Three glass coins; father coin, mother coin and baby coin are pulled from a wishing well and cast onto a glass table. From the bird’s eye we see a troll,that guards the ‘under-table’, pop its head into view like a squinting mole from a hole. It mumbles moreover rumbles with a deep and incoherent clarity “Spee Noo”. A hand gathers the coins and casts them across the table anew. The troll mumbles and rumbles again, quite liking the part it’s playing but flustered by its speech impediment.
Stage left no, stage right no, stage sky – YES; Thor in a string vest flexes his biceps and his forearm muscles tighten soon after as the oversized football-ended drumsticks he grasps start to deliberately and measuredly beat themselves onto an equally oversize kettle drum. Slow at first with a pace that steadily intensifies. Animal from the muppets pulls your focus to some other-dimensional corner where he sits on an unseated drum stool and rattles out a cascading riff on an old casio electric drum kit.
An ethereal Martin Fry, voice freshly polished eclipses Animal and slides the instruction ‘Speak’ over his larynx. All eclipsing this sound is too and all graceful it pervades but doesn’t alter the ambience. All matter of fact he sounds to boot. But “No” comes the quick reply–his own reply in a matching tone. The Troll listens itself now and learns these two words “Speak, No“. That’s what it was trying to say it thinks to itself. Martin Fry employs a one-fingered pianist, the pianist plays and pitches high notes, in serial, into the milieu.
So, with the scene now set to agreeable, Martin breaks into stern song, yet there’s that smoothness that stays with his voice. The voice he uses to state his argument in a silky-silvery denial; always denial.
A Jazz club sax player makes a brief appearance from the seventies cigarette vapour that is part his making. Eyes closed, cheeks puffed with air and nicotine he belts out a small solo while the listener Martin; who gave up the listening years ago, listens for a second to himself singing and reminiscing. To decide only to bin the idea for further defiance. Yes defiance.
Defiant, you see – Fry’s in love, he’s so deludedly in love he’s certain it’s forever and as much as he wants to, he can’t sing away the denial.
An interlude perhaps – for him to gather energy me suspects – No good, voices, voices, him, himself, he becomes the TROLL. Animal and Troll then combine with the upskilling pianist who’s quickly growing fingers. It’s an alliance and it’s all for the crescendo, all for the climax, all for ceding to a shared eternity.
Now reader, you can stop here, move quickly on and dismiss this message from a man, a true inhabitant of the pigeon hole you hold that’s dymo taped with the label : Bedlam.
Goodbye.
Or take this key from me and turn it.
A door opens. There’s a note suspended centrally in a cubed room. It reads: Get the best cans, get yourself free, get 5 minutes, get yourself comfortable. Get the one song: ‘4 Ever 2 Gether by ABC’, get it on. Close your lids, open your mind and listen.
Get then what I’m on about.