VIII

“An Elephant???”

I looked at him feigning shock and awe (if I can borrow a term). In fact I was nowhere near as overawed as I had pretended, because I had already got quite emotionally involves with a strange lost little goat person from (presumably) those very same woods and if those woods could produce Panne, the idea of a half man, half elephant in a wheelchair was no real paradigm shift.

I have never been a very convincing liar, and I am a terrible actor, so instead of carrying on pretending to be shocked and awed, I lit yet another cigarette, made a mental note to light a candle to St Bernardino of Siena who is not only the Patron Saint of lung problems, but looks - in a painting by Jacopo Bellini from about 1450 - more than a little like Andy, the current lead guitarist with The Pink Fairies who is a vague chum of mine, and asked:

“So what did you do then?”

“Give me one of those fucking things..” he gestured towards my rapidly depleting pack of B&H.

Now I was shocked. I have known Danny for about a third of a century. Not only have I never seen him smoke, but he has always been vehemently annoying in his opposition to the habit.

I passed him a cigarette, lit it for him, and whilst he coughed and spluttered, I made encouraging noises and tried to get him to continue with his story.

“He looked at me for what seemed like hours, but was probably less than a minute, and asked ‘Give me one good reason why I should not kill you immediately?’”

He dragged on the cigarette, which despite everything seemed to be calming him down, and continued…

“Well, although I am sure that he knew perfectly well what I had really wanted from the two girls, I couldn’t really admit that, so I told him that I was a music journalist who was incredibly impressed by the music that the two girls had played me, and wanted to know more”….

This seemed to have been the right answer. At least, the bestial elephantman had not smote him down immediately, so sensing his tactical advantage, Danny gabbled on. He was involved with a community record company which was being set up, he lied, and both with that and with his unique relationship with the editor of Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine he wanted to get involved and help bring this remarkable music to a wider audience than it had at the moment.

As the audience to which he was referring was presently about thirty runaway teenage cultists living in surprisingly Spartan conditions in the middle of the woods, this quest would not be a difficult one to fulfil.

Both his “involvement with a community record company which was being set up” and his “unique relationship with the editor of Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine” were of course down to the fact that he had known me, and been an on-off thorn in my side for over thirty years.

“But we are nowhere near being Britain’s leading weekly music e-zine”, I blustered, but for once Danny seemed sure of his facts.

“Back in February the BBC quoted: ‘The NME website gets 1.4m users per week, while the digital edition of the magazine sells 1,307 copies a week, and thousands of people attend NME live events and concert tours’.” He said proudly, and looked me in the eye with the face of someone who is particularly proud of his own cleverness.

“Well yeah, we do get more readers than that most weeks”, I admitted, “but you are nothing at all to do with the magazine, and while I am editor you won’t be…”

“Details, details” he spluttered, and continued with his story…

“For some reason the elephant man whose name was – by the way – Mr Loxodonta – seemed quite impressed by all this bullshit of mine, and I began to think that I might be able to get away with it all, and live to fight another day”.

One of Danny’s most annoying characteristics has always been to talk in clichés, but I let him get away with it, as he continued his story.

“So I bullshitted like I have never bullshitted before” he said proudly, “and you know how I can bullshit!”

He looked at me as if this was an accomplishment of which he should be justly proud. In my opinion it probably isn’t, but I smiled wanly at him and nodded for him to continue…

“So I told Mr Loxodonta that what he needed was a Business Plan, and how he needed to market his cult for all that it was worth”

This was probably true. Cult leader Charles Manson has been in prison since 1969, but his records are still remarkably popular despite the fact that they are bloody awful and that the only USP that they have is that they sound mildly disturbing only because of what and who he is.

Danny continued:

“I gave him all sorts of ideas, and promised to come up with a cogent business plan and some ideas for how to market this stuff. It helps, I think, that unlike most music made by cults and cultists, this music is really pretty damn good”

I nodded, actually truthfully being able to agree with him for once. The music truly is pretty damn good.

“He asked me if I would like to be their publicity officer. I didn’t answer but thought really hard. Then I remembered your mate Mick Farren who died last year. He was the head honcho of the UK White Panthers, so I decided to steal one of his ideas.

‘No man; I told him. ‘ I want to be your Minister for Information’”.

Apparently this struck some kind of chord with Mr Loxodonta who nodded as enthusiastically as a half man half elephant sat in a wheelchair can do. It seems that on the numerous occasions in the past thirty years that Danny has stayed in my spare room or wherever has doubled as my ever-growing personal library has borne fruit…for him at least. Because I am a ridiculously voracious bibliophile, some would say packrat, and despite regular pruning and weeding sessions I still have over 5000 books on a variety of subjects including Forteana, magick (of various hues), politics (also of various hues), music and animals.

It turned out that over the years Danny had read a lot of these books, and had cherrypicked information that he was now regurgitating to Mr Loxodonta like a mother pigeon feeding her offspring.

Thinking completely off the cuff in a stream of consiousnesss way that I have to admit that I grudgingly respected, he took the idea of regular ‘Communiques’ delivered anonymously to various media outlets from The Angry Brigade (an anarchist group active in London during the mid-1970s), the idea of Art Terrorism from The Situationist Movement (with a hint of Banksy), more odds and ends from Mick Farren and the leader of the American White Panthers John Sinclair, and then wrapped the whole thing into a business model based on Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s conceptual band The Gorillaz..

“Their records are fucking great man, but they are cartoon characters and everyone knows that. What if you had progressive hip hop – I’m not gonna call it fucking ‘Urban’ cos its not fucking ‘Urban’ – made by actual double A class fucking Gods! Gods that have real powers and should scare you shitless! Gods that can smite you to dust! Can you think of a better fucking incentive to buy their record?”

I have to admit, that much though I abhor his method of speech, and the way that he said ‘Fuck’ more and more often as he became more excited, and the fact that all the best bits of this were things that I should have come up with myself years ago, he had a point.

Then it seemed things really started to happen. Mr Loxodonta made it known that he was in favour of these plans and that he wanted Danny to go away and think about these suggestions and come back with some cogent plans. He was given a telephone number to ring next time he wanted to get in touch, the bin bag was put over his head (gently this time) and he was (also gently) put back into the trunk of his car and driven back to a layby a few hundred yards from the A39.

It was the huge and (if you didn’t know that he was actually a pussy cat – I knew him back when he was called Jeremy, and I wondered whether he still collected stamps) terrifying figure of Skullfuck, who lifted him out of the boot of his car, dusted him down and helped him into the driver’s seat.

“You’ve been lucky today” he said, and strode back into the forest as Danny took a deep breath and continued his journey back up the A39 towards the link road, the M5 and his long-time boyfriend Basil in the Somerset Levels.