The Dream Journals of Mark Question
1962 - 1966
1962
The Night That London Swallowed the Sun
Starlight Room, Soho — 1962
It was the night Erik Evol burst his headstock through a rented Vox amp and created a sensation. The same night Coco LeBree slapped a copper across the face with a pink lace glove, then kissed him on both cheeks. The night Mitchell Joy pulled the fire alarm just to sync it with the bridge of “Sick Penny Blues,” his voice raw from a weekend spent shouting in a squat off Ladbroke Grove. The night S. True Smith met La Maga, and the sky over London was permanently altered.
The Starlight Room was never a proper venue. It was a gambling club with a damp floor, a glimmer of mirrors from a prewar burlesque, and a smell of spilled Cinzano, cold gravy, and long-evaporated scandal. Ronnie Scott once described it as “like the Marquee had a bastard child with a Lyons Corner House and left it in the cellar to rot.”
The Get Quick had been slotted in by Fabian Kevorkian, newly sacked from Decca for overdubbing birdcalls onto a Lulu single. He claimed it was “the future of applied acoustics.” S. True Smith, then managing a group of Scottish Mods called The Turbulents, had seen The Get Quick at a lunchtime showcase in Islington and declared them “unmanageable, unpresentable, and unmissable.” By week’s end, he was booking their Soho debut and rifling through Evol’s handwritten lyrics for “possible incantatory properties.”
That particular Tuesday had no right to be special. Mick Jagger was seen slipping out the back of the Flamingo with Chrissie Shrimpton, and Andrew Loog Oldham had declared the Troggs “uncannily marketable” just that morning. But the Starlight had pulled a curious crowd: failed aristocrats, fanzine poets, two Beatles incognito, and a trio of girls in Mary Quant shifts who claimed to be from a church called the Choir Invisible.
La Maga, then still known as Celeste Montforte, appeared between sets, hovering by the rear exit. She had a Rolleiflex in one hand, a half-empty bottle of Beaujolais in the other. “You look like a boy who swallowed a star and forgot to die,” she told Evol. He asked if she’d like to photograph his amp bursting into flames. She took one look at the curtains and declined, but stayed the rest of the night, and the next four years.
The music? No one agrees. Some recall a shattering wall of sound, equal parts Bo Diddley and Gregorian chant. Others swear the band played only one song, over and over, its tempo shifting like the phases of the moon. A surviving tape exists—allegedly—but S. True Smith swore in a 1987 Mojo interview that “anyone who hears it goes clinically pale.”
What is agreed upon: something changed that night. In the weeks that followed, Evol began using reversed guitar loops in rehearsal. Coco stopped sleeping and wrote six songs in a trance. Mitchell began tapping messages on phone booths when no one else was around. And the name The Get Quick began appearing on walls around town, often scratched into glass, or burned onto linoleum floors.
Some say it was their true beginning. Others believe it was the moment when the city began listening back.
Coco in the Grove
Ladbroke Grove, Summer 1962
Before she was Coco LeBree—bassist, gender specter, underground style icon of the amphetamine afternoon—she was known only as “Cookie” to the boys in the squat on Tavistock Crescent, who thought she was French, or American, or something cooked up between a Godard matinee and a West Indian record stall. She rarely corrected them.
The Grove was a place of flickering collisions then: Trinidadian sound systems sharing wall space with the last peeling posters for Tommy Steele revues; angry clots of kids in stovepipe trousers shouting over the rumble of the Westway’s construction. The local press called it a slum. Coco called it a broadcast tower for beautiful freaks.
She had come up from Brighton with a tape recorder, a sequined vest, and an ambition shaped less like fame and more like sonic transformation. Her squat was one of many near the Acklam Road railway arches, and if you climbed onto the roof at dawn, you could see the smoke-slick sprawl of Portobello thinning out into broken factory windows and estate blocks. The mornings smelled of tea, vinyl, and woodsmoke. The nights — burnt paper and hash.
At the squat, she lived alongside Don Letts’ older cousin Desmond, who ran cables through the walls to power a pirate station that only played Pharoah Sanders and rude calypso. There was Jeanie the Teeth, who sharpened her too-ample grin with a nail file, and a drummer from Stepney Green who claimed he’d once fought Gene Vincent in a laundrette.
Nonetheless, Coco stood out. She painted her eyes with iridescent chalk from a book of pagan cosmetics stolen from the Foyle’s occult shelf. She played a cheap hollow-bodied Japanese bass guitar, untunable and shrill, through a blown speaker that made every note sound like it had been run through a banshee. People came by to watch her rehearse. Word spread to S. True Smith, who at the time was managing three other bands, two affairs, and one civil lawsuit.
S. True brought Mitchell Joy, freshly expelled from the merchant navy, to a Grove basement gig where Coco performed with a flamenco guitarist, a typewriter, and a can of pink spray paint. “I don’t know what the hell I saw,” Joy later told Melody Maker. “It was like if Mingus had been mugged by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and left for dead in a knitting circle.”
