The Mysteries of Dance

Of all the supposed arts, I've never had much of a relationship with dance. I quite enjoyed all that stuff with the maypole when I was a kid, and I can appreciate the folklore of village ceremonies, or dance as defining the ritual space in which offerings might be made to Huitzilopochtli; but otherwise it generally doesn't engage me, and I don't regard it as either interesting or important. Many years ago I used to buy The Observer every Sunday, more or less for the sake of habit and because it was marginally funnier than the Radio Times, but I gave up when they printed some crappy Millennial list of the hundred people they saw as having most influenced the twentieth century. There were three choreographers in the list, because apparently choreography is important. It was probably the wankiest, most excrutiatingly middle-class thing I had ever seen in a left-leaning newspaper, so I stopped buying, at last understanding that such things weren't for the likes of me, mister.

I never danced as a kid, but I danced as an art student when I realised that the act was part of a process which, if performed correctly, might provide access to the contents of women's knickers; although it never did in my case. This was probably because I attempted to develop my own style - a kind of spastic bodypopping relative of David Byrne in the Once in a Lifetime video. I observed my peers dancing, mostly doing that thing with forearms moving up and down from a stationary elbow whilst looking bored, sort of like a mime of climbing a ladder performed by someone who is tired and doesn't really understand why you would want to know in the first place. I saw this and felt compelled to move rhythmically in a way which at least suggested that I was alive and maybe even enjoying the music. My style was knackering, but had the additional benefit of providing much needed exercise which tended to lessen the subsequent unpleasant effects of being full of beer, but it never led to sexual activity, or at least no sexual activity involving persons other than myself, and was therefore mostly a waste of time.

Nevertheless, here I am thirty years later going to a dance recital. We're going along to watch Jamie, who is seventeen or maybe eighteen and who is my friend's daughter. She's been attending a local dance class for at least a decade, and this is the big show at the end of the educational year.

We take seats and we watch.

There are four or five groups according to age ranging from five or six to Jamie's bunch, and each group performs three or four times to some song or piece of music; and as soon as it starts I realise just how much I'm out of my depth. I don't understand why I'm watching this thing, and these people have no reason to be on the stage moving around in set patterns whilst grinning or else looking confused. There is no reason for this thing to be happening, and yet here it is.

The youngest group aren't really dancing so much as going through a set sequence of vaguely illustrative gestures, more or less at the same time, and all staring intently at an off-stage teacher, aside from the one dancer who spends each performance facing the opposite direction to all the rest. It's puzzling, and yet sort of charming because it's little kids, which at least keeps my wife happy for a couple of minutes. They dance, or at least engage in roughly synchronised gestures to what sound like Shirley Temple numbers; but they really come to life during Blue Suede Shoes. Yes, they're all girls, but there's no reason why they shouldn't look at least a bit like Elvis, and their shoes are certainly blue. Then as one, they point out at the audience, furrow brows into angry-little-girl faces and yell don't step on my blue suede shoes - a startling burst of atonal noise but you can tell they're enjoying themselves.

The older groups are probably better in so much as what they do looks more like dancing, or at least more like those routines which clogged up the British television schedule for most of the seventies - top hats, teeth and high kicks all swirling around the stage to a dubstep version of some Amy Winehouse song. I still can't quite see the point of any of it, and now I have the additional conundrum of why anyone really thought Back to Black worked better as some shitty crunk ringtone with the bass replaced by that wub-wub-wub sound. Is it not enough that the poor woman is pushing up the daisies?

I say the older groups are probably better, but it's all relative. I remain aware of lumps of meat hurling themselves awkwardly across the stage to land with a thump whilst trying to smile, but it's never a convincing smile. It looks like they're mostly on the verge of shitting themselves, and the ones who aren't smiling have a face suggestive of trying to remember what the hell comes next. It's awkward and a long way from anything you could describe as graceful, but it feels somehow like we're all in this together. We all have to get through this thing so we can go home.

