Espedair Street

TWELVE

Yes, it is like sex. Performance; the show, the live act.

We had never been bad at it, and by now we were very good. I always thought I was the weak link, standing there just playing non-virtuoso bass and occasionally tapping my foot, but according to some people I was the base, too; something the others could build on; a rock, a foundation. Well, so they say. I think too many things are over-analysed, and a lot of the effort's wasted, just unnecessary. We were popular; end of story and so what?

But it is like sex. Of course. Getting out there and doing it, under the bright darkness of the hiding lights, in the bowl or beneath the arch, after the build-up of tension and the slow engorging of the venue where the people sit and stand together, sharing that warmth and sweat and scent, sharing the same obsession, the same fixation and anticipation. Oh, you enter into it, you become part of it; secreted beneath, preparing nervously in some distant dressing room, you can usually hear, you can always sense; you can taste it.

And there, suddenly appearing, in the blaze and smoke and the crashing chords, or just drifting in, like we did once, pretending to be road crew, fiddling with the gear, then starting to play, one at a time, almost casually, so that people only realised slowly, and the roar grew slowly, swelling and filling the place around us.. the initial nerves evaporating, the beat setting in, taking over, governing. And the greater rhythm, the light and shade of slower songs and faster songs and the few spoken intervals, when either Davey or Christine could just stop, listening and gauging and feeling, and mumble or shout or scream or just talk reasonably, make a joke; whatever fitted the mood, whatever moved us on, whatever kept that unstated game-plan on course and sent us all forward again.

To the climax, to the big finish that was one of many, to the stamping, chanting, swaying recalls, the encores, and the anticipated fetishes of old favourites, the old textures everybody knew and could join in with and be part of. Finally, sweating, betowelled, the lights back on, a last, quieting, basically acoustic, two-person finale, to smooth the raw exhausted edges of that ecstatic energy away; a last scene of touch and tenderness, like a breathed post-coital stroking, like a hug, before the people go, drained, fulfilled, buzzing into the dark streets and home.

Sometimes you thought you could go on forever and never stop, sometimes you just wanted it all never to end; there were ten times like that for everyone of the few when you just weren't in the mood and it was done — though professionally, and to the insensitive, just as excitingly — mechanically, by rote.

But when it did seem you could keep going forever, time went odd, and it was as though it had stopped, or vastly extended, stretching out... yet when it was all over, when it had all gone and you were thinking about it, back in normality, everything within that singularity, everything about that unutterably different period of time seemed to have taken up only one single instant. Sometimes, whole tours were like that, as though it had all happened to somebody else and you were another person entirely and had only heard about it, second hand, third hand, at any number of removes.

You played, and you were part of it as it was part of you; you were no less you — in fact, you felt more alive, more alert and capable and... coherent — but, at the same time, though continually conscious of that differentiation, you were integrated too, a part not apart; a component in something that was the product, not the sum, of its constituents.

A sort of ecstasy, all right; a charging, pulsing sense of shared joy; a bodily delight felt as much in the brain as in the guts and skin and the beating heart.

Ah, to go on and on like that, you thought; to be at that level forever... Well, it was impossible, of course. It was light and shade again, the sheer contrast of the mundane and the fabulous; the dull grey weight of the endless workaday days, and the bright, startling burst of light in the darkness, as though the five or more of us on stage before those thousands, even tens of thousands, were a concentration of excitement, glamour, life; the very pinpoint place where all those ordinary lives somehow focused, and ignited.

I never did work out who took energy from whom, who was really exploited, who was, if you like, on top. Sure they paid, so that act might be called prostitution, but, like a lot of bands, we actually lost out on some tours. Playing live, we gave them their money's worth, sometimes more. The albums were where we coined it in, not the tours. You paid your pounds or your dollars or your yen for the particular wavy pattern of gouged, printed vinyl, for the hidden noise a diamond could bring out, or for a certain rearrangement of magnetic particles on a thin length of tape, and that was us making a living, thank you very much. Me especially, me more than the rest, even though we'd come to an agreement where the others got between five and ten per cent of the composition rights, as an arrangement fee (well, it was only fair).

But playing, touring, going up there and doing never quite the same thing each night, or every second night; that was the buzz, those were the times that made you feel you were really doing something different from everybody else, something worthwhile. God knows it got to me, and I always did stay in the background. What it was like for Davey or Christine, the binary stars of that focal point, standing at the ground zero of our self-created storm, I can't even imagine.

