Michael Bolton was as obsessive a corrector of punctuation as he was a sound editor. The mixing desk atop his work station had long since suffered the attentions of the black marker pen (a Sharpie with a chisel end) which was permanently poking out of the back pocket of his faded blue jeans. He had painstakingly altered the erratic Sino-English spellings and the abhorrent grammar during his coffee breaks, and at lunch hours he would open up the heavy, acrylic bound manual which had come with the equipment, and proof-read that. Over time, and under the friction of his wide, pale hands and fat fingers, the original writing on the surface of the desk had faded, and now only his pedantic corrections remained. Robbed of any context, commas and apostrophes looked like the speck of dirt and grime that will gather under the corners of duct-tape, and immaculately ruled crossings out and his own stencilled corrections bisected the brown rings left by one hundred cups of black coffee. Consequently to the casual observer Michael’s mixing desk appeared as grubby as that of Dick at the next table along; though Michael rubbed down his gear every morning with a damp chamois he got from the Ford garage on the corner, whilst Dick didn’t think twice about using the recessed tape drive as an ash-tray, or the CD drive as a cup holder.

Michael turned to watch him now, his grubby hands white with dead skin and his nails yellow from nicotine, poking a finger into the axial slot in search of a few rogue crumbs from his afternoon sandwich. Michael’s look of boredom turned into one of disgust. He pushed his heavy black NHS glasses up his stubby nose in disgust, as if to better classify the order of indecency which Dick was perpetrating on the equipment. Had Michael walked down the high street as he looked now, he would have been instantly marked down by the initiated as something of a trend-setter. The permanently pouting lead singer of “this year’s hottest sound” (so said NME) had sported the same look in his latest photo-shoot; a pull-out poster which was no adorning the walls of no less than twenty thousand fourteen year old girls and thirty four thousand disaffected and androgynous teenage boys. They looked at it is they straightened their hair that morning, and as they applied their eye-liner, and no doubt the girls did the same. Suitably prepared to face the day, they had rushed out to browse Oxfam and Cancer Research, even Marks & Spencer and Debenhams, all in search of the same Gingham shirt and skinny legged brown cords. None of them had replicated the look as well as Michael had, though it was far more likely this year’s youth prophets were in fact copying him. Or their stylist was at least. In fact the band had been in the sound studios the previous week, polishing the razor-edged chorus of the third song on their upcoming debut; destined, they had been told, to be the single which would make them a household name. A beleaguered record company dog’s body had spotted Michael struggling to liberate his change from the aging vending machine, and seen in his awkward and impotent frustration a metaphor for the state of today’s youth, and had informed his superior of such when he returned with the three skinny lattes he had been sent to fetch. Sensing promotion, he had even gone so far as to execute a quick sketch in biro on one of the napkins provided. His superior had thanked him for his contribution in the most patronising manner possible, then once out of sight had executed a quick spin and clicked his heels in delight; a spontaneous expression of joy at the felicity of having an English undergraduate for a work experience placement. He in turn had passed on the designs to the band’s manager, and the latest trend was set.

In reality, Michael knew that the song would be overplayed to excess on MTV and Kerrang, barely pique the interest of the late night DJ on Radio One, and later provide the up-beat backing vocals to a shampoo advert. The lyrics would have to be cut of course, since the desperate twenty to thirty year old singletons said shampoo was aimed at would probably flinch at the lines about “the desperate guns of the forgotten ones”, or that bit where the bassist repeated the names of the victims of the latest American High-School shooting victims in a piercing Falsetto. And what would they have to show for their efforts? A loan of thirty grand from the record company which was barely paid off, and an awful lot of coasters.

That was why Michael worked with the lates and the greats; re-issues of classic albums and compilations of the finest tracks to commemorate the deaths of acclaimed artists, or to feed the nostalgia of once passionate music-fans reaching their thirties, forties or fifties. Ten years on, these releases pretended, this music has stayed has faithful to your experiences even if your wife hasn’t to you. That was what Michael offered; happy endings to people who thought they thought like Nick Hornby. The most perfect fidelity, priced accordingly. Michael replaced his heavy head-phones and felt the comforting touch of the thick leather compressing his ears. The leather meant silence; obliterating the immediate future, the present, and the past thirty years. Tweaking the sliders with trembling fingers, Michael he slowly faded in the track and hearing the first tinkles of the tambourine, sank into ecstasy. He was there again, sat in the corner of a recording studio he had never visited (and long since demolished), listening to the DNA of a generation trapped in vinyl like a fly trapped in amber. Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons sang about love and loss and the night, and tweaking the knobs in front of him he could make them sound better dead than they ever had alive. Pan and treble erased the imperfections which alcohol and happiness and youth had more than compensated for in the minds of the listeners, who had now grown old and could no longer stomach them.

Tune of the moment: Invalid Litter Dept. - At The Drive In

Jac

Labels: fiction