When the Music's Over

In which The Author isn't singing any more

Two weeks ago yesterday, something strange happened to me. Early in the morning, I got out of the bath and suddenly felt very dizzy and light-headed. As I mentioned in the last entry, I'd climbed the Monument in London less than a week before. I'd suffered no ill effects as a result of climbing over three hundred steps and then emerging onto a viewing platform some 160 feet about the ground. A few days later, I could barely make it down the stairs in my house without feeling wobbly.

I sat down for a few minutes, thinking that my blood pressure might have been a bit off when I stood up after a hot bath. That didn't help. I made sure I ate something, just in case my blood sugar was down, and waited for the feeling to pass.

It didn't pass. By lunchtime I was still feeling light-headed, and spent the rest of the day at home. I certainly didn't feel up to venturing out for karaoke that evening. I stayed in and watched a film instead. It was the same story on the Friday; if anything, the effect was even more pronounced when I lay down in bed. I didn't like the way the week was panning out.

The following Monday morning, when the strange sensations still hadn't subsided, I rang the surgery. I described the symptoms to Janet, the receptionist, and she booked me in for lunchtime that day. Dr Wardrop said it was probably just a touch of vertigo. He checked my ears, gave me some tablets which he said would help, and told me it would probably pass in a week or so.

It hasn't passed. In fact, on Monday morning this week I got out of bed and promptly keeled over. I managed to land against the bedside cabinet, giving my neck and left shoulder a fair crack on the way down.

Yes, you read that correctly – my left shoulder. After seven years of problems with my right shoulder, culminating with an operation in 2008, I'd gone and crocked my other arm. It was painful all right, but I didn't think I'd done any serious damage. However, the pain gradually intensified as the week went on.

I headed down to Minor Injuries this morning to get it checked over. The X-ray didn't show any bone damage, so the nurse thinks I might have torn a muscle. Armed with ibuprofen and co-codamol, I'm preparing for a fairly laid-back weekend of reading Michael Moorcock's latest book, the excellent, evocative and mysterious The Whispering Swarm.

I went to the Lighthouse from the library yesterday, simply because I wanted to take a couple of ibuprofen and needed something to wash them down. (A soft drink, before you ask.) The karaoke regulars were starting to gather, even though it was still comparatively early. Joe and Phil were there when I arrived; Martin was outside chatting to someone I vaguely know. I took two painkillers and had a chat with Joe and Phil. After about an hour or so, the tablets hadn't even started to take the edge off. I decided a pint wouldn't hurt. In fact, I figured that a pint or two might ease the pain slightly. (Even if they didn't ease the pain physically, I might care a little less about it.) Phil's sister Claire arrived during my first pint, so our little gang was assembling as usual. Huntley came in a bit later with his usual gang, and they filled a table in the middle of the pub.

Tara was setting up her gear when Chazza walked in, together with a guy I didn't recognise. She'd texted me in the afternoon, telling me that the trip to Cardiff hadn't gone according to plan, and asking if I was going to be out for karaoke as usual. I said I wouldn't promise. I didn't know if I'd enjoy it because I was in so much pain.

They joined our table and we started chatting, but I wasn't in the mood for company. Joe got up to sing first; Phil was next, then Chazza, followed by Martin. So far, so Thursday. Then Tara called my name. I just shook my head. I really wasn't feeling well enough to leave my seat, never mind stand up and sing. I'd done the same last week, too. That time it was mainly because I was feeling a bit under the weather, but also because there were too many people who couldn't even work out the correct way round to wear a baseball cap. It wasn't a good audience.

To make matters worse, last night I was sitting directly under the TV, and it was tuned to the sports coverage. In the meantime, Keistan had come in and staked his claim to a table in the corner. After about twenty minutes of everyone watching the Olympics above my head, I grabbed my stuff and joined him, out of sight of the stage. He didn't stay long; he sang one song, came back to our table, drank up, and headed home. Tina and Bethan came in and said hello, but I was in too much pain to talk to them. I was left to my own devices until about 9.20. I didn't even make my excuses – I just left, without a word to anyone. I wanted the bus home, some decent painkillers, a hot bath, and an early night.

