Bandwagon

By Andrew Fish

The road to stardom, as any good band will tell you, is paved with good bands who failed to reach the end. Its substrate is the pulped contracts, discarded ticket stubs and recycled vinyl blues of a myriad crushed dreams.

This is the story of one band who didn't even know they were on that road, the first human-robot combo ever to sneer at a drum machine. It is a story of hopes and dreams, gigs and setbacks and a road that passes through some very unsavoury locations on the way to its destination.

Bandwagon is a musical comedy from the Douglas Adams-inspired mind of Andrew Fish, author of Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Fish
• Release date: Jul 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301784370

Andrew Fish

In 1972, Andrew Fish was born in Chatham, Kent. He promptly escaped and made his way to the heart of Sherwood Forest, where he now lives as a software engineer and aspiring author. If you’ve got a problem and you can find him... actually, you’re probably better off with the A-Team, although they’re probably getting a bit old by now. There’s the guys who were in the recent film version, of course, they’re a few years younger, but since the film didn’t really do so well they might not care to be reminded of it... But I digress. Andrew Fish has had a long, varied, but hitherto unrewarding writing career. He started writing in his teens, mostly for pleasure, but a piece of what would now be called flash fiction entitled Exit Darwin made it onto BBC Radio Kent in the early 1990’s. Since then he has had various brushes with publishing success, from an almost signed radio comedy in the early 2000’s, to various attempts to get properly published throughout the last decade or so. Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow is his most-frequently almost properly published book, although this may be because most of the others have never seen an agent’s in-tray let alone their rejection pile. He hopes this time it will be right, it will work and - to complete the Douglas Adams paraphrase - nobody will have to get nailed to anything.

Book preview

Foreword to the Digitally Remastered Edition

There are, in my experience, two kinds of writers - ice floes and icebergs. Both are adrift on a sea of opportunity, pushed around by currents of circumstance. But the ice floes are all on the surface - what you see is what you get - whilst the icebergs are more than meets the eye. What do I mean? Well, assuming you know any writers or wannabe writers, how often do you come across one who has the one big idea that will make them rich? How often are they peddling the one book they have written with seemingly no intention of writing another? Those are the ice floes.

The icebergs meanwhile will push one book whilst writing another. This is partially because they enjoy the writing rather than simply clamouring for the success, partially because they find it difficult to retain confidence in a single idea or book for long enough to keeping pushing just the one. An iceberg that has been adrift for a long time, therefore, will have a vast amount that is never seen by the masses.

I am, by this definition, an iceberg. Since the heady days of 2001, when I decided finally to take my writing seriously and strive to complete a novel, I've written armfuls. Most have never been published. Most have never even been submitted to an agent or publisher. The reason for this is largely the very complex history of Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow, which was written in 2003 (under the title Robin Who?) and which has been accepted for publication three times and actually published twice in the last decade. Being driven around by the vicissitudes of that particular current, it is perhaps not surprising that I haven't got round to publishing other books.

There is, however, one exception. Bandwagon was the book before Erasmus. There had been two previous volumes, Others and Others at War - neither of which, in retrospect, were very good - but Bandwagon was the first book I felt had something. It was fun, original, and it’s one of the most Douglas-Adamsy things I ever wrote.

It was, of course, rejected by publishers. Not often - I’ve never had the stamina to keep resubmitting the same book until I could, like Frank Herbert, wallpaper my bathroom in rejection slips. But after half a dozen rejections, I despaired enough to look at self-publishing. The process was somewhat slow and laborious, but eventually a copy was issued through a company called Publish and be Damned. So slow was the process, however, that by the time the book was ready to sell, Erasmus had been written and accepted for publication for the first time. As a result, Bandwagon never got enough of my attention to make a mark.

Some years later, during a surge of optimism brought on by Erasmus’ second acceptance, I revisited Bandwagon. To my surprise, I still rather liked it. Sure, it was rather rough around the edges, but the charm and humour still appealed to me. I decided, therefore, to give it a little tweak. Not for release, but more or less as an exercise and to see how far I’d come. The result, which I refer to as the Digitally Remastered Edition, is a book still not as professional as Erasmus (which was, after all, a quantum leap in my literary development) but one I could imagine having pushed more vigorously had Erasmus not emerged.

Fast-forward another few years and Erasmus is out there again, this time as an e-book (hopefully going into print soon). The emergence of the Kindle and its kindred has created new opportunities for authors and publishers alike. I’ve decided, therefore, to let Bandwagon in its digitally remastered form out into the world. Not as paying book, but a freebie, partially to see if people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, partially - to be honest - to create a little noise and help Erasmus along.