And it was addictive. You always thought you could give it up, but you always found you wanted more, and it was worth a lot of time and effort and expense to make sure you did. The applause, the screams, the shouts and yells, the stamping feet, the crowds and the ingenious, mad or pathetic attempts to make it through our layers of defence to get to see us individually, one-to-one, just to look, or to hug, or to gibber, or to pass on a tape and entreat.

For Davey and Christine, at the epicentre of it all, it meant more than it did to me, and, because they were different people from me, because they felt almost like a different species sometimes, they lapped it up, they revelled in it, they drank it deep. I tried, even with just the pale version of the fame that was my share, but I couldn't take to it naturally, the way they did.

It frightened me. For a long time it wasn't too bad anyway, and then for a longer time after that it was new, different and interesting and exciting, but then, after the first few tours, it started to get to me...

The crowds, the sheer weight and press of them. The invisible, besieging hordes out there in the darkness, baying and bellowing and stamping their feet. The way it took so many of them so long to recognise a track...

Jesus, if I even half-know a band's work I can spot a song within a bar; the first few notes of the introduction and I know it; but we'd play an intro, just the way it was on the album, and it would take... seconds, bars and bars for our fans to spot which favourite it was, and start trying to drown us out... I thought maybe it was just the time delay, sound taking that long to get from them to us, but I worked it out, and it wasn't; it was just people being slow.

But I'm not a natural crowd person; I don't pretend to understand or to relate to any of that sort of behaviour. I've never felt like part of a mass of people, not even at a football match. In a crowd of any sort, at a game, a concert, in a cinema or wherever, I never get totally carried away with whatever's going on. Part of me is always detached, observing, watching the other people around me; reacting to how they react, not to what they're reacting to.

There was a lot more I found worrying; like the people who wanted to know what sort of toothpaste we used and what our lucky number was, and what we wore in bed; like the backwoods geeks that were convinced to the point of inanity and insanity that they were The One for Davey, or Christine, or — God help them — both.

Then there were the Christians. Oh, jumping Jesus, the fundamentalists, the people who made old Ambrose Wykes and his folly look positively sensible and sane, and necessary.

Largely my fault. I'd said the wrong things.

It had happened on our first big tour in the States. I'd always been happy for Davey and Christine to do all the talking; they were the beautiful ones, after all, whereas I looked like a henchman in a Bond movie; hardly ideal prime time or front cover material. But in New York a lovely, intelligent, serious girl had requested an interview specifically with me, for a college magazine. I'd said I'd do it, but I'd been determined to put on my dumb and stuttering act the instant she asked me what my favourite colour was or how did I feel about being a rich and famous rock star?

Instead she asked sensible, reasonable questions, several of which actually had me thinking about them — suddenly seeing things in a new light — before answering; usually we all just regurgitated the same old answers to the same old questions. She was sweet and witty and nobody's fool, and I even made a date with her, after the tour was over, after failing to convince her she should join us for the post-concert party. Jeez, I wasn't heavy, I wasn't pawing her, I didn't even flirt with her; I acted the gentleman and I just said I'd enjoyed talking to her and could we meet again?

Bitch sold the interview to the National Enquirer. About two per cent of that interview was about religion, another three per cent about politics, another five about sex; in the paper, that's all we talked about. I talked about.

According to that article I was a communist atheist who'd screw anything in skirts and was anyway bisexual (I'd admitted I'd slept with a guy once, just to see what it was like; it was nothing special and I kept having to think of women to keep a hard-on, and I made the point that I'd avoided sodomy from either end, so to speak and, while the whole experience wasn't totally unpleasant, I'd no intention of repeating it; and, damn it, I'd said it was off the record!). I was also trying to corrupt and pervert the minds of all decent, patriotic, mom— and dad-loving American children with my vicious, drug, Marx, anti-Christ and semen-sodden song lyrics.

Oh, did we have some albums burned south of the MasonDixon line.

Suddenly it was noticed that the instrumental on the first side of Liquid Ice was called 'Route 666'. The number of the beast! Oh God, oh Jesus, lock up your nuns! This was a joke, of course; I'd originally called the song '25/68', naming it according to the opus numbering system I'd used when the only places my songs existed were in an old school exercise jotter, a low-fidelity, high-hiss C-60 cassette, and between my ears. '25/68' sounded too much like '25 or 6 to 4', by Chicago, so I renamed it after about ten seconds' thought, in the studio just after we'd recorded it.