The styles are tap, jazz, freestyle, and a few others I've never heard of. I can see there are differences. I know what tap dancing is, and mostly they've all got that one pretty much nailed. Jazz involves sparkly top hats and a whole shitload of grinning.

Inevitably there are a few disquieting anomalies even without the missed beats and screw-ups. One group includes a girl roughly three times the size of everyone else. She's probably just regularly proportioned, but everyone else being so tiny makes her seem enormous, ungainly, and very difficult to miss; but this is some dance class not Broadway, so she's stuck with midgets of equivalent ability and that's just how it is, and now I have to feel bad for even noticing. Also there are two males in the group, and they dance well, which isn't a problem; but from my circumstantially blinkered point of view it jars. It feels forced and awkward. It's all weird and pointless, and I'm aware that my opinions don't really count for shit in this context, which doesn't make it any less weird or pointless.

Jamie herself is on a few times, and whilst I may well be biased, I can't help notice that she dances well compared to her peers. Her moves seem graceful with less huffing and puffing involved, and she looks as though she's enjoying herself rather than grinning like she's at a job interview or communicating something to people with whom she shares no common language. This is great because at least it means I won't have to lie to her mother. She dances with the others to Nights in White Satin, and thankfully it's not the dubstep version. It's not even the Dickies version, although that might have been interesting.

We end with ceremony and applause, speeches and awards, even for just showing up in a few cases. Those who have been in the class for longer than ten years take a bow, and it's most of them. I guess that dancing must be a lot harder than I imagined if some of this bunch have been at this since 2006. I don't know how many of these kids are likely to end up on Broadway, if that's an ambition. I still don't know what any of us were supposed to get out of this.

Afterwards we visit the south side and eat at some place on Military Drive, which is fine during the day but can get a bit shooty in the evenings. Once we've eaten, we drop in on Flipside Records because it's almost next door to the restaurant and I've always wanted to take a look at the place. The incense is so thick I can barely see the bongs and related paraphernalia on sale at the rear of the store, but I browse the racks of used records and find a Stranglers album I've been after, which is nice. Three Mexican girls come in and begin looking for some Moody Blues album. I can't work out quite which record they're looking for, but wonder if it might be the one containing Nights in White Satin.

If there's a pattern to any of this, I don't think I will ever understand it.

Frank's Chicken

The car was maroon, an estate, possibly a Volvo or a Vauxhall or something of the sort. I've never really taken much interest in the minutiae of the automotive realm. It was parked on the grass at the side of the driveway which ran past the School of Art. Wells and myself had only come in to college for the sake of signing the register, and this one last job before we broke up for the Christmas holiday. We had eggs, bags of flour, and shaving foam. We were all ready to go.

We had both been in the year below Frank at school, and I'd only really known him through reputation. I'd had friends who disliked him to varying degrees of disdain, and he in turn hadn't thought much of them. He was an unusual combination of swot and bully, doing well in almost every class whilst having a pathological need to belittle others, particularly those he considered enemies. These were generally people who had noticed his absolute lack of a sense of humour and who made sport of this failing because it was funny. The more agricultural pupils would mock his regimentally neat appearance and hold impromptu darts tournaments during the technical drawing lesson utilising Frank's expensive fine-nibbed Rotring pens as darts. Mr. Stanier, the technical drawing teacher, had been carbon dated to no later than 1650 and was ill-equipped to restrain rebellious pupils, or pupils of almost any other description, and so Frank was left to fend for himself, and then to vent his frustration on whoever else was available and conspicuously lacking in reinforcements.

Frank reserved a particular venom for my friend Pete who was in his class and physically smaller, thus presenting a convenient and legitimate target. Pete however had the sharper wit. His retorts were quick, perceptive, and very funny, and he could shoot you down before you were even finished saying whatever crap it was you had thought so funny when you first thought of it. This didn't sit well with Frank whose wit was by contrast blunt and overly reliant upon terms such as pouf, bender and bumboy. He compensated by delivering these descriptors with force sufficient to quell any further insurrection; and his laughter was stupid and cruel, the amusement of a brute. Hur hur hur hur hur hur hur hur...