So take, read, and enjoy. If you do enjoy this one, Erasmus isn’t quite the same, but you may also find it worth a look. There’s a website at http://www.erasmushobart.com which will help you find it in shops and point you to the Facebook page. And please do feel free to share Bandwagon with friends. The more people who read it and enjoy it, the more who might read Erasmus and the more of that iceberg that may eventually become visible.

Andrew Fish, June 2013

Notes to reader: Allegro, with feeling – rest if feeling crotchety.

The origins of music are lost in the swirling mists of antiquity - the time signature lost to the memory of a race that can only faintly hear its coda in the wind. Historians generally hold that music, as we understand the term, emerged from the rhythmic chants used by primitive warriors to unnerve their enemies before a battle, but why something intended as a weapon could have found itself a place as a form of artistic expression is scarcely understood - after all, you wouldn’t expect to see an H-Bomb on display in an art gallery¹. The reason that we do not know why music made its leap from weapon of mass distraction is that in most civilizations this occurred before the days of recorded history: by the time our ancestors leap onto the written page, they have already played the pipes of peace. A notable exception to this, however, is to be found on a planet in the Rigel system, where the transition came relatively recently: the planet of Rigel IV had been a veritable arena of war for millennia – a place where you didn’t only shoot the piano player, but hung his body on a gibbet as an example to anyone else who tried to sing about their ex-wives with a pot of paint balanced on their instrument. The planet was in a continual state of turmoil and, although the myriad tribes had gradually coalesced into two huge power blocks, there seemed to be no let up in the violence. Oddly enough, this hadn’t stopped music from advancing from the stage of people yelling ‘you’re gonna get your f***king head kicked in’ accompanied by a very large drum, and the many tribal communities had brought their traditional instruments to the army such that the two opposing armies would march into battle with substantial music troupes in tow. And this is pretty much how things would have remained, until one fateful day, when a battle now known as the peace overture was about to be joined. The two armies duly began their pre-battle psychological warfare, but by a million to one chance, the opposing music troupes happened not only to be playing in the same key, but in the same time signature and, against all odds, they broke into a jam session and all thoughts of battle were forgotten. Needless to say the powers that be were not amused and, at the signing of the subsequent briefly maintained treaty, both sides agreed to ban musicians from accompanying military operations. The last thing that any nation with a vested interest in war wants is racial harmony.

Whilst we can only speculate as to the cause of the transition on our own world, it is clear that music, freed from the constraints of the military, was able to develop along more experimental lines, producing material that was not intended simply to scare, but to elicit other effects in its listeners: music could be used to woo a maiden, to impress visiting nobility or to give praise to a deity. This increasing diversity of music led to the development of notation by which songs could be passed not only between contemporary musicians but also between generations, allowing music to develop and evolve in a more complex manner than had been possible with the earlier oral traditions. So, music thrived for many years until, perhaps inevitably, the major religions began to get involved.

In many cultures, as strong religions arose to dominate and subdue their precursors, restrictions were placed on all forms of creative expression in order to suppress any influences which might allow the older, pagan religions to survive. The most holy order of the blue flame on Omicron II, for example, decreed that not only was polyphony to be outlawed as a reflection of a polytheistic society and repetitive rhythm as the basis for the monotony of eternal damnation, but that any note other than middle C would imply that the holy flame could have some other colour than blue and was therefore also banned. As a result, music on Omicron became totally monotonic and arrhythmic and was frequently mistaken for the song of a particularly dull breed of bird. The ruling also resulted in the killing of all other species of bird, as they were obviously heretics. Religious constraint did not last forever, however, and as people began to question the established values of their precursors, music began to go through a form of rebirth or renaissance. Once more the art flourished and, as it became fashionable with the less constrained nobility of the time, they gave their patronage to a new breed of professional musicians, relieving them of the worry of feeding themselves and leaving them free to explore music as it had never been explored before. Studies were made of music from other cultures, which were brought together and blended to create rich orchestral tapestries. Musicians began to gain an understanding of how music worked from an analytical viewpoint and used this to produce pieces of surprising simplicity and subtle mathematical elegance. At least two cultures are known to have created unfinished symphonies based on the value of PI - although the people of the Remus system, whose understanding of music was slightly more rudimentary, broke with this tradition by basing their unfinished symphony on the value of one over three. Not surprisingly, the symphony was discarded rather than simply left unfinished.

