Bandwagon

curtain rose above the level of Vid’s tracks that Keys noticed that something was wrong.

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ he hissed in a loud whisper.

  ‘Behind my amp,’ said Vid.

  ‘What’s he doing there?’

  Vid shrugged. ‘No idea - we’ll work that out later,’ he said and he began to play.

  Keys shook his head despairingly, but struck his first chord in perfect sync with the opening notes of Riff’s solo. Whatever happened, the show had to go on…

  The final echoes of Listening to Nothing died away, radiating out like ripples from the stage. Several seconds passed before the audience, realising that the gig was over, began to applaud. It wasn’t what you might call a tumultuous applause – there weren’t really enough people to produce that much noise – but it was warm and seemed genuinely enthusiastic. On the whole, Keys considered, it would have been nice if there had been as many people listening at the end of the gig as at the beginning, but it was a café and some people had most likely only come in for food.

  He scanned the faces of the audience for reaction: some still looked confused about the disembodied voice that had nervously provided words to accompany the robots’ playing, others were displaying the normal rabbit-in-headlights stare caused by having the lights switched on after an hour in a darkened room. There were no people rushing the stage for autographs or bobbing their heads erratically to a badly remembered beat but the vibe was good – for a first gig it had been a success.

  Keys left his keyboards and drifted over to the back of the stage, where Nutter was helping Vid down the stairs. Vid’s wheel wasn’t designed for staircases, so it was fortunate that he was fairly light and Nutter was very strong.

  ‘How do you think it went?’ Keys asked Vid.

  ‘Seriously?’ said Vid.

  Keys nodded.

  ‘It would have been better if people hadn’t spent the whole gig trying to work out why there was evidence of oil and none of blood.’

  ‘W-Where is B-ben?’ said Nutter.

  ‘Haven’t seen him yet,’ said Keys. ‘I think he left the stage just before the applause.’

  They found him with Riff in the small backroom which served as the band’s dressing room. Since only Ben wore clothes and he hadn’t dressed up for the occasion, the room was currently serving the purpose of a place of sanctuary. Ben looked pale and tired and was sitting in a chair nursing a beer.

  ‘How are you?’ said Keys, his eye-strip glowing softly and showing his concern.

  ‘OK, I think,’ said Ben. ‘How do you think we did?’

  ‘Not bad. Probably a couple of bum notes, but I doubt anyone noticed. The audience seemed happy enough.’

  ‘They didn’t seem that impressed.’

  ‘That’s nothing to worry about,’ said Keys. ‘The first couple of gigs are going to be filled with people who don’t know what to expect. If we’re any good, then the people who like us will tell their friends and the audience will start to become sort of self-selecting.

  Ben turned to Riff. ‘How do you think it went?’ he asked.

  ‘You did fine,’ said Riff. He looked at Keys. ‘What was that you did at the end of Daft People?’ he asked.

  ‘Which bit do you mean?’

  ‘Just before the end.’ He turned to Vid. ‘Can you show him?’

  Vid’s screen displayed a look of concentration as he searched his memory for a few seconds, then he began to play back a recording of the song in question. An array of pulsing bars displayed on one of his cheeks, moving in time to the music.

  Riff listened, nodding along to the beat. He made a circular motion and Vid fast-forwarded a little. Another motion and Vid skipped on further to a particularly laid-back guitar lick.

  ‘Spin on a bit,’ Riff advised. Vid skipped on to the end –Keys’ keyboard part had evolved from simply underpinning the structure of the song to exploring a countermelody.’

  ‘I know it isn’t what we practiced, but it just sounded right,’ said Keys. The melody wound down and they reached a closing chord. Vid stopped the playback.

  Riff nodded. ‘I think we could extend it and do a sort of playout,’ he said. ‘The song ends too abruptly at the moment anyway.’

  Ben looked between the robots, somewhat exasperated.

  ‘We’re going to do it again next week, then?’ he asked nobody in particular.

  Riff shrugged. ‘You wanted a change,’ he said.

  11

  Seen through the eyes of time, history is a landscape. Take a look.

  A blurry vision of a room, images of broken light that dance before you like a thousand eyes; a kaleidoscopic infinity of realities that turn cartwheels cross the floor. It would undoubtedly render you somewhat seasick. The crowd, however, are calling out for more.