After the performance S. True, Joy and Coco talked for hours in a Formica café on Ladbroke Grove, mostly about symmetries and dub and bad vibrations in Victorian plumbing.
That same night, Erik Evol, barely seventeen, cutting acetates at Decca for shillings — was invited to the squat by a blonde waif he wouldn’t name for years. They all met in a room with no windows, three jugs of rum, and one reel-to-reel tape looping Coco’s heartbeat with distorted field recordings from the Notting Hill Carnival.
Somewhere around sunrise, La Maga took their photograph on an expired roll of Ilford 400. Only three faces showed up. Coco wasn’t one of them.
Old Compton Street
(or what’s left of it)
Entry: June 4, 1962 – 2i’s Coffee Bar
We went underground tonight—literally and otherwise. The 2i’s is the kind of place where mildew wears sunglasses. Half steakhouse, half sarcophagus. Coco said it smelled like “teenage sweat and marmite dreams.” Erik didn’t come. Mitchell came, glowered, drank a Coke, left.
The house band—still The Wellingtons back then—were “on” for two half-hour sets, no pay, just as much flat espresso as they could stomach. Coco nearly OD’d on instant crema. S True wasn’t around yet, so an oily man in a mohair jacket named Neville who booked the club was all over Coco trying to woo TGQ into playing. Said the place had “history,” like a battlefield or a ghost train.
We sat near a trio of teddy boys who sang doo-wop with terrifying sincerity.
Dreamnote: I saw myself in the chrome napkin holder and I was older, and I was someone else. Smoking. Smiling. Said, “You’re going to love Denmark Street. Just bring matches.”
The Get Quick Mythos: The Black Tape Begins
Swinging London, Autumn 1962
Fabian Kevorkian’s studio was not on any map. You reached it by descending a narrow stairwell behind a tobacconist in Soho, past stacked boxes of acetate blanks and a rusted heater wired into the wall like an electroshock relic. The door was unmarked except for a faint black star burned into the grain of the wood. The air smelled of solder, rosin, and cheap incense.
Erik Evol arrived already vibrating with static. He had spent the previous night in a bedsit in Earl’s Court, staring at the ceiling tiles while a French girl read from Les Chants de Maldoror between nibbles from a small nectarine marked with the number 23. He hadn’t slept, couldn’t remember what sleep was. The guitar slung on his back still had flecks of dried red wax on the body from a séance at a Notting Hill flat party.
Fabian was waiting, hawk-eyed and lantern-jawed, at the far end of the narrow tracking room. Behind him stood two hulking Ferrograph tape machines modified with Bakelite knobs and additional inputs. The whole place shimmered with a low hum, as if it were in tune with the National Grid.
“I’m told you can tear holes,” Kevorkian said without greeting, his voice like gravel dropped into a China teapot. “Let’s hear one.”
Erik plugged in. The amp—apparently an old Selmer Zodiac borrowed from Mickie Most—buzzed with a faint Morse code pattern. As Erik adjusted the volume, the ceiling lights flickered. Fabian said nothing, just reached for the red record button on Track A and rolled tape.
What came next was not music.
It was a sound like wood warping in heat, like the breath of something ancient being forced through a copper funnel. Erik began with one note, bent backward over the tremolo arm until it was sobbing in its own waveform. His fingers danced across the fretboard not in patterns but in gestures, as if divining something from a hidden language.
Fabian’s eyes widened. He stood slowly, removing his incongruous Russian fur trapper hat, and whispered, “He’s found it.”
Tape hiss became rhythmic, almost breathing. A loop began to overlay itself, Erik’s own playing folding back in reverse, treated through Kevorkian’s experimental loop system—a twin-reel delay box he’d nicknamed The Apparatus.
Kevorkian began patching in frequencies from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s unused tone library—shortwave interference, birdcall reversal, and the infamously banned “Frequency 12-D,” supposedly first recorded at an army base outside Woking that had since vanished from the maps.
At some point, Erik dropped to his knees, eyes shut, murmuring a counter melody that would later become “Zoltan’s Mirror,” the instrumental b-side to their first EP Carnaby Cryptic.
Fabian seemed to move as if underwater. Reaching out was a struggle. He stopped the tape. Erjk’s eyes opened.
“You went through, didn’t you?” Kevorkian hissed, breathless. “Did you see it?”
Erjk blinked, licked his lips. After a moment he said “I saw where the sound comes from... before it knows it’s a sound.”
“And?” Kevorkian demanded.
“And it’s very old... And... it’s not happy about being heard.”
From the hallway, I was peeking in, holding two cups of Lyons tea and feeling ghost-pale. “There’s a dog outside. With... a person’s face,” I managed faintly. And I swear... there was.
Fabian waved me off. “It’ll go when the reel stops spinning.”
Outside, rain beat against the alley in time with the last loop echoing from the tape heads: a mangled chord that never resolves. It would later be dubbed “The Black Tape,” apparently confiscated by the government and studied by military audio labs through the 1970s. But not before Kevorkian made a copy. Segments of which were allegedly backmasked into later pop recordings by The Get Quick. “The Black Tape” was to become one of the many dark spectres to shadow the band throughout their career.