The discovery of recording technologies brought music to the common man and, in many civilizations this was also followed by an obsession with rapid repetitive beats, extremely loud noises and large piles of money. Unlike the previous military or religious constraints placed on music, commercialisation has, in many societies, proved a fatal development to the art and, to meet the demands of fashion, music has gradually become formulaic, repetitive and, above all, boring. Instruments which actually require some talent to play have been discarded in favour of those which the holder still can’t play but which they can at least hold in commercially viable poses on stage; vast amounts of audio processing technology allow even the least musical of people to become famous if they have the right look, whilst the true pioneers of music have been swept aside and their dreams have been allowed to die. This isn’t to say that true music is dead, of course, but it has become an underground movement, out of the eye of the unknowing public. Good music is, however, like a cocktail made with milk of magnesia, very hard to keep down.

1

The problem with sudden showers, Ben felt, was that they were sudden and that they were showers. Their least redeeming features were right there, expressed succinctly in their very description. Had they been called tears of joy or showers of affection, they probably wouldn’t have been so unpopular.

He should, of course, have been prepared. He should, like any sensible person, have gone out with an umbrella, raincoat, at least two sweaters, snowshoes and factor two thousand sun block, just to be on the safe side. But no, not he; he hadn’t even bothered to look at the forecast. Instead, he walked out into the streets in his shirtsleeves, carrying nothing so much as a pocket parasol in defence against the gods of watery fate.

Now he stood, wet and shivering, under the protruding upper floor of an electrical store with all the other poor, unprepared saps, helpless but to watch as the rain dived noisily to earth like an invading army and ran along the streets in rivulets, pursuing the few pedestrians who had chosen to run rather than to seek cover from the onslaught.

He cast a casual glance at the motley group assembled behind him: there was a couple taking advantage of their temporary confinement, perhaps convinced that the pillar they were leaning against afforded some privacy, perhaps simply unconcerned with popular opinion; a young woman leaning against the shop window, reading a novel and wearing a bored expression; and a scruffy looking man, sitting on the floor next to a robot dog and jerking his head rhythmically as if to some tune which Ben couldn’t hear.

Finding the couple rather embarrassing and the young woman rather dull, Ben focused his attention on the man, noting that he had a blanket over his knees, a sure sign the place the rest of them had chosen for shelter served him somewhat more permanently in the same regard. He wondered briefly on the robot dog – it seemed an expensive accoutrement for a man of casual address.

A second glance, however, revealed the dog to be an old model, one – if memory served – of the ones that suffered from the old postman’s trousers fixation bug. Clearly, the man had not always been so down on his luck. Either that, or his synthetic canine had been rendered homeless itself when its owners had chosen to upgrade in response to a boycott by the postal service. With its internal hydrogen reactor and solar cells, it was cheap to feed, and unlike a human friend, would never abandon him – it was the perfect companion.

Ben cast a concerned look at his trousers in response to an interested look from the dog and decided he was probably safe enough. The low growl was probably nothing more than a fault in the creature’s voice synthesis.

The man, for his part, seemed unconcerned with his audience. He sat under his blanket, rocking gently back and forth like a discarded rocking horse in a perpetual motion lab. After a few minutes of this, he paused to reach into his chest pocket and withdraw something. Curiosity drove Ben to cast another glance to see what it was. It was small – perhaps only two inches long – silver, and seemed lined with small square holes. Ben could scarcely guess as to its purpose.

The man brought the item to his lips and Ben lost interest. It was just a smoker – a filter device that allowed people to smoke without polluting the air or generating wasteful stubs to litter the ground. He turned away – smokers were hardly the pariahs society had once made them, but neither were they something regular people regarded as normal. It was like watching the couple at the other end of the arcade: you accepted people did that kind of thing, but you weren’t especially keen for a ticket.

He watched the rain instead. He’d never really paid it much attention before – it was, after all, only falling water – but forced to occupy himself in observation, he began to detect patterns. Drips fell from the guttering above in regular order, small ones measuring a steady beat, larger ones joining periodically with an accenting plop. And behind it all was the chorus of rain falling straight to earth. It was almost like music.

And then there was music – or something like it. A raw, reedy sound penetrated the heavy air, riding the raindrops like a man astride a horsetronic (Ben had watched a few Westerns in his time) and insinuating itself almost into his soul. He turned, wondering where the sound was coming from. To his surprise, the only candidate seemed to be the man under the blanket. His ‘smoker’ between his hands, he was sliding the object back and forth and blowing through it.

