CHAPTER 71

 

#30: THE SILOS

“When The Telephone Rings”

from the album When The Telephone Rings

Released: August 2004

 

 

I was all out of pain, or had deposited any residual pain in reserve. Laura was buried on Thursday 6 September, four years to the day after Diana’s funeral. She had barely been gone more than just over two weeks when the world ended. I hadn’t anything left to feel or give. I had enough grief (if, not yet, enough of grief). You watched the live footage on the work PC screens – I don’t think anyone was doing any actual work that Tuesday afternoon. You travelled home through an auburn fog of stunned bafflement, listened to the radio speaking for confirmation that the world had ended. Your employer had warned you to take care travelling home; they had even thought of keeping staff in because of supposed or imagined threats.

 

You were too busy trying to pull your collapsed self back together and there would be further, neighbour-to-calamitous collapse before any pulling could be pulled off. You had no time to think of the city you had visited at six times in your life, the first two when nobody sane travelled there, particularly to the Lower East Side (but then, nothing put my father off, except, in the end, his heart). No, you were occupied by your own internal battles. You wouldn’t want anybody to see what you looked like, those final Saturdays in Oxford; a generation later you still frighten yourself thinking about it.

 

It is three years later, almost to the week, when you’re unknowingly approaching the final act of reassembling your self, that you hear this quiet, almost apologetic in its pleading, song at some unearthly morning hour. “Even in New York – how I long for New York.” The fucked-up forks of exiled tongues, and even pissed at four-fifteen in the morning you recognise an elegy when you feel its curtain skyscrapers and its perishing world. It is the exit song of the West.

 

It is four years later still, one breeze-bedazzled but still sunny Saturday, and you are having a day out – a day away from your unpromising surroundings – looking for music; you go far and further trying to find the thing. It’s barely gone ten o’clock in the morning when you go upstairs in the second-hand shop and see this 2-CD, 42-track, probably not entirely legal Steinski compilation but you buy it anyway. You will go as far as Southgate, where the hippie in the Oxfam shop speaks knowingly of Zappa while you pick up a copy of the Red Rat album.

 

 

 

The thing turns up at the end of that day, almost as an afterthought, in your back yard. But you listen many, many times to the last track on the first CD of that Steinski compilation and it is undanceable, opaque, demanding (that you care), and features voices dutifully telling us that something horrible has just happened, is still happening, and the duty then crumbles to barely-suppressed fear as some of these voices know they are about to die horribly. “Number Three On Flight Eleven.” Interspersed with that dialogue, along with extracts with whatever was on television at that point, is a solemn, Masterpiece Theatre voice, intoning a soliloquy – “Even in New York – how I long for New York – when the telephone rings.” The same words you heard on that song three years earlier, augmented by some amended Matsuo Bashō haikus from nine centuries before.

 

Years yet later you will learn that Steinski knew the main person in The Silos and that via a middleman (a bandmate) the song was given to him and he interpreted it as it stood, or sat. He made the song – one of the greatest songs of the last quarter-century, however much that estimation is worth – the memoriam it had always promised to intend. The voice of the receiver, at the end…”Yes…We’re still here…”

 

Where I found the thing was in my then-local Oxfam and it was a Mastercuts compilation of jazz-funk and its final track was Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do For Love” with its Arcades Project corridor of a long and patient fade. That was a blue carpet towards my future. I love that song more than most songs but it isn’t in this particular one hundred because the music one loves the most isn’t necessarily – indeed, rarely is – the music one plays most often.