  And so the band gave. On a hundred nights there were a hundred stages, a hundred gigs, a hundred locations in the landscape of time; each distinct, yet each a part of a greater whole, like a melody inside a chord that lasted forever.

  But that melody was evolving. There were themes, of course - every night the opening number, the slow one, the crowd-pleaser and the encore – but over and above this the story changed. Ben’s position moved from behind the speakers. Riff sank a little into the shadows of the wing to join the keyboardist. At one instant – or perhaps in one space – he is heard to observe: ‘well, at least he’s visible now.’ ‘Yes,’ agrees the keyboardist, ‘but it would be nice if he would face the audience.’

  The light fandango was in full procession.

  It had been three months since the debut performance of Blood and Oil and the gigs had settled into a kind of routine. The musicians would arrive at half past eight, have a quick drink and then go backstage. At five to nine they would be waiting for the curtain to go up, Riff meticulously tuning his guitar, Vid replacing one of the strings on his bass (usually the A string, although he didn’t think there was any particular relevance to this), Nutter practising artistic twirls with his drumsticks and Ben picking them up when they invariably landed somewhere backstage.

  Keys would be sitting, arms doubly akimbo, in quiet contemplation of higher things7, relaxing himself before the gig began. After five or ten minutes the curtain would go up – there was no longer the need for an announcement – and Riff would begin to pick out the introduction to their first number, a piece purposefully composed to allow each band member to join in one after the other, building the atmosphere with the complexity of the song.

  As Riff’s guitar finished its electrifying opening gambit, Vid would bring in his bass, followed by Nutter’s steady drumming. Keys would then innocuously introduce one keyboard as backing texture, followed by the other playing a complimentary melody to Riff’s lead. Finally, Ben would begin to sing – a meandering tune which would begin wordlessly before springing into esoteric lyrics about the nature of time, space, love, death and income tax. And so the gig would begin. All the by now familiar tunes would take their turns on the stage, and after two hours the band would take their final bow of the evening, the sound of Listening to Nothing still resonating around the room, mixed with the appreciative applause of the listeners, and the curtain would drop noiselessly before them.

  After perhaps the hundredth gig, perhaps the thousandth, Ben found himself on the edge of the stage in contemplative mood. He sat, watching as the service robots scurried between the now empty tables, cleaning them and placing the upended chairs on top. Two smaller robots, which resembled oversized mice, buzzed busily around their feet, vacuuming the floor, their dustbags billowing behind them like giant external lungs.

  A presence beside him distracted from the industrious display and he looked round to see Nutter sitting down next him, his huge metal legs nearly crushing one of the vacubots as he stretched them out in front of him. The vacubot turned to face the drummer, its dustbag puffing and deflating gently as if it were taking deep breaths. It bleeped irritably and Nutter, noticing the bot for the first time, moved his feet and looked
down.

  ‘S-Sorry,’ he said. ‘I d-didn’t see you there.’

  The bot made a noise which sounded suspiciously like a snort of derision then trundled away to resume its cleaning operations.

  ‘G-good gig,’ Nutter said to Ben conversationally.

  ‘Seemed alright,’ Ben agreed reluctantly.

  ‘You should h-have seen the audience. They s-seemed to be enj-joying themselves.’

  ‘They still make me nervous. I can’t sing with them watching me.’

  ‘You h-haven’t tried,’ said Nutter. ‘P-perhaps you should.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘I’ll get around to it,’ he said. He took his harmonica out from an inside pocket and began to play a twelve bar blues. After a few bars he sighed, the breath emerging as a drawn out note through the instrument.

  ‘Harmonica just isn’t our sort of music really, is it?’ he mused.

  ‘I l-like it,’ said Nutter, his eyes glowing warmly.

  ‘That’s not what I meant. I don’t mean we don’t like it; it’s just not right for the kind of music we’re playing.’

  ‘W-why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just… perhaps it’s that we don’t need another melody instrument with Riff’s guitar and Keys’ keyboards.’

  Nutter shrugged, he wasn’t sure if Ben was expecting an answer, but he’d learnt that the young human was like an old computeach – they couldn’t perform calculations without making lots of clicking and whirring noises either. Clearly some humans needed to make a noise