Somehow captivated, Ben approached the man and squatted down in front of him. After a few minutes, the man stopped playing and looked at him.

‘Don’t stop,’ said Ben. ‘It’s wonderful.’

The man’s eyes flickered slightly and something approaching a smile passed his old cracked lips. ‘Thanken you,’ he said, expressing the words with some lack of familiarity.

Ben nodded at the instrument. ‘What is that?’ he asked.

The man held it out for his inspection. It was beautifully made, with fine carving on the surface of the metal. Ben saw there were holes on the other side as well, giving the impression of a series of parallel tunnels through a silver hill. ‘It’s a Jew’s Harp,’ said the man.

‘A harp?’

‘Or a harmonica.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘No, there’s not many have these days. My granddaddy gave it to me when I was little. His daddy gave it to him and his daddy to him. My granddaddy said that long ago, people used to play them when they were sad.’ He put the instrument to his mouth and produced a slow, wailing series of notes, which vibrated in a way that sent shivers along Ben’s spine - although this could equally have been caused by the rain dripping through the cracks in the parapet.

‘You play beautifully,’ said Ben.

‘Thank you. My granddaddy taught me to play. And his daddy taught him and-’

‘And his daddy taught him?’

‘No. My great-great granddaddy was taught to play by an angel.’

‘An angel?’ Ben strained to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

‘At a roundabout.’

This time Ben restricted himself to eyebrow movement. It still felt like he looked sceptical. The man seemed not to notice.

‘It was a long journey, they say,’ he said wistfully. ‘They woke up in the morning and travelled hundreds of miles every day to reach the promised land.’

‘The promised land?’

The man nodded. ‘This place,’ he said, nodding around them.

Ben looked around. He never really thought that much about his home environment, but if it had been promised to him he would have been somewhat disappointed. He looked back to the man, his gaze taking in the tattered tartan blanket.

‘I know,’ said the man. ‘Some promise, eh?’

‘Indeed.’

‘That’s probably why the angel taught my great-great granddaddy the blues. I kinda figure if they was pleased to come here they might have learned something a little happier.’

‘I imagine so,’ said Ben. Feeling slightly uncomfortable on his haunches, he rose to his feet and looked out onto the rain-soaked streets. The man began to play again. Ben found the mournful melody seemed both to reflect the feelings the weather induced and to amplify them, giving him the impression that it was somehow raining in his heart.

For the first time, he felt somehow connected to music. The tunes of his youth – the bouncy happy ones he had enjoyed with his mother, or the saccharine ballads that had salved him after another failed romance – they faded by contrast. This was raw music, a potent emotional high that wrenched at the soul. Something deep inside told him that to walk away now was to turn his back on the first real emotion he’d ever felt. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew he could hardly stay under the parapet indefinitely.

‘Should I stay or should I go?’ he muttered to himself. The clock across the road showed an hour had passed – if he stayed there would definitely be trouble. Out on the street, the rain had subsided. The street robots emerged from the alleys between the shops and began to shepherd puddles into drains with their brooms. Any excuse to remain disappeared with the water. A glance around him revealed that the bored woman had already gone, although the young couple seemed to be oblivious to the change in the weather and were continuing to take advantage of the cover.

Ben averted his eyes from them in embarrassment and found himself looking into the shop behind him. His eyes passed over the wall-mounted televisors and the optical disc players and settled on a rack of synthesisers – the first time he’d really noticed them. Glancing one last time at the man, whose robot dog had now begun to whine in an approximation of harmony, he walked purposefully to the door of the store and strode in, the sound of the blues ringing in his brain.

2

The inside of the store was, like all other large electrical outlets in the universe, specifically designed so that all visitors are automatically guided to the most expensive items. As in many of these stores, the devices were in this instance large display devices, a product scientifically proven to exert an almost magnetic attraction on a large subsection of the customer base². A good salesman knows they need only brush up on the latest in televisors and wait by the appropriate model in order to make a quick sale.

Vid was a good salesman – it was the way he was designed. His face itself was a flat panel display, not one which would be particularly attractive to the average male on payday³, but it gave him the ability to display either a digital representation of facial expression or full colour videos from the latest sales brochure.

