the organist's digressions

The stage was not one as such but several Ikea boxes pushed together, that he had been saving since a large online furniture purchase the previous year. He had set up two folding chairs on top of the boxes, one of which he used as a stand for the lime green Bontempi organ he had purchased on eBay for peanuts; it had chord buttons to one side that he tended to use exclusively, save for occasional attempts at notational intricacy that inevitably resulted in disaster or in the organ falling over in his exuberance. Since its purchase he had been trying without success to replicate much of John Carpenter’s memorable horror soundtrack work of the 1970s and 1980s but his attempts were poor and the sound laughable, his version of the Halloween theme, in particular, sounding like the theme tune to a daytime entertainment show with absolutely none of the taut oppressive atmosphere of the archetypal slasher of which the Carpenter soundtrack was an integral texture. On receipt of the organ he had stuck a printed greyscale promotional photograph of once-popular, now sexist presenter Michael Buerk to its casing with masking tape; “999” had profoundly influenced him as a younger male, left him with an almost permanent feeling of entrenched anxiety that he considered more blessing than curse, opening his eyes, as it did, to the unimaginable risk in even the commonplace. He watched Michael Buerk as he played and remembered; he cared not for the Buerk of today, whose reactionary aphorisms enflamed all of Guildford with righteousness; his feelings for and gratitude towards the man were of far greater consequence, a fact to which the printed greyscale promotional photograph adoring his Bontempi organ testified.

The days performance was what he termed his “parlour version” of the soft rock hit Total Eclipse of the Heart, a song he had always found almost uncomfortably emotional and rousing. The gathered audience waited for his muted shuffling entrance which he executed without a word like a shadow elongated by the slipping sun. He stepped over the organ’s frayed yellow power cord and took his position on the empty folded chair before it, the chair legs tearing with a jolt into and through the thick corrugated cardboard of the stage surface. Unfazed the commenced the performance, alternating between chords that bore little recognisable relation to the song as known, a lack of relation that was no further bolstered by the lyrics, when they appeared. Performed “in the vein of” Michael Winner they were conversational, shredding the melodramatic pomposity or garment-rending heft of the original to nothing, his pleaded, slightly whiney “turn around, bright eyes” sounding more like a frustrated owner half-heartedly encouraging its aged dog to walk back to the car quickly than the urgent declaration of some fierce and passionate love that Tyler had presented circa 1983. The performance’s impact was further stymied by his insistence at frequently deconstructing the so-called moment and fourth wall by unexpectedly stopping both his conversational vocals and his limited organ work mid-verse and even mid-line in order to explain what he would do differently with a more complete and elaborate selection of musical instruments and skillsets at his disposal. For example: “imagine, if you will, accordions”; or “you’re familiar with the drum kit sir? I envisage its presence here in some plenitude”; or “when I close my eyes I can hear, here, brasses of divine origin”; “recorder bits would pepper this coming section in spiralling solos of perhaps unexpected – given the limits of the instrument – clarity”, the like. Throughout the five or so minute performance he paused nine times to offer these elaborative deconstructions of the musical process, which resulted in his complete fantasies pertaining to what could be achieved with different personnel playing different instruments roughly five times the performance length of the song itself. When finished, he stood from his seat and the boxes further crumpled to flat beneath his weight. The Bontempi continued to hum through its in-built speaker; he crossed the room to unplug the power cord, as the on-off switch was damaged beyond usage and once the instrument was plugged in it remained very much ‘on’, and his foot caught in the piled boxes as he did so and he felt onto his side and pulled the organ down on top of him. The humming persisted; indestructible, the old Bontempi products, he thought proudly.

While he struggled to his feet the gathered audience of three, his immediate family, spouse and two young, left the living room without applause or a word of thanks, and he wrapped the Bontempi in a tartan blanket and began to fold away the cardboard for recycling.