Meant nothing. But suddenly it was a Sign that I was a Devil Worshipper. All the other lyrics were put under the microscope as well then; professors of colleges in the South where the level of learning was such they thought evolution was a blasphemy started writing learned articles proving that everything I wrote was directed at destroying the American Family, Flag and Way of Life.

Holy shit; I should have been so lucky!

Ah, what the hell; we didn't lose out. We must have sold another three or four extra albums for everyone thrown onto flaming pyres, just because of all the publicity. And having maniacal fundamentalist Christians turn up shrieking and waving banners where we were playing eventually became part of the show; they were as much part of the entourage as the groupies.

But there were death threats. I started to get paranoid, worrying about car bombs, people breaking into my hotel room... worst of all — because you could always protect yourself from that sort of threat, with enough security, sufficient money — I worried about somebody with a rifle in the auditorium. It might have been crazy, because of course there were always police and security men outside and inside the venues, but maybe not that crazy. If somebody was determined, they could get in, they could smuggle a rifle in beforehand and then buy a ticket; they could even get a job in the place, long before we arrived — tours are set up long enough in advance — and take a gun and a telescopic sight in any time they wanted. A spotlight operator would be the ideal person; those were the people that scared me most, I don't know why... the man with the Super Trooper and the Winchester M/70 Magnum...

I know it's crazy, but I started wearing a bullet-proof vest on stage. It made me feel like a looney, but it was the only thing that let me play; the worry about being out there, naked and exposed under the lights, picked out with the others, a tall, broad, stationary target, was starting to affect my playing. Sticky fingers; almost stage fright, a couple of times.

The vest was embarrassing — I kept it a secret from the others for months — but it calmed me; it worked. I could face the unseen mob and play them their music, and afterwards, as the police shoved people back from our limo and we crawled past clutching hands and anguished faces mouthing God knows what, secure within our thick green glass windows and armoured steel, on our way to secure hotel suites and whole floors patrolled by large men with bulging armpits, I could look into the night-time craziness of the people who wanted to tear us apart because they loved us and the people who wanted to tear us apart because they hated us, and feel less crazy: a sensible madman in a world where only paranoia prepared you for reality.

The Great Contra-Flow Smoke Curtain, the idea conceived that day in the English countryside outside Winchester, when Inez and I made a cloud and I danced in the ashes, the total bastard of an idea it took several months and a hundred grand to get just right, was produced by using lots of dry ice, fans, heaters, smoke machines, and lights, both laser and ordinary.

It consisted of fan-driven dry-ice machines, positioned above the front of the stage, and smoke machines — also fitted with fans, plus powerful electric heating elements — which were set at the edge of the stage beneath, directly under the line of ice machines, but staggered, so that each two-metre wide nozzle pointed at the space between the equally large ice-smoke outlets above, where giant intakes sucked the warm smoke away to outside vents; similar intakes between the smoke machines sucked the dry-ice fumes away as well, to avoid filling the whole auditorium with freezing fog.

There were lights positioned inside both smoke and ice machines, shining straight up and straight down respectively, as well as batteries of lasers and spots and strobes set up to illuminate the Curtain itself from various angles and directions. The Curtain was created by the opposing, interspersed streams of vapour, alternately boiling up and fuming down.

We had twenty-four of those units, though the number we actually used on any given night varied according to the size and shape of the venue's stage. It looked impressive as hell once it was all working, but getting the streams set just right, so that the currents didn't get all mixed up, and making sure the intakes didn't suck the ice fumes or smoke from the machines right alongside them, proved to be extremely tricky; we needed a Curtain check before the gig that was longer than the lighting and sound checks combined; and the Curtain had to be fine-tuned for each different auditorium. We were never entirely sure it was going to work.

We couldn't just leave it at that, of course, even with all the fabulous lights; we set up a massive battery of fans and what I guess were de-tuned concussion grenades or claymore mines or something, so that, instead of just switching the Curtain off, we could blast a gigantic hole out through it, revealing the band in one vast, backlit explosion of smoke and sound and light. And we had big booms and moving platforms built too, and wire harnesses set up, so that we could just suddenly appear through the Curtain, more or less anywhere.