He cruised past the display of televisors, checking the position of each was calculated with precision to draw the customer’s eye to the current jewel in the crown. The Nostram 78000, the latest in flat screen perspective sets, could produce a 780 inch picture from a 78 inch screen, using the latest in Distortiomax projection. At the moment, the televisor was showing a video of three moody boys standing behind a wall of synthesisers as their latest track On and on and on and on and on went just like it sounded.

Vid discretely checked the front of the store; the new customer was male, so he changed the channel to display the new girl band Upfront, whose latest video involved the lead singer warbling something about love being pain, whilst being strapped to a wheel in a leopard-skin bikini. Her two band mates, wearing similar costumes, flicked her cinematically with whips as they chanted their repetitive yes it is lines in time to the beat. Vid himself was, naturally, completely immune to the poorly concealed charms of the singers but he understood the importance of such imagery in short-circuiting the average human male’s ability to make rational affordability judgements. Instead, he stepped just out of view and watched as the human approached, drawn with all the inevitability of a fly to a windowpane.

Ben kept his eyes on the video as he crossed the store. By the time he arrived, it was beginning to puzzle him - he wasn’t sure if it was extremely repetitive or whether it had simply started again. A few days earlier he would have been considering only the shape of the singers, now it was the form of the music that caught his attention. It was dismal – overproduced, underperformed, and about as innovative as hitting a pig’s bladder with a larger stick. For the first time his eyes were opened to just how bland commercial music really was.

Vid, somehow sensing the mesmerising effect of the onscreen talent was waning, approached from the shadows, rolling silently across the carpet on his single, spherical wheel.

‘I see you’re looking at the new Nostram,’ he intoned in a voice which centuries of salesman evolution, years of market research and two hours of fiddling with a voice synthesiser had determined as the correct one for commencing a sales pitch. It was exactly a fifth above middle C, with a hint of E on the wider vowels.

‘Actually I was looking at the picture,’ Ben corrected him. ‘I hardly noticed the screen.’

‘Exactly,’ Vid agreed, keeping the customer happy by not contradicting him. ‘It’s an unobtrusive set. If the picture wasn’t on, you wouldn’t know it was there.’

‘Wouldn’t the whacking great screen in the corner give it away?’ Ben asked, beginning to wonder if they were talking about the same thing.

‘If you wanted it to, certainly. What I meant to say was that the framing of the screen doesn’t distract you from the picture itself.’

‘Ah,’ Ben answered distractedly. He was still trying to decide if the video was repeating, or whether it was now running for a third time. The camera seemed to be continually following the whip towards the lead singer’s cleavage and then cutting away just before you could see if her breasts still had the manufacturer’s logo embossed on them. ‘It’s hard to believe they get paid a fortune for doing that, isn’t it?’ he observed.

Vid surveyed the screen. He certainly didn’t know any robots who made their living tied to wheels with their chassis exposed. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘it’s not work in the same way as electrical installation, if that’s what you mean. Now, take these televisors for example…’

‘I wonder what you need to get into the business,’ Ben mused.

‘Presumably some transplants and a wheel,’ Vid suggested, feeling that he was losing the customer. His programming suggested trying to get back to the point. ‘I suspect it’s probably very expensive, although it could well be offset by the small clothing budget. Now, if you want a better way to spend your money…’

‘Some kind of instrument,’ Ben continued.

‘That might help, but it might also get you into trouble.’

‘Musical instrument,’ Ben corrected. ‘I thought I saw some keyboards on the way in.’

Vid, realising that he wasn’t going to sell the Nostram, decided to accept the lesser of two evils and try to sell a keyboard instead of losing the customer entirely. Pivoting the upper half of his body, he rolled towards the keyboard display.

‘If you’d care to follow me, sir,’ he said.

Ben took one last look at the unfeasibly large breasts on the giant screen and then turned to follow the robot. It wasn’t difficult: the robot was about seven feet tall and easily visible over the rows of white goods which funnelled the customers from the entrance to the televisors.

The keyboards were displayed on a series of densely packed racks, seemingly designed to prevent anyone from playing any apart from the ones on top. The instruments were arranged such that only the most expensive was accessible, with the cheapest being only a few inches from the carpet.

‘Now,’ Vid began, ‘the Virtuoso 1500 is our top of the line keyboard with a five octave spread, five hundred voice memory and one hundred note polyphony.’

‘What does that mean?’ Ben asked.

‘Basically, if you hit all the notes at once it still plays them,’ Vid told him.

Ben did a quick count. ‘But there’s only sixty one notes on it,’ he objected.

‘Yes,’ Vid explained, ‘that’s because it also has a