Free The Blueprint by Marcus Bryan Page B

hand; I can’t make sense of it from
behind the half-light and drunkenness, but it looks almost as if
it’s been inked-in this morning. ‘Well done,’ she says, after a few
awkward moments.
    ‘For
what?’
    ‘For not
singing that stupid television song.’
    ‘The Friends one?’
    She shrugs.
‘If you say so.’ I admit that the thought had crossed my mind.
    ‘You’d be
surprised at the amount of people who can’t resist doing it,’ she
replies. A mental image of Charlie briefly flashes across my mind,
and I can’t help but smile. Then, as if summoned telepathically, a
voice rumbles out of the speakers above our heads, echoing around
the bar.
    ‘I know we’re
a little bit on the late side…’
    I turn to look
at the stage, and see Charlie hoisting a guitar over his shoulders,
a guy on his left doing the same thing, a bassist standing in the
shadows who’s already running through scales, and a geeky-looking
chap sitting down at the set of drums behind the rest of them. A
group of people to the side of the stage boo Charlie’s opening
words. He laughs, and even this quiet chuckle overpowers them
thanks to the heavy amplification.
    ‘… so we’ll
spare you the introductions.’
    The drums, the
bass, the amps, the speakers all blast out at once. The bassist and
the drummer strain to hold the two guitarists together, since
neither one seems to want to play the same song as the other. The
other guitarist’s chin is tucked into his chest and his arm has
gone staccato, moving in discrete little plucks, up and down, in
vivid contrast to the way that Charlie’s wild strokes send the body
of his guitar clattering against his hips, looking like it’s going
to fall off at any second. When he staggers back into the light
he’s yelping something I can’t hear, and probably wouldn’t
understand if I could. All the people at the bar, recognising the
song, have turned around to watch. Just as the instrumental starts
to drag, it all drops back into quiet again, and Charlie waltzes up
towards the mike and sings.
    He can’t hold
a tune to save his life - not if you’re using any conventional
definition of ‘singing’, at least. It’s just a demented, incoherent
scrawl of sound, but he delivers it as though he really means each word, even if he can’t pronounce them. As though
they’re his own words, and someone else just happened to write them
down first.
    As Charlie
stumbles back from the microphone and blunders into the solo, his
attention falls away from the crowd and towards the other
guitarist. A thread of doom and violence twists itself between
their eyes; they’re glaring at one another as though they’re about
to fall off the edge of a cliff, and each has figured he might as
well drag the other one with him. The sound gathers volume and pace
until the rhythm section can barely keep it from collapsing. It’s
music to make you want to lose your clothes and senses - even for
someone who has sex in the dark, such as me. Charlie staggers right
on the edge of the stage, where a sudden blast from the amp could
send him tumbling into the crowd, but he somehow holds it there, on
the edge of chaos, screaming out into the darkness. I find myself
overcome. The worry that came with this halfway-drunkenness flies
off, along with my inhibitions, and I want to dance like Charlie
sings, let the booze loosen my arms and my neck.
    ‘Alright Ian
Curtis, calm down,’ mutters a girl in a red dress as she passes.
She accompanies it with a glare of disdain - one which is, I
notice, also being worn by a group of hipper-than-thous on the
chairs at the side of the room. Rather than watching the band,
they’re laughing at me. I stop mid-movement, as though I’m playing
a one-man game of musical statues. Then a cymbal crashes, as if to
punctuate the moment, and Charlie spits out his final line. The
guitars fade away, leaving just the bass and drums to gently waft
the song into non-existence, and the encroaching silence throws