But in that moment, it was just the beginning.
Oct 4, 1962 – Flamingo Club, Wardour Street
Tonight: Jazz ghosts and rank trousers.
Fabian (the one with the Transylvanian diction and hunting hat) had invited Mitchell and me to observe rather than participate in a soul night at the Flamingo. Mitchell accepted on behalf of the band; I accepted on behalf of posterity. He wore that donkey-brown duffel coat like an oath. I wore a blue polo neck and knew I was invisible.
The Flamingo is sinking—you can feel it, even through your shoes. There’s a dampness that doesn’t rise from sweat or beer but from time itself. The ghosts of Ellington’s reeds curl in the rafters, bored. American servicemen loaf around like extras from The Sweet Smell of Success, waiting for something to happen that won’t.
In the loos, a saxophonist offered to sell me Benzos and a theory about the Greco-Turkish roots of soul jazz. Mitchell told me to stop engaging with mirrors and men with schemes. I told him the band would be better off with a dedicated vibes manipulator. He told me to fetch cigarettes.
Dreamnote?: Erik Evol appeared in the balcony at 2:10 a.m., though he had not come in with us. He was wearing a white scarf and tapping one long, pale finger on the balustrade. I blinked and he was gone. Later, the MC announced a surprise feedback performance “for those still vibrating.” No one played a note, but my teeth hurt for hours afterward.
Nov 3, 1962 – The 2i’s, Old Compton Street
Erik Evol played the 2i’s tonight, though “played” may be the wrong word—conducted sonic sorcery in denim and leather is closer. The stage is a crate. The sound: damp and hopeful. The ceiling drips, but only during Coco’s bass solo.
There’s a sweat to the place, both literal and spiritual. The ghost of Tommy Steele hovers near the milk frother. I’m fairly certain Cliff Richard’s shadow is stapled to the wall.
Mitchell beat on a borrowed floor tom with military precision, unbothered by the leaking pipes or the man in the back booth who kept muttering about “the Third Interval of Rhythm.” Coco (still male, just barely) wore a turtleneck and introduced every song as “a plea to a forgotten god of frequency.” He was joking, of... course.
The pay was a cappuccino and half a Kit-Kat. Erik claimed the Kit-Kat tasted “like a velvety ghost.” I nodded, as though I too understood sugar mysticism.
1963
Coffins And Caffeine At Midnight
Feb 2, 1963 – Le Macabre, Wardour Street
Coco insisted we go. Said she’d heard a poet died mid-stanza here last month and they kept his ghost in the jukebox. The tables are shaped like coffins, but it’s the mirrors that do you in—warped, cracked, moody like Francis Bacon’s shaving kit.
La Maga was there, sketching people instead of photographing them tonight. Drew Erik before he arrived. Drew him exactly. He walked in ten minutes later, same coat, with a cigarette in the side of his mouth just like the sketch. He said, “Have I missed anything?” Then sat beside his drawing and didn’t speak.
There was jazz on, maybe. Or just the sound of spoons in cups. Beesley showed up, asked the barista for “Piping hot silence, no sugar,” then sat in a corner reading a manual on magnetic tape corruption like it was scripture.
Mitchell didn’t come. Said the place gave him “a brain rash.”
Dreamnote: In the loo, I met a man who said he built guitars from animal bones and conducted a skiffle orchestra of ghosts. I said, “You should meet Fabian Kevorkian.” He said, “Already have. Gave me tinnitus in both timelines.”
The Cat’s Whisker
August 12, 1963 – Kingly Street
(The band was “mistakenly” billed as The Harlequins, and I still think that’s better)
The band cut demos earlier that day on Denmark Street, in a room that smelled like fresh wood stain and stale fear. Then S True said, “We need ears.” So we came here—where the ears are hungry and the coffee costs nothing if you allow the baristas to flirt with Erik.
Coco had on a cape. No one asked why. Erik fell asleep standing up, woke when someone dropped a teaspoon and muttered “D-sharp.” Mitchell beat time with one hand on a ketchup bottle and refused to smile—at least until someone asked if he was “that bloke from The Hollies.”
There was a girl there with a tambourine and a birthmark shaped like a treble clef. She said, “Your band doesn’t sound like anything else.” Erik said, “Thank you.” She said, “That wasn’t a compliment.”
Dreamnote: The booth jukebox played a song. I saw the record spinning—it had no label, only a spiral drawn in purplish ink. I followed the spiral and woke up on the fire escape behind the Stockpot with a sugar cube in my mouth and Coco’s cape draped over my knees.
Regent Sounds
April 1, 1963 – 4 Denmark Street
I nearly got arrested today for not being important enough. Showed up with Coco, who was wearing a green coat he said once belonged to Chet Baker’s barber. Mitchell had called it a “dry run” session—just vocals and rhythm at Regent. But Erik was bringing his “black coil,” and that meant they’d need me to “document.” Or so I thought.
