Turntables of the Night
by Terry Pratchett
Look, constable, what I don’t understand is, surely he wouldn’t be into blues? Because that was Wayne’s life for you. A blues single. I mean, if people were music, Wayne would be like one of those scratchy old numbers, you know, re-recorded about a hundred times from the original phonograph cylinder or whatever, with some old guy with a name like Deaf Orange Robinson standing knee-deep in the Mississippi and moaning through his nose.
You’d think he’d be more into Heavy Metal or Meatloaf or someone. But I suppose he’s into everyone. Eventually.
What? Yeah. That’s my van, with Hellfire Disco painted on it. Wayne can’t drive, you see. He’s just not interested in anything like that. I remember when I got my first car and we went on holiday, and I did the driving and, okay, also the repairing, and Wayne worked the radio trying to keep the pirate stations tuned in. He didn’t really care where we went as long as it was on high ground and he could get Caroline or London or whatever, I didn’t care where we went so long as we went.
I was always more into cars than music. Until now, I think. I don’t think I want to drive a car again. I’d keep wondering who’d suddenly turn up in the passenger seat . .
Sorry. So. Yeah. The disco. Well, the deal was that I supplied the van, we split the cost of the gear, and Wayne supplied the records. It was really my idea. I mean, it seemed a pretty good bet. Wayne lives with his mum but they’re down to two rooms now because of his record collection. Lots of people collect records, but I reckon Wayne really wants – wanted – to own every one that was ever made. His idea of a fun outing was going to some old store in some old town and rummaging through the stock and coming out with something by someone with a name like Sid Sputnik and the Spacemen, but the thing was, the funny thing was, you’d get back to his room and he’d go to a shelf and push all the record aside and there’d be this neat brown envelope with the name and date on it and everything – waiting.
Or he’d get me to drive him all the way to Preston or somewhere to find some guy who’s a self-employed plumber now but maybe back in 1961 called himself Ronnie Sequin and made it to number 152 in the charts, just to see if he’d got a spare copy of his one record which was really so naff you couldn’t even find it in the specialist stores.
Wayne was the kind of collector who couldn’t bear a hole in his collection It was almost religious, really. He could out-talk John Peel in any case, but the records he really knew about were the ones he hadn’t got. He’d wait years to get some practically demo disc from a punk group who probably died of safety-pin tetanus, but by the time he got his hands on it he’d be able to recite everything down to the name of the cleaning lady who scrubbed out the studio afterwards. Like I said, a collector.
So I thought, what more do you need to run a disco?
Well, basically just about everything which Wayne hadn’t got – looks, clothes, common sense, some kind of idea about electric wiring and the ability to rabbit on like a prat. But at the time we didn’t look at it like that, so I flogged the Capri and bought the van and got it nearly professionally re-sprayed. You can only see the words Midland Electricity Board on it if you know where to look. I wanted it to look like the van in the ‘A-Team’, except where theirs can jump four cars and still hare off down the road mine has trouble with drain covers.
Yes, I’ve talked to the other officer about the tax and insurance and MOT. Sorry, sergeant. Don’t worry about it, I won’t be driving a car ever again. Never.
We bought a load of amplifiers and stuff off Ian Curtis over in Wyrecliff because he was getting married and Tracey wanted him at home of a night, bunged some cards in newsagents’ windows, and waited.
Well, people didn’t exactly fall over themselves to give us gigs on account of people not really catching on to Wayne’s style. You don’t have to be a verbal genius to be a jock, people just expect you to say, ‘Hey!’ and ‘Wow!’ and ‘Get down and boogie’ and stuff. It doesn’t actually matter if you sound like a pillock, it helps them feel superior. What they don’t want, when they’re all getting drunk after the wedding or whatever, is for someone to stand there with his eyes flashing worse than the lights saying things like, ‘There’s a rather interesting story attached to this record.’
Funny thing, though, is that after a while we started to get popular in a weird word-of-mouth kind of way. What started it, I reckon, was my sister Beryl’s wedding anniversary. She’s older than me, you understand. It turned out that Wayne had brought along just about every record ever pressed for about a year before they got married. Not just the top ten, either. The guests were all around the same age and pretty soon the room was so full of nostalgia you could hardly move. Wayne just hotwired all their ignitions and took them for a joyride down Memory Motorway.
After that we started getting dates from what you might call the more older types, you know, not exactly kids but bits haven’t started falling off yet. We were a sort of speciality disco. At the breaks people would come up to him to chat about this great number they recalled from way back or whenever and it would turn out that Wayne would always have it in the van. If they’d heard of it, he’d have it. Chances are he’d have it even if they hadn’t heard of it. Because you could say this about Wayne, he was a true collector – he didn’t worry whether the stuff was actually good or not. It just had to exist.
He didn’t put it like that, of course. He’d say there was always something unique about every record. You might think that this is a lot of crap, but here was a man who’d got just about everything ever made over the last forty years and he really believed there was something special about each one. He loved them. He sat up there all through the night, in his room lined with brown envelopes, and played them one by one. Records that had been forgotten even by the people who made them. I’ll swear he loved them all.
Yes, all right. But you’ve got to know about him to understand what happened next.
We were booked for this Hallowe’en Dance. You could tell it was Hallowe’en because of all the little bastards running around the streets shouting, ‘Trickle treat,’ and threatening you with milk bottles.
He’d sorted out lots of ‘Monster Mash’ type records. He looked pretty awful, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I mean, he always looked awful. It was his normal look. It came from spending years indoors listening to records plus he had this bad heart and asthma and everything.
The dance was at … okay, you know all that. A Hallowe’en dance to raise money for a church hall. Wayne said that was a big joke, but he didn’t say why. I expect it was some clever reason. He was always good at that sort of thing, you know, knowing little details that other people didn’t know; it used to get him hit a lot at school, except when I was around. He was the kind of skinny boy who had his glasses held together with Elastoplast. I don’t think I ever saw him raise a finger to anybody only that time when Greebo Greaves broke a record Wayne had brought to some school disco and four of us had to pull Wayne off him and prise the iron bar out of his fingers and there was the police and an ambulance and everything.
Anyway.
I let Wayne set everything up, which was one big mistake but he wanted to do it, and I went and sat down by what they called the bar, ie, a couple of trestle tables with a cloth on it.
No, I didn’t drink anything. Well, maybe one cup of the punch, and that was all fruit juice. All right, two cups. But I know what I heard, and I’m absolutely certain about what I saw.
I think.
You get the same old bunch at these kinds of gigs. There’s the organiser, and a few members of the committee, some lads from the village who’d sort of drifted in because there wasn’t much on the box except snooker. Everyone wore a mask but hadn’t made an effort with the rest of the clothes so it looked as though Frankenstein and Co had all gone shopping in Marks and Sparks. There were Scouts’ posters on the wall and those special kinds of village hall radiators that suck the heat in. It smelled of tennis shoes. Just to sort of set the seal on it as one of the hotspots of the world there was a little mirror ball spinning up the rafters. Half the little mirrors had fallen off.