We played a few gigs in Britain, without the Curtain, getting ourselves together, trading freshness for tightness, I guess, then we were ready to head across the pond for the American part of a world tour that was intended to take us through South America, Japan, Australia, and even — firsts for us — India and Nigeria before heading back through Europe (East and West) and Scandinavia, for a final set of British dates.

We'd just brought out Nifedge, the vastly complicated double album we'd been working on since '78. Symphonic, lyricless, frighteningly expensive (not to mention twice as long as it had been supposed to be), we'd recorded it in '78 and '79, and spent a year trying to mix the bastard. Recording and releasing And So The Spell Is Ended (not intended to be a prophetic title, but apt as it turned out) in late '79, was quick and simple by comparison, even though it was still the most musically complicated and studio-time guzzling album we'd recorded, apart from Nifedge.

Even the songs on Ended were starting to sound too contrived to me; we'd taken twice as long to record single songs for that album as we had to lay down the whole of Liquid Ice. We were getting to be obsessive, losing sight of the music in the beguiling mathematical filigree of production and mixing possibilities. Wes, ever the perfectionist, was the instigator of all this, but we were all affected. We were becoming... I don't know; choked; decadent, even.

Looking back, I'm surprised we avoided it as long as we did, given that we were hardly bursting with street cred to start with.

And So The Spell Is Ended went platinum in what seemed like about a nanosecond; it outsold anything else we'd done. It was a muscle-bound, over-developed, strangled album; a collection of fairly reasonable songs held together with tourniquets, but it sold. Topped the American charts for weeks; they were rationing it in some stores, selling it straight out the back of trucks in other places. I'd suggested a special flammable edition with some kind of compressed, flattened fireworks worked into the vinyl and the cover, for the mental fundamentalists to burn, but this sensitive and caring idea was cruelly rejected by ARC, by now, of course, headed by Mr Rick Tumber himself.

It was my turn to receive the platinum album; it was presented to me at a ceremony in New York where I got very drunk later on and slightly disgraced myself. I thought I'd lost the damn thing then, but a couple of years ago, unpacking some cases in the folly, I found it again. I prised it out of its glass case and tried playing it, just for a laugh.

It was a James Last record.

Jesus, we're not even on the same label.

You want it in a nutshell?

Phht. Dribble. Crack. Whee. Crash, Splash. Zzt. Beeeeep.

The 'Beeeeep' was Davey dying, Davey dead. It happened like this.

We'd done Boston, New York, Philly, Washington, and Atlanta; everything was working, the tickets had sold out within hours, punters were going bananas for us, and even the fundamentalists seemed to have gotten tired and largely given up on us, partly, perhaps, because by that time Davey and Christine were back together again and talking about getting married and having a family. Mickey Watson's exemplary bourgeois and stable family life was also made the subject of several exclusive illustrated articles. Also, Big Sam had made sure I hadn't been allowed to do any more interviews, and had put out rumours that I'd just been kidding some poor gullible cub reporter when I'd said all those horrible things. So the moral majority mob and the people who thought the universe was six thousand years old had mostly drifted off.

We'd had fairly stiff security in Atlanta, all the same, but it hadn't been needed, not for axe-wielding Bible-thumpers, anyway. The Official Souvenir Programme wielders/thumpers were another matter, and probably no less lethal if they'd come within range. We arranged similarly tight minding for Miami too, even though we knew it probably wasn't necessary; Florida is Florida, not Dixie.

Our convoy of trucks was delayed getting to Miami; one of the Macks was involved in a crash on the freeway. Nothing too serious, but the driver and his load were held up by the local sheriff. We'd hired a 737 (painted gold, but of course) for the American part of the tour, so we got there in plenty of time, but setting up all the equipment in time for the show proved a frenetic and slightly chaotic experience for the road crew.

The auditorium we were playing was one of the smaller ones on the tour, though the stage was wide enough to use twenty of the smoke/ice units. We'd sold out, they told us. Could have filled the place twice over, easy. There'd been some confusion over the number of tickets for sale at the door, but otherwise everything was looking good.

It was a hot, sticky, muggy day, followed by a hot, sticky, muggy evening; the air conditioning in the dressing room was noisy and dripped water, the champagne was not vintage, the bread for our sandwiches was rye, not wholegrain, and Christine's Chablis hadn't been chilled properly... but you learn to live with these hardships when you're on the road.