The doorman (whose mustache had its own ego) told me the band was “at capacity” for the room. “What am I, steam?” I said. He didn’t get it. Coco slipped past like a ribbon in wind. I loitered in the stairwell until Fabian came down for a cigarette and hissed, “Let him in, he’s harmless.”
Inside: chaos disguised as purpose. Kip was taping tea towels to Mitchell’s toms while Scully poured salt around the mic stand. Said it was “a preemptive bleed banishment.” Jerome had unplugged the board because it “smelled wrong.”
Erik played four notes that made dogs gather in the alley, howling. We had to stop for a full hour while the engineers “realigned the earth wire.” Everyone blamed me. Even Coco. Even the dogs.
Kip was recording the dogs.
I saw the master reel labeled “FORGETTING ENGINE.” Kip crossed it out. Wrote: “Remembering Device (Draft I).” Beesley winked at me and said, “You won’t hear this. You’ll just know it’s missing.”
Le Macabre
May 4, 1963 – Wardour Street
Coffin-shaped tables and a beatnik waiter who recited Lorca while serving bitter orange espresso. The place reeks of pretense and instant chicory. I adore it.
Kip Leeds was there with a prototype tape delay hidden in a breadbox. Told me he was sampling “table clatter in 7/8 time.” I told him he should sample me. He told me I already sounded like bad tape hiss.
Coco read Justine aloud to a girl in a beret who was so captivated that she kept lighting matches and then forgetting why. Mitchell stood near the fire exit polishing his cymbals with a sock. Erik talked philosophy with a man who may or may not have been a ghost, or at least a failed playwright.
Fabian Kevorkian arrived and immediately requested a “quiet table in the loudest part of the room.” He was meeting with a young man from Denmark Street who claimed to have discovered “a secret major key that undoes trauma.” Fabian just nodded and asked for a cup of boiling water and a menu he could burn.
Dreamnote: The barista refused to make me a latte unless I could spell “Sartre” backwards. Turns out I couldn’t, but the lights flickered and she made one anyway. It tasted like ash and forgone dreams. I gave it a 7.
Happening 44
August 18, 1963 – Gerrard Street
So this is the new 2i’s? Somewhere between a sweat lodge and a séance. They performed under a poster of Screaming Lord Sutch with the eyes blacked out in Sharpie. Coco wore false lashes over his eyelids. Kip ran a cable into the men’s loo and swore it gave him a “bathroom reverb dome.” Mitchell said, “Just don’t plug anything into the soap dispenser.”
The crowd was mod, French, loose, and loud. One girl danced so violently to third number (“Midnight on a Broken Harmonica”) that her handbag burst open...
Le Macabre
October 6, 1963 – 3:21 p.m.
(“There’s glamour in being unwanted—until you have to pay the bill.”)
I came to get caught up with my journal. Stayed for the company of strangers and the promise of something strange.
Le Macabre is quieter by day. The coffins have fewer elbows, the mirrors fewer faces. A beat girl in white tights and a velvet beret chain-smoked over a paperback of Naked Lunch, mouthing every third word like it tasted like a stale pickle. I asked if she knew Coco. She said, “I know the idea of Coco.” Fair enough, I decided. Me too.
Mitchell was across town “fixing the van’s spiritual grounding” (read: arguing with Fabian about petrol money). Erik was—somewhere else. He doesn’t do daytime. I think he waits for the sun to ask him out first.
Soho is too warm in the autumn. It could give jock itch to a ghost. I ducked into El Toro for a Spanish Coke and heard someone whisper my name from the jukebox. Probably no one. Possibly Beesley, encoding again. Messing with me. Can’t stand the thought of him today.
Dreamnote: I saw a girl I’d kissed behind the Scene Club last week—only now she was working the counter at Les Enfants Terribles. She didn’t remember me. But when I left a drawing on my saucer napkin, she folded it, kissed it, and slipped it into her shoe.
The Scene Club
Oct 12, 1963 – Ham Yard
Coco was still going by “Clive Harker” then, but tonight she insisted on Mirabelle and debuted a silk scarf she claimed once belonged to Christine Keeler’s hairdresser. I told her it clashed with the bass. She told me I clashed with the century.
Scene Club was alive tonight, and I mean more than the usual mod twitches and amphetamine jazz twirls. Something beneath the floorboards was ticking—or breathing. I asked Thor Scully about it, and he said, “Time’s metronome always leaks in early takes.” He’d been up for 48 hours tuning a prototype snare to the rhythm of the Earth’s magnetic field. He looked like Asgard’s audio technician.
Kip Leeds had brought along a compact reel-to-reel hidden in a shoulder bag shaped like a falcon. Said he was recording “crowd tremor data.” I asked if I’d be on the tape. “No,” he said, “you fall between frequencies.” Took that as a compliment.
Evol arrived late, looking like he’d just walked out of an x-ray. Played one note during soundcheck that made the lights blink before he struck the strings. I’m told this is normal.
