Bandwagon

the band is talentless and consistently fail to reproduce their overproduced records on stage, then inaudibility can be a positive boon – but it has been known to be a problem with other popular performers such as politicians or prophets, whose misheard or misreported messages have led to many a war or spurious religious decree. This is hardly a new problem, however: some of the historically more popular acts managed to reach the same level of inaudibility in much smaller venues.

  ‘What?’ Keys yelled across the stage at Riff, whilst desperately watching his fingers. He couldn’t hear his keyboard at all and was playing purely by sight.

  ‘I said, where did all these girls come from anyway?’ Riff yelled back. He was used to playing his guitar without looking at it or listening to it and could therefore afford to face Keys whilst conversing.

  ‘I don’t know, but I wish I knew what they were screaming about. We’re not that bad are we?’

  ‘Maybe they’re just in pain,’

  ‘Well, I wish they’d go and see a doctor. I’m probably playing all kinds of wrong notes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said Vid. ‘If you can’t hear them, I doubt they can.’

  ‘What?’ Keys gave him a puzzled look.

  ‘I said-’ Vid began. ‘Oh, never mind.’

  ‘Is it just me,’ said Keys, ‘or are they getting louder?’

  Vid shrugged and concentrated on his bass playing.

  The evening had, Riff considered, been an odd one. First he’d been stopped in the street when he’d been locking the van and asked to sign a piece of paper by a group of children. Then, as if that wasn’t odd enough, they’d barely started playing their second number when a group of girls had run into the café, rushed up to the stage and started screaming.

  The noise was loud. Very loud. So loud, in fact, that even Ben had been forced to turn round and see what the commotion was. Riff wondered how they managed to keep it up. They hadn’t stopped to recharge for the last twenty minutes.

  He finished playing the solo – very well he thought, shame nobody could hear it – and started strumming for the final verse. Ben was standing at his mic, his face flushed with the effort of trying to sing loudly enough to hear himself. He wasn’t singing now - he’d had a coughing fit after a few minutes and was now miming - but nobody seemed to have noticed. But he was facing the audience and smiling, so that was progress of a sort.

  Riff returned his own attention to the audience: there seemed to be a lot of young girls, although there were a couple of boys being squashed out at the back. Despite being in the minority, the boys were being completely ignored, although oddly, they didn’t seem too put out at this.

  The robot cast his eyes over the front row of screaming humanity and it struck him that there was also something odd about the girls to the right of stage: most of the audience were fairly flushed from the heat and lack of breath, but the ones on the right seemed to be an unusual shade of blue. As he watched, the colour of their skin changed to green. After another second it shifted again, this time to some kind of pattern of yellow and pink spots.

  Riff glanced to his right and noticed with some surprise that Vid’s face was a mass of colour. Although he knew the robot was designed for promotional purposes, he’d never seen his display showing anything other than an approximation of facial expression. Now, however, it was projecting patterns and shapes, swirling and morphing in time to the beat of his bass guitar. The lights were dazzling, although the audience seemed to be as oblivious to the display as they were to the music.

  Riff nodded thoughtfully – the moment was taking them all in different ways, he just hoped it wasn’t a side effect of the noise levels and that no permanent damage had been done. By the time the curtain fell, his own hearing circuits were ringing. As the echoes of the evening died away he retreated to the dressing room, ran his audio calibration program, and relaxed in the blessed silence. Just the same, though, there was something… moving in the memory of that din.

  It was a few minutes before the others joined him. His four bandmates ambled aimlessly into the dressing room and slumped, gazing vaguely into empty space as if watching the atoms playing leapfrog. Occasionally Ben prodded at his ears in a human approximation of recalibration. The human’s face was a mixture of pain and pleasure – expressions, Riff noted, that seemed almost inseparably close. Vid, meanwhile, was also displaying a face, albeit one with a more bemused expression than usual.

  It was Keys who broke the silence. ‘What was that?’ he asked quietly.

  The others turned to look at him as he hovered over a chair with one pair of hands on his waist and the other supporting his aching head.

  ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea,’ said Ben

  ‘It was loud, whatever it was,’ said Vid.