I was learning to put up with something else; not having Inez around. Things had never been completely right between us after Naxos — though, looking back from far enough away, maybe they'd been going wrong since Wes' party at the house overlooking Watergate Bay... hard to tell. Ah hell, it's all a long story, and there's doubtless still a lot of it I don't know, but what happened in the end was Inez married Lord Bod. Remember him? Photographer and socialite and one-time ARC shareholder (not any more, or I'd have left the label). They'd been conducting a discreet on-off relationship ever since they'd met, ever since Inez and I'd met, at Manorfield Studios and Lord Bod's house, where the leaves blew and fell and I watched a juggler from up a tree.

Lady Bodenham. Hot damn; did she have her sights on that all along? Did that strategic, middle-class planning get me again? God knows; I'm not going to ask her .

So Inez had pulled out of the tour with two weeks' notice and we'd had to find a third backing singer in the middle of the usual last-minute organisational panic just before a major tour; could have sued her under the contract we had, but we didn't have the heart.

I tried not to think about her; I involved myself in the logistics of the tour and spent all my spare time writing new songs. And despite missing Inez, at first it felt good to be back on the road again.

Back on the road... with no idea we were about to crash, that night.

The set we were playing included a quarter — twenty minutes — of Nifedge. We had had plans to perform the whole thing, making it the second half of a three-hour-plus concert, but there were too many problems. The main problem was we didn't have the nerve to do it, but that's just a personal opinion. Big Sam and ARC both thought it was a potentially disastrous and fan-losing departure to perform a lyricless piece of music as long as a movie to entire stadia of people who'd probably come to hear us recreate our singles. Probably correct, but pretty gutless. If you did nothing but give people what they already like, there'd be no new sounds at all (a state it's possible to feel we are already fast approaching if you listen to some radio stations).

Anyway. We were doing the song 'And So The Spell Is Ended' (itself a good twelve minutes long, just on the album), and the first side of Nifedge. Plus all the favourites, to keep the unadventurous happy.

We'd been delayed getting to the auditorium, held up while we waited for a helicopter to fly us in; the crowds and traffic outside the place were too dense to get a limo through. We started about half an hour late, in an atmosphere of sweat and heat. The air conditioning in the main hall had broken down and the place must have been sweltering even before they let twenty thousand excited, often dancing, mostly smoking humans inside it. Once they were in place it became like a sort of vast communal sauna.

We'd decided to start slow, so began with 'Balance', where everything's black dark (saving the Curtain for later; people had already heard about it, so we didn't always start with it working), and first the drums, then one, then two guitars, then vocals and finally bass and synth together gradually join in and build up, each lit as they slot in, but (the clever bit) all at about half-volume. We played a different, quieter, more wistful version of the song for concerts anyway, using harmonising backing vocals where on the album version there's just the band playing raw and a purposeful, eventually driving, beat, and the lulling effect on a keyed-up audience was always — assuming we played it with conviction — dramatic.

Ater the last line of 'Balance' faded away ('... as the balance ... of your mind... was disturbed...'), Wise William, our mixing wizard, wound the volume up to near maximum, we fired all lights and slammed into 'Oh Cimmaron'.

Audience reaction: Wild.

We played another twenty, twenty-five minutes of well-known stuff, then let the stage go dark, and kept it that way while the Curtain was switched on. Lights, music; on into 'And So The Spell Is Ended'.

Our first on-the-night hitch with the Curtain; one of the dry-ice machines had packed up. The fan had fused, motor burned out. After a couple of minutes a few wisps of dry-ice vapour leaked over the unit, but otherwise there was nothing; just a vertical column of clear air where there should have been a soft waterfall of cold mist, just left of stage centre, about where Davey usually stood.

We carried on anyway, as we'd agreed if something like that went wrong. It would take too long to fix, and the effect was still impressive. Spots spotted, lasers lased, and the Burst (when the whole centre of the Curtain was blown out by small explosive charges), all worked fine.

We started side one of Nifedge.

I was sweating. I felt thirsty already, and the noise was intense; I didn't know whether we had the monitors turned up too high, the crowd were just exceptionally rowdy, or there was just some sort of weird resonance with the main speakers and the shape of the auditorium, tut the noise sounded deafening to me; an internal feedback. I had programmed myself well enough by that time (translation; I was professional enough) not to be unduly put off, so I still did my bit, played my part and my music, but I felt ... strange.