Dreamnote: I followed S True to a side room where he and a man in a trench coat discussed sonic visas and an “unrecordable tone.” When I approached, S True handed me a stick of gum and whispered, “You didn’t hear the chord. You heard its absence.” I nodded, as if I understood. I still carry the wrapper, can’t decipher the writing.
Blue Gardenia Club
Nov 10, 1963 – St. Anne’s Court
The alley stank of butcher’s rain and old cigarettes. I followed a trail of loiterers and mod boys to number 20, where Cass of the Cassanovas allegedly invented Thursday night. Inside: narrow walls, borrowed gear, a ceiling you could headbutt by mistake.
I was promised The Get Quick would play. What I found was a broken amp, two pints of orange squash, and a man in dark glasses telling everyone he used to be Rory Storm.
Thor Scully had somehow routed Mitchell’s kick drum through a series borrowed transistor amps. Every beat sounded like an echoing detonation from inside your own brain. A man in a trench coat applauded politely and dropped a blank business card in my jacket pocket and promptly left.
Mitchell kicked over every amp and repacked his kit. Said the bass bin “looked damp with lies.” Coco seemed deeply offended. Erik left without entering. Said he’d “already played the gig in a dream and it went badly.”
Some Liverpool lads played instead—two of them looked suspiciously like Beatles, though everyone swore they weren’t. One of them winked at me and muttered something about “the Swiss chord.” I asked what that was. He said, “It’s not on your scale, mate.”
Dreamnote: I saw the walls flex. Literally. Like a lung. The club inhaled and the bass player missed a note. The room exhaled and the lights dimmed. Cass said, “It’s the building learning our key.”
“The Tape Is Awake: A Press Event at the Albion Rooms” The Get Quick Mythos – Soho, London, December 1963
The invitation was printed in thermal ink that vanished moments after first exposure to air. It read:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / OR TOTAL REPRESSION FABIAN KEVORKIAN presents THE GET QUICK Thursday 3rd Dec / 3:33 PM ALBION ROOMS / NO CAMERAS / NO CLOCKS
They gathered anyway.
A Melody Maker columnist who wore mirrored sunglasses indoors. A French radio producer with a recorder the size of a shoebox. Someone from Tit-Bits who had been promised nudity. A girl from Honey magazine who just wanted a quote about Coco LeBree’s “astral waistline.”
They were led into the Albion Rooms’ velvet-cloaked conference suite by a pale man who introduced himself as “Mark Question” and would not explain further. The floor was faintly sticky with something sweet-smelling. Incense burned from an upturned tape reel.
Fabian Kevorkian entered backwards.
Literally. He walked in backward, in a pinstripe dressing gown and engineer’s gloves, holding a leather attaché case from which he produced a glass reel of magnetic tape and a jar labeled Vocal Honey (Do Not Open Above 14 Hz).
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press,” he began, “welcome to the discharge. The Get Quick have opened the sequence. They are now in rhythm with the event horizon.”
A pause.
“Mr. Kevorkian,” asked the girl from Honey, “where is Erik Evol?”
Fabian smiled.
“Phase-locked. He’s currently in pre-echo alignment, somewhere west of Earls Court.”
The Melody Maker man lit a cigarette and muttered, “Bloody hell.”
My job was handing out cups of something warm and opaque.
Walter Ego entered from a side room, wearing Coco’s cape and one boot, the other foot wrapped in plasticine. Eyes closed, nodding slowly like a man translating sonar into verse.
“Are we live?” he asked. No one answered.
Kevorkian continued. “The record is a mirror. A prismatic fracture of signal and flesh. We’ve recorded Zoltan’s Mirror, and Zoltan has responded.”
“What does the single sound like?” the French producer asked.
Kevorkian nodded gravely. “It sounds like the universe, sentient, face to face with its mirrored reflection. And in that moment, it remembers your name.”
The tape was threaded. Played.
A single note blared. It seemed to stretch. Time slowed. The Tit-Bits man’s biro exploded in his pocket. My nose began bleeding and when I staunched it with a tissue the blood blot was in the shape of the letter “Q.” The mirrored sunglasses cracked.
Then it stopped.
Silence.
Tea cooling on the saucers. Reporters blinking back into consensus reality.
Kevorkian looked pleased.
“The song will not chart,” he said. “But the song will embed.”
A long moment passed before Walter whispered: “He’s not gone, you know. He’s still playing.”
“Who is?” asked the girl from Honey.
Ego looked directly at her. “Erik. You’re hearing his pick scrapes before he plays them. He’s outpacing us.”
“Any final statement?” someone shouted, hoping for copy.
Fabian turned to the reel, which had started spinning again on its own, whispering backwards syllables. He held up his finger as if to shush it, then spoke:
“Ladies and gentlemen: This is merely the first strike in a tone war. You may not have known it was upon us, you may not have asked for it, but nonetheless, we are all already in the radius.”