It's not as though I'd have been up for singing anything last night, anyway. In fact, I've pretty much exhausted my repertoire. Over the past fifteen years or so in various venues in and around Aberdare, I think I've sung every song that I a) like enough to want to sing; b) know well enough to try and sing; c) have been able to find on the karaoke playlist; and d) feel confident enough to sing in front of friends and relative strangers alike.

And, even if I say so myself, I haven't got a bad track record. I've made 'Me and my Monkey' by Robbie Williams into a karaoke mini-adventure every couple of months. I finally nailed 'Changes' by David Bowie on a third attempt, shortly after the man himself passed away. I think I'm the only person in Aberdare ever to do both vocal parts of 'Comfortably Numb' – the Pink Floyd original, of course, not the pisspoor Scissor Sisters attempt. On occasions I've also done 'Won't Get Fooled Again' (which I always introduce as my 'election night special'), 'Light My Fire', 'Waiting for the Man', and 'Common People' – which owes far more to William Shatner's version than the Pulp original. I've even attempted (once) 'Sympathy for the Devil', which was a bit of a failed experiment. Still, if you don't try it, you'll never know for sure.

I did 'Up the Junction' by Squeeze a few months ago, just to prove I still could. Then there's 'Piano Man' and 'Scenes From an Italian Restaurant', two of Billy Joel's finest songs, both of which I can get away with to a certain extent. My pal George once told me that I like songs that tell a story. I'd never thought about it until he mentioned it, but yes, he's right – the majority of the songs do have a story, or at least some sort of meaning, rather than being just a bunch of random words slung together.

If I've just come back from London I might do 'Baker Street'; other times, I might give 'Davy's on the Road Again' a go. Both are songs about people in similar circumstances. I didn't understand what Gerry Rafferty or Manfred Mann's Earth Band were on about when I was twelve years old, but both those records made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Now that I'm older, and I know a great many semi-pro and amateur musicians, I understand them totally.

I don't often sing with other people, because it's pretty unusual to meet someone who actually shares my taste in music. On the occasions when she's drunk enough, Rhian and I make a fair job of 'Perfect 10' by the Beautiful South. I also managed to rope the beautiful Sam E. into 'Comfortably Numb' about eighteen months ago, when she was paying a rare visit to Aberdare. She repaid the favour by getting me to sing 'Valerie' (the Mark Ronson version). In the Cambrian about a month ago, Claire twisted my arm into singing an entirely different 'Changes', with her taking the Kelly Osbourne part and me being Ozzy. Well, I was half-pissed, so it sort of worked.

And, of course, Chazza and I have made 'Shut Up' by the Black Eyed Peas into one of our set pieces. It was actually her idea for us to sing together, so I can only take half the blame. I'd sung it in Elliots on a Thursday night a few years previously, with another Claire, so I sort-of knew it anyway. When Chazz suggested one night, out of the blue, that we should do a song together, I thought about it for a while and then remembered that one.

It turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. She'd split from her girlfriend, so she was (understandably) feeling angry and hurt. It didn't take much for me to play the innocent party to her vengeful woman spurned. Even though we got slightly lost in the middle, I think we did a pretty good job of it. The following week we did it again. And the following week. The fourth week, we drank up immediately and went to the Bush so that we could do it yet again.

Which is where we reached the stage I told you about in the last entry.

Even if I'd been feeling well enough last night, I wouldn't have wanted to sing 'Shut Up' anyway. Of all the things I fear about karaoke – the hecklers, the pissed dancers, the random stage invasions, the sudden crashing realisation that actually, no, you don't know this fucking song at all – the worst case scenario is getting stuck in a rut.

Plenty of the gang are stuck in a rut, I'm sad to say. Martin is a very fine singer, and goes to Spain to work in a friend's bar for a few months every year. I don't know what his professional set is like, because on the basis of the available evidence he knows exactly four songs; maybe five, if Tara twists his arm to do a duet. Phil's rendition of 'American Trilogy' is getting very stale now, since he starts with it every week and does it in the Cambrian on Fridays as well. Joe's 'Enter Sandman' is pretty decent too, but the novelty is starting to wear off. Huntley seems to have settled into a groove of light reggae, a bit of soul, and a touch of funk. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I'd like to hear him venture out of his comfort zone once in a while.

