Cambridge Corn Exchange
1990
The
Lads walked onstage through a thick fog of dry ice.
The noise was deafening.
They were immediately soaked by a deluge of spray, spume, spit and
sputum.
The baying battalions went berserk,
drowning the Band in a blizzard of beer and bodily fluids.
As usual.
But tonight the crowd was invisible.
The Lads crashed through the opening songs, and screamed into the
storm.
But the hall was empty.
Fog.
From their ankles to the horizon stretched a thick mist of dry ice.
The sea fog was broken only by the flailing arm of a drowning man,
the flying foot of a stage diver, or a bobbing dismembered head.
Anonymus beneath the clouds, missiles flew from the uncordial soup.
The crowd was down there, betrayed by their noise, heat, and juices,
but not a soul was visible.
The thunder of amps, the monsoon of projectiles, and the roar of the
hidden hordes.
It was a storm.
McCavity's hair was blown back in the gale of a thousand emptying
lungs.
Then the stage shook.
Flump!
Out of the
boiling firmament pitched a huge, pink, wobbily thing.
It flumped near McCavity's feet, and lay stranded and gelatinous.
The vast bulk, naked and clammy, was prone and immobile.
Mutts urged the masses to keep it moist - help was at hand.
The show continued, hotter, faster, louder; spurred by the torrid
typhoon.
But lyrics were lost in laughter as the roadies were toiling in
vain.
They slithered and slid across the slippery stage,
but foundered against the beached pink sea slug.
Covered in sweat, slime, beer, gob, piss and goo;
they could not grip the wobbily whale.
They tugged, and levered, they hauled and heaved.
They slapped and tickled and dragged and pushed.
No use.
A dead weight.
A dead, oily, floppy weight. Immobile.
It stayed.
After the last
encore, the slug slipped quietly back into the mire, under the mist.
And was gone.
Subsequent
visits to the seafront at Cambridge were action replays of the first.
Roadies were posted to scan the offing, but inevitably, at some
point,
the Lads would feel the stagequaking flump.
Cambridge will always remind them of flopsum and jetsam.
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