Mark Question and the Roundhouse Ordeal
Chalk Farm Road, December 1963
Filed and misfiled under: INCIDENT, MINOR POLTERGEIST / POSSIBLE CONTACT / ONEIRONAUTICS (UNLICENSED)
It was supposed to be a routine errand.
Drop off the acetate. Retrieve Marianne Faithfull’s shoes. Exit before the soundcheck ghosts came up through the heating vents.
Instead, I, Mark Question—assistant, gopher, occasional decoy for Mitchell Joy’s warrant issues—found myself locked inside the Camden Roundhouse with a pair of silver kid-skin heels, three cigarettes, a half-laced tea sachet labeled “For Dreamspeed Only,” and something dark and sloshy moving behind the rigging that whispered in Latin.
Earlier that day, Coco had dropped the key into my palm (“It only opens once. Then it forgets”) and Fabian Kevorkian had warned, “If she asks about the left one, lie.” He didn’t elaborate.
The Roundhouse was abandoned that evening save for one disgraced psychic stage manager named Harold who said he’d been fired by Dusty Springfield for summoning “the wrong brother.” I didn’t ask.
The shoes were in a pigeonhole behind the old lighting desk, wrapped in a scarf that smelled of vetiver, benzoin, and Courrèges vinyl. Marianne Faithfull had apparently left them after the previous weekend’s “Sun-Counter Initiation Rehearsal,” a TGQ–adjacent happening involving tape loops, an unlicensed parrot, and an unsanctioned incantation in E-flat minor.
I tucked the shoes under my arm and headed for the side door.
Locked.
Tried the back.
Locked.
Even the disused conductor’s entrance—padlocked from the inside.
I checked my watch. It was missing. In its place, a bruised circle on my wrist, and the faint sound of a string quartet tuning up in a frequency just above human hearing.
That’s when the shoes began humming.
⁂
So I sat down on the wooden floor near the central pillar. Tried to light a cigarette, but the match ignited in slow motion, burning a symbol into the air: a stylized eye inside a spiral. It flickered—perhaps winked —and vanished.
From the shadows, a single spotlight flickered on. Empty stage.
Then—
Footsteps. Sharp, soft, deliberate. High heels on old wood. But no one there.
The silver shoes vibrated faintly in my lap. One lifted. Then the other.
I watched, completely sober except for what the tea might’ve been doing to my hippocampus, as the shoes walked themselves to center stage, turned out, and began to dance.
Not ballet. Not rock ’n’ roll.
Something older. Cloven. Ritualistic.
It was like watching the unbroadcast parts of a Ready Steady Go! episode where the crew reveal themselves to be a Satanic Cult and the audience weeps and forgets their names.
From the catwalk, a disembodied voice hissed: “Mitchell was supposed to bring the candle. You’re not Mitchell.”
“I am Mitchell!” I called back, trying to mimic Joy’s purr. “I just had a bloody haircut!”
Laughter. A laugh track—of people long dead.
An abrupt cut to silence.
And then the smell of warm vinyl again.
⁂
When I awoke, dawn had blistered across the stained glass in fractured violet. The shoes were gone. In their place, a feather boa with the label “PROPERTY OF NEMS” sewn into the hem, and a red-and-black acetate marked “ONLY FOR FAITHFUL.”
Harold was gone. The doors were now open.
So I bloody left, blinking, clutching the acetate like a communion wafer. I would later insist to Coco that he’d guarded the shoes all night, of course. She would nod politely and never ask again.
[POSTSCRIPT: Years later, during the infamous “Mammothgon Playback Séance” in Berlin, someone would play a reversed dub of the acetate and claim to hear a woman’s voice reciting German translations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in Marianne’s timbre.
No one ever found the shoes.
But for weeks afterward, the Roundhouse staff reported faint scuffs in the dust where no one had walked.
And as for me, Mr. Question?
I still won’t walk past bloody Camden Lock without checking behind me.*]
1964
The Coffee Ann 4:02 p.m.
Jan 18, 1964 – Whitcombe Street
(Some places never open before dusk, like secrets and bad decisions.)
Rain like piano wire today. Slashed sideways into my lapels. Thought about going to the studio, but they’re tracking backing vocals and Mitchell says I “vibrate wrong.”
So I went to the Ann. Basement deep, breath warm, thick with steam and secrets. A jazz gal nodded to me as if we’d shared a dream. Maybe we had. There’s a booth in the back where people pretend not to listen. I joined them.
Overheard: – Coco was seen arm-in-arm with a French student poet who claimed to “channel Baudelaire through bass notes.” – Erik may or may not have caused a brief blackout on Wardour Street during a feedback tuning ritual. – S True Smith is compiling dossiers on each band member “for contractual reasons.” – A girl in a fake leopard coat swore she once kissed Georgie Fame and a member of The Get Quick in the same evening, but “not in the same timeline.”
I left a note for no one under my saucer: “Make me essential or let me dissolve.”
