That’s aw a load ae shite, man,’ said Max.
‘His eyes are spinnin’ like a bloody kaleidoscope,’ said Maggie.
‘Has he been oan the mushrooms?’ Max demanded.
‘How should ah know?’ said Simon, before theatrically adding, arms outstretched, ‘I am not my brother’s fucking keeper.’
Grant and Maggie both laughed.
‘Gie it up, you’se two … an’ get him fuckin’ sorted oot, eh?’ said Max. ‘Ye’se are back oan in twenty minutes!’
The Heid’s act was indeed predictable. After warming up the crowd by having the four believe they were the new ABBA, with unsurprisingly awful voices, it progressed to the four ‘volunteers’ acting out a scene in a hotel restaurant. Each man was dining with the other’s wife. At the click of The Heid’s nicotine-stained fingers, that became suddenly apparent to all four. Hilarity was supposed to ensue. This running theme of swapped partners led to the subsequent ‘adjoining bedrooms’ scene, in which each ‘couple’ was challenged by The Heid to out-vocalise the other during role-playing sex. In one corner of the dancefloor an older woman was yodelling like Johnny Weissmuller while her much younger ‘partner’ barked during an energetically simulated doggy-style. In the other corner, the blonde Max thought he’d seen earlier shouted ‘Yee-Haw’ as she sat astride a bearded, dark-skinned boy, riding him to what seemed to her to be Grand National triumph. Only when the women were down to their underwear did The Heid step in and touch their heads, saying ‘Sleeeeep’ as he did so. All four instantaneously capitulated to The Heid’s will.
As a reward for their efforts the two males were given juicy ‘apples’, and the smell of raw onion filled the Metropolis. For his finale, the two women were running free, through the flower-filled meadows of Austria, singing ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music’ at the tops of their voices. Until The Heid suddenly intervened and reminded them that they had a profound fear of open spaces.
Both women shuddered and dived into the corners and crevices of the dancefloor. Max saw them both look genuinely fearful. He thought about this gig, and now reckoned on why Bobby Cassidy was so keen to get out of it. Fuckin’ walloper, he thought as he imagined Bobby’s smiling face. He went back behind the bar to gee up the band for their final four numbers. The Heid had just brought the two women back into the room, so to speak, and was bringing the ‘performance’ to a close. Max annoyingly heard more applause proffered for The Heid’s clapped-out, tired act than for the band. Still, it was a start. He’d get to work on the local pubs in the morning and get a proper, wee Ayrshire tour of their own going. He might try and approach Billy Sloan from the radio to come down in the hope of a bit of coverage. He even considered banging on Simple Minds’ manager, Bruce Findlay’s door. A future support slot with them would be fantastic, once the singer had written a few more original songs. Into the bargain, Findlay owned a few independent record stores around Scotland.
‘We’ll need tae just dae a few acoustic versions, Max.’
All four of them stared at Eddie Sylvester. He had wedged himself under the Belfast sink. He was shaking and sweating profusely.
‘Whit?’ said Max.
‘He thinks he’s … aggra-phobic,’ said Simon.
‘Fuck does that even mean? Is he jist angry?’ shouted Max.
‘Naw. Cannae go ootside intae open spaces,’ said Grant.
‘So how did he fuckin’ get here th’night then? Beamed straight doon fae the bastart Enterprise?’
‘Look, leave him in there. Let’s go, eh?’ said Maggie impatiently.
‘Get up ya stupid cunt!’ shouted Max, aiming a kick at Eddie’s coiled body.
‘Hey, fuckin’ leave him alone!’ Simon jumped in to defend his brother, qualifying the action with, ‘he might be an arsehole, but he’s ma arsehole tae batter, no’ yours.’
‘Fuck off. Get him oot oan that stage noo or yer both history,’ screamed Max Mojo. Grant and Maggie had already headed down the narrow corridor.
‘That auld wanker’s fuckin’ done the voodoo shite oan him. That’s your fault, Mojo! He’s never gonnae get ootae this cupboard.’
‘Don’t talk shite!’ Max could hear Grant and Maggie tuning up. ‘Ah’ll be back,’ said Max. As he turned away, Simon gave him the fingers.
Out in the club, Grant was introducing Maggie as the best drummer in Scotland. Some people had drifted away, but around thirty remained. It was now one am on a Wednesday morning. That in itself was worthy of celebration. Tuesday night was the worst for any type of event. It was just beyond consideration as part of a previous extended weekend hangover, and too early to be regarded as part of the run-up to the next one. The most miserable of all days, Tuesdays.
‘We’re gonna soothe you into Wednesday with a few wee classics,’ whispered Grant Delgado. Shorn of the uncontrolled amplification, Grant’s voice, light guitar strumming and Maggie’s brushed strokes made ‘Here Comes the Sun’ sound fantastic to Max Mojo. It was the best they had ever performed it, in his opinion. They followed that with a glistening ‘Life’s a Gas’, and then a slowed down ‘Touch Me’, with Grant channelling Bolan and Morrison in a way that gave Max Mojo his second hard-on of the evening. The duo’s newly adopted theme song, ‘Thirteen’ rounded off the covers.
‘We’d like to leave you wi’ this. It might end up being our first single. It’s somethin’ called “The First Picture”.’
Max Mojo was astonished. He didn’t even know such a song existed, far less that they would be revealing it tonight. It was a fragile, delicate number full of soaring melodies and unexpected chord changes. Max could hear it in his head, with the full band in flow, and with some decent production. For Max, it stood comparison with the four stonewallers that had preceded it. It was an instant classic. Grant Delgado was a fucking superstar in waiting. Max’s cock was now bulging out of his tight, pin-striped jeans. As soon as the song finished – and the best cheers of the night were its reward – Max Mojo dived into the gents and relieved the pressure.