Flesh Guitar

PERFORMANCE NOTES — SHIMMERS

Bob Arnold recalls an especially challenging Jenny Slade gig

Lately Jenny Slade has been denying that she ever made a habit of appearing nude on stage; but anyone who ever saw the Flesh Guitars play the composition ‘Shimmers’ (described as ‘a performance piece for more intimate spaces’) would surely beg to differ.

The Flesh Guitars were operating as a drummerless six-piece at the time, two men, four women, all of them guitarists. The players were prodigiously gifted unknowns who regarded Jenny Slade with a certain awe, and would willingly have followed her into the darkest regions of guitar hell.

The stage was set with a dozen guitars, a few on floor stands, others suspended on racks at waist level; some were bass guitars, some twelve strings; some were hooked up to multiple effects units. Illumination was kept enticingly low, a swathe of purple light bleeding into shades of coral. The six band members took to the stage, some of them a little tentatively, some with a defiant confidence.

It would take the audience little or no time to realize that all six band members were naked; Jenny Slade included. Her later claims that she wore a flesh-coloured body-stocking simply won’t wash. Even the most blasé crowds would be captivated by six nude guitarists. Was it just a cheap gimmick? No. Genuine Jenny Slade fans knew better than that, but even they could have had little idea of what was to come.

As the audience peered more closely at the musicians, as their eyes got used to the dim light, they would see amid the dappling of line and shadow that there was something unusual, something extra about the nudity. It could take a long time to work out precisely what was going on, but sooner or later one would realize that each guitarist’s body was spiked in dozens of places by acupuncture needles, all of which had been left in situ, their points lodged in the guitarists’ flesh.

They moved towards their instruments and positioned themselves before them. They stood an inch or two away. Then, as their bodies moved, acupuncture needles would sway and make metallic contact with the guitar strings. Sometimes several needles would touch different strings or different parts of the strings simultaneously. There would be glistening ripples, glissandos and arpeggios. The sounds produced might be clean and resonant one moment, the next they might be just random scrapes.

The sonic possibilities for six people of different builds and body types performing movements that ranged from the barely perceptible to the downright violent, touching the strings glancingly or furiously as the case might be, with each guitar displaying its own distinctive, musical signature, were all but limitless. Performances could go on for two hours or more, until the performers were physically or creatively exhausted. The piece was so demanding that it remained in the Flesh Guitars’ repertoire for less than six months.

Only one, rather inadequate bootleg recording exists of ‘Shimmers’. It is not much prized by collectors, whereas a pirate video of a performance at a private party in a converted corned beef factory in Rio de Janeiro has been known to change hands for staggeringly high prices. Jenny Slade, despite her denials, has never looked better.

Reprinted from the Journal of Sladean Studies

Volume 7 Issue 4