Perhaps, I remember thinking, we've hit that point in a tour when you've lost the initial impetus of enthusiasm, have yet to work up the momentum of routine, and cannot yet tap the energy of knowing it will all be over soon. Happens that way sometimes, I told myself.

We played. They listened. A few must have heard the album on import, or got their newly released copies very early (or been incredibly avid fans) because some of them seemed to recognise a few of the tunes, and even sang along with one or two of Christine's lyricless voice parts.

The Curtain had gone through its paces, firing all up, then all down, then sweeping through a whole slow staccato sequence of firings, flowing left-right, right-Ieft across the stage. The still-misfiring unit near centre stage made the whole display less than perfect, but you could tell just from the noises the punters were making the overall effect still impressed.

We got to the end of our twenty-minute (nearer twenty-five minutes, on stage) excerpt of Nifedge. That side, that movement (if you like), ends with one vast sustaining chord, punched out by every voice and instrument on stage, plus a synth key-triggered echo and reverberation sequence looping the resulting noise through a pre-figured programme for a digital analyser/sequencer which, at the time, was state of the art.

A stunning, sublimely furious noise, with the sound system at a hundred per cent plus whatever reverberations the venue could provide.

In Miami, the noise sounded like the crack of doom, like the whiplash of a galactic arm snapping, like an earthquake wave riding a major power line; we hit our individual assemblage of notes all at once, in a single blasting moment of impacted noise.

And brought a small section of the house down.

Ho ho, ha ha.

And killed Davey.

Because the dry-ice unit above him had blown a fuse, and the fan didn't work. Because the unit had been put up wrong; in the rush to construct the set, they'd put some part on upside down, and excess vapour and liquid couldn't drain away. Because the air in the hall was very humid, and the moisture in the air, the natural heat of that steamy city, and the collected body-breath of all those worshipping people, had collected around the great unused lump of granulated dry ice sitting way above the stage there. Because a bolt had been tightened up with a monkey wrench, not a torque wrench. Because this was before the days of radio mikes and leadless guitars, so we were all connected up, linked to the machinery.

So the whole lot snapped and crashed and fell. Missed Davey by a good few feet, but spilled its load of collected water all over him and his guitar and, in seconds, while we were still trying to work out what the hell had happened, and the audience were still applauding the spectacular effect (that burgeoning bursting bow-wave of water had happened to be caught in an accidentally delightful pattern of lights and lasers), the water rushed and/or seeped into some errant wire, some badly connected part of an amplifier, and promptly electrocuted our Davey.

Lasted... maybe two seconds, maybe five. Seemed like about three hours, but you could probably find some ghoulish bastard with a bootleg tape who could give you it down to the nearest tenth of a second.

Before we ran for him, before he fell, before that ghastly, jerking, stiff parody of a guitarist dropped from rigidity to slackness across the stage, before Wise William and his cohorts finally realised the circuit breakers — also too hastily installed, we found out later — weren't working, and cut the power manually.

And we gathered him up, and we took him to the stage exit. He was blue, silent, heart still beating weakly, but breathing only with the assistance of us all; taking turns at first until the paramedics in the ambulance took over. The medics and the ambulance were there according to the contract, but they only let Davey die slower. A chopper was ordered, but would take too long to get there.

We went with the ambulance, but it got us, effectively, nowhere.

The crowds were too great.

There were just too many people. We got him into the ambulance, we surrounded him with our own bodies, we did all we could, but none of it was enough, because there had been a mix-up with the tickets, especially with the number for sale at the door, and so there were even more people milling, ticketless and frustrated outside the auditorium than there were inside.

And we just couldn't get through the crowds.

I stood on the ambulance roof at one point. Stood there with its lights flashing round my ankles and its exhaust smoke rising around me, like some tiny image of our stage show, me the star at last, and howled at those people, looking down a crowded alley of them to a crowded street of them, and fists clenched, head back, I screamed with all my might, 'Get oot the fuckin WAY!'

... but did nothing, accomplished nothing, communicated ... nothing.

The swarming chanting tides close round the ambulance and its quiet, unminding cargo, like antibodies round an infection.

We all thought that he would somehow live, that he of all people would find a way to pull through; another crazy death-defying stunt ...

But, he didn't; a last practical joke.

DOA.

Davey Balfour. 1955-1980.

RIP

And that, folks, was very much the end of that.

end of (a) story

roll up that circuit diagram

finished with engines

shantih