On the other hand, Tony S. shocked us last night by doing a song that was written within the current millennium. I didn't even think he knew Elvis Presley had died, to be honest.

I don't know half the songs that Bethan, Claire and Chazza sing, so I can't be sure if they're doing something different anyway. They're heavily into all the modern stuff, and my DAB radio doesn't pick up Radio 1 because it values its continued existence too highly.

So, between these attacks of vertigo, the lack of variation in general, and the impossibility of finding backing tracks for the songs I really do fancy (I've told you about my adventures with the Scott Walker song), I think my karaoke days are probably numbered.

I'll miss the singing part of it, of course, because it's one of the few hobbies I indulge with other people. I'll miss the social part of it, because there's a good gang of us and we always have a laugh before and during the music. I won't miss the long walk home at the end of the night, though, especially now that our brief summer is drawing to a close. And I especially won't miss having to sub Chazz for beer and/or taxi fare every week.

Will anyone miss me? Well, that's debatable.

Maybe I'll venture out every couple of months, instead of every week. By doing that I can keep my set reasonably fresh and avoid becoming the next Martin, or the next Phil. Or I might just knock it on the head entirely. It's been great fun and I've met some amazing people, but like everything else, without a new challenge every so often, singing karaoke soon becomes tiresome and pointless.

Maybe I should head out next Thursday for one final fling. Who doesn't like the Rolling Stones, after all? 'The Last Time', anyone … ?

The Not-so Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

In which The Author has the feeling he might have been cheated

I won't go into too much detail about this latest adventure. Suffice it to say that the other person concerned has been mentioned a couple of times in this blog already. I don't know whether she reads it – but if she does, well …

This story begins a few Thursdays ago, when I was out for karaoke in the Lighthouse. The usual gang were there, and we were drinking and chatting in between songs. One of the girls had just split up with her (female) partner after being cheated on, so she was feeling rather tired and emotional. Towards the end of the evening she asked me if I'd take her home in a taxi, as she didn't want to wait on the rank on her own.

I asked her where she lived, and she told me 'Aberaman.' Now, I spent quite a bit of time exploring Aberaman for the Vanishing Valleys and Street Names Projects, so I know that it's much bigger than you might imagine from the map.

I asked, 'Is that the Curre Street end or the Chapel Street end?'

'Maes y Deri', she replied.

I said, 'Good God, that's almost Pontypridd!'

It's a slight exaggeration, but it's pretty much as far south as you can get and still remain technically within Aberaman. But I agreed all the same, and rang a couple of numbers I had stored in my wallet.

We ended up getting a car off the rank at about midnight. Because the driver lives not far from me he didn't charge me for the return leg.

I didn't feel too bad about picking up the tab for that, to be honest. If I'd caught a taxi on my own it would have cost me nearly four quid. An extra pound to make sure my friend got home safely seemed like a decent investment.

The following Thursday we were both rather pissed by the end of the night, having gone from the Lighthouse to the Bush for the karaoke there. There was a decent gang out that night – Gema, Thi Nga, Mair H., Wendy, and another few people I haven't seen for a while – and for once the Bush was fairly bearable. We stayed out until closing time, and once again we jumped in a taxi to make sure my friend got home okay.

Anyway, the Saturday after that I was in London. On the Sunday my friend and I had pencilled in a visit to the Harlequins Bowls Club, behind the Coliseum in Trecynon. The Colstars were auditioning for Hairpsray; as I've previously mentioned, I think my friend would enjoy the Colstars. Even though she's missed out on the casting for the forthcoming show, I invited her along to meet some of the gang and see what it's all about.

I messaged her on Facebook on the Sunday afternoon, but she was skint and couldn't even afford the bus up to Trecynon. I couldn't sub her, either, because I was pretty much cleaned out after London. We said, 'Never mind, these things happen,' and agreed to go along another time.

The following Thursday I didn't go out at all, because I've been suffering from frequent dizzy spells over the past fortnight or so. My GP reckons it's just a touch of vertigo, and nothing to worry about. In fact, we had a bit of a laugh about it when I was in the surgery.

'Ironic, isn't it?', I said. 'Last weekend I climbed the Monument in London and didn't bat an eyelid. Over the weekend I could barely get upstairs without wobbling.'

