Saturday 16 June 2012

SWEET NOISES THAT GIVE DELIGHT AND HURTETH NOT...

About ten years or so ago a bloke called Andy Billings (now living in Canada but then a resident of the next estate up from the CFZ in Exeter), was a regular visitor to our HQ in Holne Court. He soon became a close friend and the CFZ Computer Consultant, but he is such a nice chap that we looked forward to his thrice weekly visits immensely.

The problem is that he was a teensy bit gullible, and for some reason brought out the worst in me and Richard, and became the butt of our stupid sense of humour. It was - I think - on his first visit that we found him peering at my voluminous and ever expanding CD collection with a worried look on his face...

"Don't you have any normal music?"

He said. We pretended not to know what he meant, and he went on:

"and, who ARE `Gong`?" he asked, "and do you REALLY need 27 of their albums?"

I protested that Gong were one of my favourite bands, and enthused about them so much that he insisted on listening to a track. I played him excerpts from Radio Gnome Invisible and he looked at me in horror.

The game was afoot.

Over the next weeks and months Richard and I would ensure that whenever we saw Andy's distinctive figure walking up the steps to our house, we would put on ever more bizarre peices of music. Eventually we spent several hours a week downloading weirder and weirder things (many way past the grey area that divides the listenable and the unlistenable. To make it even funnier, we made sure that we would sit, listening to the music, clicking our fingers, nodding our heads, and tapping our feet in time with the rhythm (when there actually WAS any rhythm - which in the case of songs like Zyclon B Zombie or Journey through the Human Body by Throbbing Gristle, or In the year of 1963 I was admitted to the Mental Institution by Wild Man Fisher, there usually wasn't.

Thank you for letting me share that.

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