Free The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe Page B

The shortest of these songs is 18 minutes 34 seconds long, while the longest is 21 minutes 35 seconds long. Only Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ has longer pieces of music on each side, to the best of my knowledge. But this album has four, whereas ‘Tubular Bells’ only has two.
    Some songwriters, e.g. Roy Wood, Marc Bolan etc., just write pop lyrics, but it would be nearer the truth to say that Jon Anderson writes poetry and sets it to music. Take this couplet of lines from his song ‘The Memory’:
    ‘As the silence of seasons on we relive abridge sails afloat As to call light the soul shall sing of the velvet sailors course on.’ What does this mean, the listener wonders? Who are the velvet sailors, and where is the bridge that sails afloat? Jon Anderson is too profound a poet to give us pat answers and soapbox slogans. In the enigma lies the message.
    Musically all five members of the band are virtuoso’s. Anyone who has heard Rick Wakeman’s brilliant ‘Six Wives of Henry VIII’ (based on real Events from history) will need no introduction from me. Steve Howe is perhaps the greatest rock guitarist of his time, bar none, although really to heap special praise on any one of these band members would be insidious.
    Side Three of the album’s Four sides tells of The Ancient Giants Under The Sun, who are ‘atuned to the majesty of music.’ These words could equally apply to Yes themselves. They too are ‘atuned to the majesty of music’.
    In conclusion, if someone was to ask me who this album was by, and whether or not it was a masterpiece, I would be able to give the same answer:
    YES!!
    Flushed with self-congratulation at the ingenuity of those final lines, Philip was not aware of Benjamin’s presence until he felt the tap on his shoulder. Even then, he failed to notice how distressed he was looking.
    ‘Have you seen this?’ he said, in a triumphant whisper. ‘They printed it. They actually printed it.’
    Then he realized, suddenly, that his friend’s cheeks were pallid, his hands trembling, his eyes rheumy with tears.
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    And when he learned the awful truth, it provoked a horrified intake of breath. It was far worse than he could have imagined.
    Benjamin had forgotten his swimming trunks.
    King William’s had an outdoor swimming pool, tucked away behind the chapel, adjacent to the main rugby fields. It came into use halfway through the spring term, after which Benjamin’s form would have two swimming periods a week, on Monday and Thursday mornings, directly after break. Benjamin dreaded these periods at the best of times. He was not a good swimmer, he did not like exposing his body to the other boys, and he disliked, intensely, Mr Warren, the PE master, a laconic sadist popularly known as ‘Rosa’ on account of his passing resemblance to the mannish villainess in From Russia with Love.
    It was not just his penchant for driving the boys to the point of exhaustion that made Mr Warren universally feared. Where his swimming periods were concerned, there was also one notorious rule, responsible over the years for any amount of humiliation and psychological damage. This rule was perfectly simple, and admitted of no exceptions: if a boy forgot to bring his swimming trunks, he had to swim in the nude.
    It’s true that there existed some schools, at this time (and perhaps still), where all boys were required to swim naked as a matter of course, either in the mistaken belief that it was character-building or simply in order to gratify the none-too-private enthusiasms of the sports teacher. But that, in a way, would have been different. It might at least have created a kind of beleaguered camaraderie, a redeeming sense of everyone-in-the-same-boat. The awful thing about the King William’s arrangement was its malign, inexorable divisiveness. Any unlucky pupil caught in this situation would not only have to run a gauntlet of sniggers and pointing fingers on the day itself, but