On the Monday I was in town when I bumped into my friend. We went to Thereisnospoon for a coffee, and then embarked on a mini pub-crawl. (Actually, a full-scale pub crawl in Aberdare only takes about two hours these days.) All the time, I was waiting for her to put her hand in her pocket, as she'd just been paid, but it didn't happen.

When we were in Prince of Wales, I put some songs on the jukebox. I've been hunting for male/female duets that we might want to try out on a Thursday. Halfway through one of them, she said, 'This is so gay!'

I said, 'You can talk!'

'I'm bisexual,' she objected. I remembered Lawrence Durrell's line about bisexual people just wanting the best of both worlds, but I didn't mention it to her face.

On Wednesday evening last week I was in the Cambrian. It was quiz night. As an old friend of mine was in town for a few days, I'd decided to stick around and catch up with him and the other lads. I'd been there for about five minutes when I had a text asking if I around. Guess who it was from …

She asked if she could come over, so I invited her to join me. When she arrived I'd only really just started my first pint. (I was looking through a little bit of copy for another friend of mine at the time.) She got a drink, and I finished what I was doing while she looked through Facebook on her phone. We chatted for a little while, and then her phone rang.

It was her brother – allegedly – asking her to meet him off the train in Aberdare. She drank up, said she'd be straight back, and headed off to the station. By 9.30 it was fairly obvious that she wasn't coming back. The quiz was a bit of a shambles anyway, so I texted her to say she wasn't missing a great deal, apart from our sparkling company.

I didn't go to karaoke last week either, so I haven't seen my friend since last week. However, this lunchtime she texted me out of the blue to see if I fancied going to Cardiff tonight. She didn't say what venue she had in mind, but apparently the drinks are a quid each. I dare say you have to pay about ten quid to get in, though. (I didn't work in Cardiff for nearly twenty years without learning a thing or two about the nightlife down there.) I said that if we went to Cardiff tonight, I wouldn't be able to go to karaoke tomorrow as well.

She replied that she wouldn't be out tomorrow anyway.

I asked her what time she was planning on going.

When she told me she'd be getting the last train from Aberdare, and returning at about 2 a.m., the alarm bells started ringing very loudly in my head.

Since Dai the Shit Engine has to be safely tucked up in bed by midnight every night, I thought 'taxi!' immediately. The last time I caught a taxi home from Cardiff, Waterstones paid for it and didn't get much change from fifty notes. That was over ten years ago. Go figure …

But no, apparently, we'd be able to have a lift back with her brother's girlfriend. Now I've never met her brother, but I've seen him around town and on her Facebook, and (jumping to conclusions, I know) I don't like the look of him. I doubt if we'd hit it off somehow. I certainly wouldn't want to rely on complete strangers for a lift home at stupid o'clock.

Especially if – as is quite possible – my friend meets someone her own age, and with an active sex life, and vanishes halfway through the night.

So I didn't even leave before making my excuses this time.

I waited a little while, then texted her back. I told her I'd arranged to go out early with my good friend Alwyn the artist, to scope out possible locations for paintings. Since then, silence has fallen.

I was talking to another couple of friends the evening before last, and her name cropped up in conversation. They told me that she's got a bit of a reputation as a user – not of drugs, remarkably for Aberdare, but of people. I'd kind of suspected this for myself after the past few weeks, but I'd decided to let it go for the time being.

However, sharing a taxi to the arse-end of Aberaman, and subbing her a couple of pints beforehand, is one thing. Going to Cardiff on what might well be a fool's errand is a hell of a leap from there.

It's not as though we're even going to end up in any sort of relationship. She's quite literally young enough to be my granddaughter. The only way we're ever going to get 'together' is with mics in our hands on a Thursday evening. She knows it; I know it; everyone else knows it. She's a nice girl, and she's undeniably a talented singer. She's attractive and quite bright, but that sort of age gap is totally absurd. I had my fingers burned too many times with girls of that age when I was still young enough to be considered a viable prospect.

In fact, the more I think about it, I'm really glad I decided to listen to my Inner Sensible Person, instead of being led around by my prick, as usually happens on these occasions. Even if my Inner Sensible Person did sound surprisingly like Johnny Rotten leaving the stage at the Winterland Theater, San Francisco, on 14 January 1978 …

A Few Weeks in the Matrix

In which The Author goes back to the Source

I recently landed the biggest proofreading job so far. Gollancz are reissuing William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels – Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – together with his collection of short stories Burning Chrome. Guess who got the gig to do all four?