Pete and I had formed a group with two others, Graham and Eggy. We called ourselves the Pre-War Busconductors and we made most of the songs up as we recorded them, improvised direct onto cassette as we bashed away on cardboard box drums and an acoustic guitar amplified through Graham's Action Man radio. Naturally Frank was eulogised on more than one occasion.

He's saving up to buy a jeep.
He does his homework in his sleep.
He's got a massive square head,
And we all hope he'll soon be dead.

On more ambitious scale was (He's Called) Frank, a home-made cassette single we mastered directly onto TDK DC90 as Eddie & the Ogdens, this being the name under which we recorded as a trio when Eggy was otherwise indisposed. We termed it a cassette single because the A-side was one song forty-five minutes in duration, a happy clappy gospel number singing toxically sarcastic praises of Frank which mutated into other musical styles as it went on. There being one particular rude word which rhymed with Frank, we just kept going until we felt the theme had been explored to full extent.

I had no direct contact with the subject of these songs whilst we were still at school, the single exception to this being a snowball fight with our bunch against Frank's team, Anders Longthorne and Mark Lewis, both of whom seemed to have sided with him out of anthropological curiosity and were waiting to see what the hell he would do next. Frank rolled his snowballs with joyless rage, going after Pete with obsessive fury that bordered on weird. It wasn't about taking part, or even about winning for Frank. It was about the utter destruction and humiliation of his opponent.

In September 1982, I found myself embroiled in further education, taking art 'A' level in the same class as Frank. It was the first time we had sat at the same table, or probably even spoke to each other. He had no idea I'd played on Pre-War Busconductors songs concerned specifically with detailing his numerous character flaws as we saw them, or even that such songs existed. He seemed amiable, and so we got on reasonably well, or at least as well as one can with a person with whom you share no mutual interests. Frank was not lacking in talent, artistically speaking, at least in so much as his craftsmanship was exceptional. His imagination on the other hand seemed to operate at the same level as his wit. I recall one laboriously executed painting presented as a stern warning against the perils of drugs - a subject of which Frank had, to the best of my knowledge, neither experience nor understanding. The painting showed a beautifully detailed human brain rendered in ink and gouache, a syringe full of that heroin protruding from its rear, sinister looking tablets and packets of ciggies strewn all around.

Hey kids, don't do drugs, it sort of said.

We both passed art 'A' level, and in September 1983 started on the art foundation course at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education in Leamington Spa, a course designed to get us ready for our degrees the following year. Frank kindly offered to give me a lift each day, Leamington being some twenty miles distant from Shipston. In return I stumped up petrol money and spent an hour or so of daily travel time listening to him talking what was mostly complete shite about which was the best Star Wars film or who amongst our fellow students was probably one of those bent homosexual bumboys. He seemed either uninformed or unconcerned regarding my position on Pete, his old enemy from school, and would retell lumbering tales of hostile encounters which had given him pause to consider anew what a loser and a complete bender my friend had been. I already knew the tales well from Pete's telling. Some of them had already inspired songs, but Frank clearly took pleasure from the retelling and would bring forth the hur hur hur hur hur hur. Day after day I listened to him declaring his superiority over our fellow students, people we both knew from school, women and members of ethnic minorities. He would explain that he wasn't being racist or nothing but that Pakis really do stink.

'It's probably all that curry,' he opined thoughtfully.

I managed about two weeks of this before I switched my allegiance to Wells, another kid I'd known from school who drove through Shipston each morning to attend the same art foundation course. Wells was the sort of kid who would spend the summer holidays blowing things up with home-made fertiliser bombs, but I had more in common with him than with Frank. The first few trips in his bright yellow Ford Escort were justified by my explaining that I needed to be home by a certain time, and Wells always slipped away early, unlike Frank who dutifully stayed on to polish apples until college closed at five. After a couple of weeks, the new arrangement had become habitual and required no further explanation.