The table I was sitting at suddenly grew warm. Not metaphorically. Actually. I lifted my palms and saw the pattern of the Formica imprinted like a rune. Kip would say it’s “vibrational residue.” I say it’s longing.
Ronnie Scott’s
Feb 2, 1964 – Gerrard Street
Jazz night, so Mitchell insisted I not come. I came anyway.
Ronnie’s has a strict smell—mildewed velvet and high-end tobacco. I posed as Coco’s cousin from Berlin and was ushered in with suspicious courtesy. The band wasn’t playing, thank god. They were only here to “absorb rigor.”
La Maga was photographing the ashtrays and muttering about how the ghosts of bop “always reveal themselves through cigarette scars.” She fed a strangely subdued pigeon in her pocket, claiming she had hypnotized it. No one commented.
Erik sat beside a broken wall speaker and hummed in unison with its static. Kip and Jerome argued about “pre-decay resonance” in mono playback until one of them spat up gin. Meanwhile, Mitchell seemed to be in a business negotiation with a man who looked like Ian Fleming’s personal chef.
Dreamnote: A beatnik at the bar told me that Watershed Studio was originally a plague hospital, and that Fabian Kevorkian never leaves it fully. I laughed until he pulled out a blueprint drawn in red pencil and pointed to something labeled “Antechamber of Harmonics.” I excused myself to write this down.
Outside Number 6
Feb 17, 1964 – Denmark Street
Snow today, but only in the middle of the road. I swear it. The pavement was dry and littered with plectrums and paperbacks, but down the yellow line: flakes.
The Splits hadn’t moved in yet. There was just the faint sense of someone waiting to be angry inside. Upstairs, a session was running late—some folk singer with a fringe and an allergy to vowels. Mitchell told me to “circle the block until the stars change.” I took refuge in a nearby shop and stared at a Hofner bass I couldn’t afford and a set of drumsticks I wouldn’t be allowed to hold.
I ran into Jones. I think it was Jones. Living in a camper, allegedly. He asked me for a light and then gave me one instead. Said: “Don’t mistake being near the song for being part of it.” I said I worked with The Get Quick. He said, “I know. So does gravity. But it’s not on the record either.”
The Stockpot, 5:11 p.m.
March 10, 1964 – Old Compton Street
(Dinner hour for the disinvited.) They serve soup here for almost nothing, which suits me. I had seven shillings left and no call sheet. Mitchell said “Don’t wait up.” Coco took my only scarf. On my way here Erik passed me on the street without acknowledging anything.
I watched a couple break up at the next table. Loudly. Tenderly. She threw a crouton at his eye and wept into her vinaigrette. I offered her a cigarette and she offered me a theory: “Every band fails when they stop walking everywhere together.” We talked for a while. Then I started getting rude thoughts and left.
That night the rain came sideways again. I wandered toward Denmark Street and found a shuttered storefront with a dusty upright piano in the window. The keys were numbered in silver ink, and someone had written on the glass: PLAY ONLY WITH INTENTION.
I kissed someone in the alley behind the Stockpot. Might’ve been real. Might’ve been La Maga wearing someone else’s skin again. Her hair smelled like Polaroid film. Her teeth hummed with love. Definitely a dream.
Mission from Scully: Oct 8, 1964
2:06 p.m.
(“What’s missing might not be lost. Just somewhere it doesn’t belong.”)
Thor Scully handed me a note this morning, rolled into the hollow of a drumstick. Said nothing. Just pressed it into my hand like a relic. The paper read:
“One-inch tape. Labeled ‘RADIANT SILENCE’ – last seen in Studio B, 3:17 a.m., night of the rain pulse. Beesley swears it existed. Kip says it never did. Find it. Don't play it. – T.”
Finding that he was still standing there, looking over me as I finished reading, I asked, “Why me?”
He said, “Because you notice things no one asked you to.”
Then he lit a cigarette with the reel-to-reel’s pilot light and walked into the echo chamber.
So now I’m in the rain again.
Coco said he remembered seeing a courier slip something “unspooled and wrapped like a baby eel” into a coat pocket at Coffee Ann two nights ago. Said the man was wearing gloves with the fingers cut off and kept muttering about “frequency trespass.” Sounded like one of S True’s field agents—or perhaps a fan of the band’s difficult material.
I start there.
Strange Currents In Old Coffee
3:17 p.m.
The Coffee Ann
The waitress recognized me. Called me “The Not-Famous One.” I left her a two-pence tip shaped like a spiral. She blinked twice.
I asked about any men matching Coco’s description. She said, “We don’t get prophets anymore. Just poets and their duplicates.” Then she handed me a sugar cube with a phone number written upon it in blue food coloring. “Try Le Macabre. Ask for Murmur.”
“Murmur...is a person?”
She said, “That depends on who’s whispering.”
The air in there felt heavy, humid, tuned wrong. I had the feeling I was being recorded somehow. I thanked her and left in a hurry.
4:00 p.m. Le Macabre
The shadows know when you’re lying. And where. Murmur was not on the clock. Or off it. No one had heard the name. But someone at the coffin-shaped table nearest the mirror said, “Try the back booth.” In the back booth, I found a cork coaster with the words “Ask Delia” scrawled in eyeliner.