It's been exciting for me, because they want these to be the definitive editions, and so I've been entrusted to bash a degree of consistency into the books. It's understandable, I suppose, because they came out at different times, and were presumably copy-edited by different people. I've been making long lists of charactes, product manufacturers (real and fictional), locations (real and fictional), and futuristic slang words, technical terms and foreign words, in order to apply the changes across the board.

It's been a fairly long time since I read Neuromancer, and I've never tackled the sequels before. As a result, I hadn't noticed just what a heavy influence Mr Gibson has been on the mainstream of science fiction over the past twenty years or so. I suppose the most obvious nod to his books was one of my favourite films of all times, The Matrix.

While the idea of plugging into a 'virtual reality' system anticipates Neuromancer by a few years – I've traced it back as far as Christopher Priest's novel A Dream of Wessex – it was the Wachowski Brothers who really brought the idea to a mass audience. While Mr Gibson uses the term 'the matrix' (with a lower case m) to describe the cyberspace world his characters explore, I think his vision of the internet owes more to the embarrassing graphics of Lawnmower Man than to our everyday experiences of surfing the Net. However, the character of the Finn, an AI construct who acts as an intermediary between the human protagonists and the sentient programs inhabiting the matrix, was a direct steal as the Oracle. (In Mona Lisa Overdrive the Finn even refers to himself as 'an oracle.') While the films owe a conceptual debt to Mr Gibson's books, the two media are worlds apart.

No, what I've got in mind is the subtle way in which Mr Gibson's ideas have spread into popular SF films and TV programmes over the years. Take Minority Report, for example. That's another great film based on a very short story by one of the Grand Masters of the genre, Philip K. Dick. You might not have noticed it unless you were looking, but the rundown areas of Washington DC are referred to at one point as 'the sprawl'. That's straight out of Neuromancer – as are the little mechanical spiders which the police use to search the building in which John Anderton is hiding.

Those same little spiders turned up again in the second episode of the revived Doctor Who, of all places. And it's though Doctor Who, perhaps surprisingly, that many of Mr Gibson's ideas have made it onto the small screen. In the two-parter 'Silence in the Library'/Forests of the Dead', Steven Moffat introduced the idea of an electronic interface which could record a person's consciousness for a short time. At the end of the second episode, all the characters who've been killed by the Vashta Nerada, and River Song, who sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, are reunited in a virtual world. That's a nod to Neuromancer, where the stored consciousness of a dead hacker known as the Dixie Flatline helps our hero crack the biggest encryption job of all time. In 'Time Heist', in the most recent series, one of the characters is an augmented human, who can plug hardware into a socket behind his ear. That's straight out of the Sprawl books as well.

Although they're some three decades old, and Mr Gibson has left the Sprawl behind to write more complex but less technologically biased books, his legacy in modern SF is huge and widespread. Read the books for yourself when they're reissued, and see how many winks to his ideas you can spot next time you're watching a film or enjoying the Doctor's latest adventures.

Several years ago, I became famous in the pub for remembering huge amounts of trivia which I could recall at a moment's notice. I used to tease my pals that I was going to start charging them for storing facts in my brain. That, of course, is the basic plot of 'Johnny Mnemonic' – later made into a rather disappointing but very stylish film with Keanu Reeves. And that's the reason I'm writing this today. The first story in Burning Chrome is, of course, 'Johnny Mnemonic'. Even though I had the book in front of me when I was working on the proof, the Voyager edition isn't without its production errors.

So, like Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded, I had to go back to the Source. If you've read my blog 'OmniScience' from a few years ago, you'll know that I was regularly reading this cutting-edge magazine of science fact, fiction and fantasy around the time that I was studying for my O levels, back in the very early 1980s.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I can now reveal the Source, as it was was revealed to me when I was about fifteen, and didn't have a fucking clue what was going on in the story at the time. Thirty-five years on, I still can't quite believe that I'm working on the reissue. When I wrote to Gollancz and told them I'd been a SF fan for most of my life, I don't think they believed me. Well, here's the proof (no pun intended!)