The weeks went by and Frank came to seem increasingly incongruous in the environment of an art foundation course. We were trying to expand ourselves, generally and artistically speaking, and Frank was Jeremy Clarkson in a vegetarian café. His craftsmanship remained phenomenal as he began to build articulated model dragons, meticulously crafting latex flesh upon skeletons of hinged plastic ligatures. He was heading for the film industry, for special effects, and so far as I am aware he got there and has been doing very well for himself in that field ever since; but in the winter of 1983 his abrasive personality was really beginning to get on our tits, these being the tits of myself and Wells, hence the eggs, the bags of flour, and a spray can of shaving foam.

It was the end of term, and such high jinx were to be expected. We had left school but could only be deemed adult by the most generous of definitions. We were agents of karma redressing the balance of Frank boring us shitless, driving like a lunatic, and that stuff about Pakis. We covered the car in eggs and flour and then, in a moment of inspiration, I sprayed a cartoon chicken across the bonnet in shaving foam turning the vandalism into a philosophical question of first cause. It was art.

We returned about an hour later. The car had been cleaned, and there was Frank hunched over the bonnet, his elbow working away like a piston on the flank of an old-time steam engine. His face was crimson, his teeth gritted, and his blood red eyes appeared distended upon veined stalks. He looked like something you would see on the cover of a Meteors album.

'When I find out who did this—' His vow became an angry incoherent salad of legal proceedings seasoned with promises of physical violence and even torture. It seemed safe to assume that he was yet to appreciate the true levity of the situation.

'Oh no,' Wells and I chimed innocently. 'What's happened, Frank?' We moved in closer, thankful at least of Frank being so blinded with rage that he wasn't going to notice our stifled hysterics. 'Did someone do something to your car?'

Still scrubbing, he spluttered and raged without making any real sense. There was no longer so much as a single grain of flour or a smear of albumen to be seen, but then we noticed how some chemical component of the shaving foam had left a permanent stain upon the paintwork. My cartoon chicken had become a burnt umber silhouette at the centre of the maroon bonnet. Had I spent another minute on the drawing, it might now have resembled a custom job, the deliberate choice of someone who really liked chickens and wished to express this in an automotive medium.

Frank scrubbed and glowered but the stain was going nowhere. He appeared to be coming close to foaming at the mouth, and apparently lacked the imagination to suspect Wells or myself. He had probably made more significant enemies on the course. It would be a disgruntled bumboy, or perhaps even a bender of some description. The thought of my having done permanent and legally actionable damage to his paintwork sobered me towards levels of guilt sufficient to at least mute the hysterical laughter that might have otherwise risen to the surface at any moment.

'I'll ask around,' Wells offered like a true mate. 'See if maybe anyone saw anything.'

We wandered off in the direction of his yellow Ford Escort, hunched shoulders and looking left to right like the beginnings of the posse which would deliver justice once it had gained momentum. We waited until we were on the Warwick New Road, heading home and out of sight of the monster we had helped create, then we began to chortle, describing the scenario to each other, and then to howl with laughter. Try as I might, I really could not quite bring myself to feel sorry for Frank.

He wasn't a terrible person. He had helped me out on a few occasions, one time driving the ten miles to Stratford-upon-Avon to pick me up when a missed bus had left me stranded; but he could be such an insufferable cunt at times, and Wells and I really felt he had earned that chicken. When we returned to college in the new year, the chicken was gone, although I can barely guess at how many hours of scrubbing and polishing it had taken to effect its removal. Frank continued to be Frank because as lessons go, it had been pretty vague even without accounting for his reluctance to learn anything he didn't already know; but thirty years later I think of that chicken and it still gives me pleasure, so maybe that is enough.