Corporal Clegg, my next door neighbor, has a wooden leg; he won it in the war, in 1984.
The Falklands to be precise. (Yes I know it was 1982 but that didn’t scan right).
Picture the scene, Goose Green, Officer’s Mess. Clegg, originally a chef from Mile End was bored out of his skull as the only action he was experiencing was watching ‘Prod the Squad’ the chief ‘washer upper’ diving into his pie and mash and retrieving lucky sovereigns like an overzealous walrus with sea kelp for brains.
‘Join the army and see the world’ he muttered. ‘Ha! What a load of bollocks! Join the army and see an overweight psycho bury his blubbery fizzog into reconstituted potato starch more like!’
Suddenly and without warning Banksia Diego Menziesii, an Argentine sniper shoots at the canteen from underneath his pantomime sheep costume and a bullet whizzes through the serving hatch into Clegg’s kitchen and unfortunately ricochets into his leg. The bullet embeds itself into the leg of Clegg in much the same way that Ragge Omar embeds himself into Iraqi Launderettes for all ‘the goss’ on the street’.
Upon waking from pitch-black dreams, a beleaguered Clegg soon realized that they’d had to amputate his leg above the knee due to lead poisoning and the fear of G.G. ie.Galtieri Gangrene. Shortly after this traumatic experience he left the army and immigrated to South Africa where he gained employment in one of the many gold mines within the Transvaal. The temptation to discuss another one legged gold digger here is almost too much to bear but I’ll desist.
Since that fateful day Clegg has always remained stoically detached from events but still carries the bullet which did the damage in the first place in his left breast pocket. A lucky totem and talisman if you like to ward off bad luck and bad vibes. I know this because he told me one day in the street whilst I was polishing my steps in true 1950s fashion.
‘I was walking down Maidstone High Street absentmindedly humming Walking Down Madison when a bible accidentally falls out of an eight story window,’ Clegg explains rather theatrically, ‘and heads directly for me. The heavyweight religious tome hits me smack bang on the breast bone and were it not for that Argentine bullet I’d not be talking to you today.’
‘Blimey!’ I exclaim, ‘that’s incredible!’
‘I know,’ replies Clegg ‘why I wasn’t humming A New England is anybody’s guess. A far superior song altogether if you ask me.’
‘Ha! So you enjoy listening to music then?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes, can’t get enough of it.’
‘What sort of stuff are you into then?
‘Well I’m an avid fan of the radio.’
‘Oh right, what type of shows you into?’
‘Gilles Peterson’
‘Nice one. Anything else’
‘No, only Gilles Peterson.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. Can’t get enough of the type of tunes he plays’
‘Nice one. How long have you been listening to GP’s radio show?’
‘Back since the year dot’.
‘What, since his Vibrazone shows on Kiss?’
‘Oh no, much further back than that. I started listening when he was doing his pirate radio shows.’
‘Wow, a real fan.’
‘Yes. And I’ve recorded every single one of his shows.’
‘What, every single one?’
‘Yes, every single one. Come round to my house and I’ll show you.’
I leave the polishing and completely intrigued, follow Clegg. We enter an unremarkable Larkin style semi-detached house, ‘Wipe your feet before you enter please’, he says in a polite manner so I follow his wishes and eventually find myself stood in a typically orthodox hallway with all the usual accoutrements; phone, coat pegs, shoe rack, painting of the Haywain etc. ‘Come, come follow me.’ and he beckons me towards a cheap looking pine door. ‘In here is where I do all my recording.’
‘It must be huge to house all the recordings you’ve made over the years? I remark surpressing my excitement at what should prove an Aladdin’s cave of musical treats . He ignores me and fusses with a heavy looking bunch of keys. ‘There, that’s the one!’ he exclaims and opens the locked door. ‘Come in, please do come in.’
It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the light and when they do I am surprised and a little unsettled at what I see before me.
There is nothing in the bare white room except a wooden table with a reel-to-reel tape machine sitting on top of it. A digital radio is rigged up to the reel-to-reel tape machine. A loop of tape is threaded through the mechanism. The machine, it seems is switched to ‘record’ and the two spools are rotating. Clearly it is picking up some ‘sounds’ because the coloured LED display is bouncing up and down, signifying that something – a GP production presumably - is being recorded.
‘There you go’ says Clegg, ‘I’ve recorded thousands and thousands of shows on that.’
On closer inspection I realize that the ‘loop’ of tape is literally just that. It’s fed from one spool through the machine onto the other spool and back again, much like the fan belt of a car. ‘But surely’ I say in bewilderment, ‘when the machine is recording the loop turns, and being a loop, the tape is erased every time new material is recorded?’
‘Precisely!’ answers Clegg looking suitably impressed with my detective work. ‘Record and erase, record and erase, record and erase! It relies upon the probability that some information will be recorded but its effectiveness is not dependent upon the preservation of content’.
‘I’m a little confused here Mr Clegg. So you’re saying you’ve recorded thousands of shows on your reel to reel, but have no ability to listen to them again?’
‘Why would I want to? For me it’s all about the ‘live’ experience anyway.’
I nod in agreement.
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