  Riff flexed his fingers and put his hands behind his head. ‘I thought they were in pain at first,’ he said. ‘Then I realised they actually seemed to be enjoying themselves.’

  ‘Odd way of enjoying yourself.’

  ‘Perhaps they couldn’t hear each other,’ said Keys. ‘It could be there’s some kind of phase cancellation going on if you’re standing in the audience.’

  Nutter, who had seemed oblivious to the conversation up to this point, turned to look at Riff. ‘I heard some people in a pub the other night,’ he said – Riff noted the lack of stammer. ‘They were talking about this new band – really hot guitarist, good rhythm section. They even said that the vocalist was so cool he didn’t look at the audience. Do you think he meant us?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Keys. ‘Did he say anything about the keyboardist?’

  ‘Don’t know. I only caught a bit of the conversation.’

  ‘Sounds like word’s getting out,’ said Riff.

  The robots nodded to themselves.

  Ben looked at Nutter. ‘What happened to your stammer?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Nutter.

  ‘Perhaps one of your loose chips has been knocked into place by all the screaming,’ said Keys.

  ‘Possibly. It comes and goes, you know. Some weeks I take ages to get through a sentence, others I talk normal.’

  ‘Well, almost,’ said Vid.

  Hearing the bassist talk, Riff was reminded of Vid’s exotic light show. ‘What were you doing out there?’ he asked.

  Vid shrugged, one pixellated eyebrow tilted at a quizzical angle. ‘I don’t know really,’ he said. ‘It just seemed, you know, the right thing for the moment.’

  ‘It was certainly different. Have you ever done anything like that before?’

  Vid’s eyes rolled through a hundred and eighty degrees before settling into a thoughtful pose. ‘Sometimes I’ve played around with pictures,’ he said.

  ‘Pictures?’

  ‘Nothing amazing - just patterns and things. Occasionally I tinker with the promotional videos for a bit of variety.’ He played them a quick montage of shots, ending with a painting, mapped onto a spinning cube with a rainbow arcing across one side.

  ‘You made the pictures bigger onstage,’ said Keys.

  ‘Like this,’ said Vid, suddenly projecting a huge image that seemed to fill the room. ‘It’s just part of my display technology. You know, like the Nostram sets.’ The spinning cube dissolved into a giant picture of Vid’s smiling face, winked, then snapped back to its normal proportions. A toaster with wings sailed across his brow and he winked again.

  ‘As gimmicks go, it’s pretty good,’ said Ben. ‘There can’t be many bass players who can double up as a televisor. With a face like that you could be in movies.’

  ‘Or just showing them,’ Vid replied tartly. He didn’t know why the human’s tone suddenly seemed so patronising, and the word gimmick annoyed him. ‘What about your gimmick?’

  ‘What gimmick?’ Ben responded defensively. ‘I’m human, I can’t exactly spin my head round for effect.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vid, ‘you spun your whole body round tonight. You’ve spent weeks trying to avoid the audience and now, all of
a sudden, turn round to look at them.’

  ‘I just wondered what the racket was.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it won’t do - you’ll have to go back to looking at Nutter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what Nutter said? They think that you’re turning your back on the audience to be cool – they might be disappointed if they can see your face.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Ben. ‘Are you telling me that these people are just coming to see the back of my head?’

  ‘Well, it’s better than the front.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the front?’

  ‘It’s all grainy round the bottom – looks like you’re about to turn into a hedgehog.’

  ‘That’s called stubble. I didn’t have time to shave this morning. Besides, some people like that in a man, it makes him look mature.’

  ‘Either that or it makes you look like someone handy to have around when they’ve lost the scrubbing brush.’

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ Ben retorted.

  ‘Why? I could have stubble, look.’ The bottom part of his face suddenly filled in with what looked like gray crayon. ‘I could even have a beard,’ he added and made the shading bushier. A digitalised head of a small bird appeared and chirruped enthusiastically. ‘See. The chicks love it.’ His face resumed its normal complexion and he smiled broadly. Ben looked at the robot sullenly, then turned and walked out of the room. The mood appeared to be broken.

  ‘What did I say?’ said Vid, turning to the other robots.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry; he’s probably just