The jukebox played a broken melody I half-remembered from an Erik solo improvisation—the one with the backwards harmonica and the warbled dog yelp that made Beesley faint. This version was slower. Underwater. I swear I heard Thor’s voice say, “Closer.”
I left. The mirrors were beginning to twitch.
5:12 p.m. Gerrard Street, outside Happening 44
This is where the world hums sideways.
I found her—Delia with the blonde fringe and eyes like weather patterns—outside Happening 44. She was painting a sigil on the pavement in wet chalk, something similar to the symbol Kip once burned into a bottle of Beefeater gin “just to see what echoed.”
I asked about the reel. She said:
“It’s not music. It’s a premonition that took physical form. Whoever holds it hears their future played at half speed. I left it at The Colony Room. Third shelf. Behind the gin with the starburst label. But it might have moved since.”
I asked why it might’ve moved.
She smiled: “Sound is alive, Mark. You should know that by now.”
6:44 p.m. The Colony Room, Dean Street
“The air was green. The gin was jealous.”
They let me in because La Maga vouched for me—over the phone, using no words, just a single sigh. The place was a terrarium of lean men and sharp girls and old spirits with new debts.
I found the gin bottle. I found the reel.
It had no label now, only a bit of torn masking tape that said “DO NOT—” and then nothing else. The rest was rubbed off. I slipped it into my coat and left without paying for my drink. I believe the drink forgave me.
Back at Watershed, I handed the reel to Thor. He took it without looking, slid it into a box marked “UNPLAYED.”
I said, “What is it really?”
He said, “Erik recorded while sleepwalking.”
I said, “What’s on it?”
He said, “Would you like to remember the moment you die, in advance?”
I said nothing. He smiled.
The reel clicked once, then sighed.
Tin Pan Alley
Oct 15, 4:40 p.m.
Denmark Street, outside Regent Sounds. They called it Tin Pan Alley, but it sounds more like a wind tunnel made of ghosts.
No call from the band today. No reply from Coco. S True hasn’t looked me in the eye since the teacup incident. And so I loiter.
Regent was quiet but not still. Something was moving inside—just beyond the fogged glass. Not music. Not rehearsal. Something like a hum from a deep-body engine. I sat outside with a cigarette and a sausage roll and waited for… something.
Saw Jones. Again. I think. Still parked in that camper van near number 6. Reading Strange Tales and muttering into a tape recorder. He looked up at me and said, “They don’t let the real songs out until you bleed a bit.” I said, “I already have.” He smiled like a cat and went back to his comic.
Dreamnote: I think the reel’s not done with me. I passed a music shop and every guitar in the window de-tuned itself as I walked by. I heard it. The manager came out and asked if I was carrying a “resonance curse.” I told him that I worked for The Get Quick and that it’s just my personality.
Alley behind St. Anne’s Court
Oct 16, 3:33 p.m.
Followed a girl with a badge that said “Murmur Club Staff.” Thought maybe I’d imagined her, until she dropped a cassette labeled “Cass & The Cassanovas: Live Dec 9 1961 – UNEDITED.” It smelled like someone else’s dream suitcase. (Where the stones remember what singers are loathe to.)
She ducked into a door I’d never noticed beside the old Blue Gardenia entrance. The lettering was gone, but the feeling remained. That place still hums.
Inside, I was told to leave. Politely, by a bouncer with hands like curled bibles. As I backed out, someone else muttered, “Mark Question, right? You left your name in a reel once.” I said, “Which one?” They said, “That’s the question.”
Note: In the alley, someone had chalked a sigil onto the bricks behind Trident Studios. It looked like The Get Quick logo—but wrong. Reversed. Melting. The circle around it pulsed, faintly, like breathing stone.
Entry: October 17, 1964 – The Marquee Club, 90 Wardour Street, 6:58 p.m.
(Pre-show, post-future.)
The Marquee is like church but with louder sermons and fewer rules. Tonight it’s Zoot Money and something called Sound Dynamics Revue. I pretend to belong. It works until someone from the cloakroom asks why I’m holding a typewriter.
(The answer: I was going to write something brilliant, but then I spilled tea on it and now it just squeaks.)
Kip walked by and ignored me. Mitchell didn’t show. Coco showed, but with him—a darkly beautiful poet from Sheffield with an aura of insider jazz magazines and romantic betrayal. He didn’t see me. Or he pretended not to. Which hurts more?
A man approached and said, “There’s a place below the Marquee where they store unfinished songs. Literal vaults. You can hear them if you put your ear to the drainpipes.” I tried. All I heard was the wind—and something cackling in 5/4 time.
Entry: October 18, 1964 – The Whiskey A-Go-Go, upstairs from The Flamingo, 5:29 p.m.
(Pre-nighttime before the all-nighter.)
The AllNighter doesn’t start until midnight. But I’m already buzzing. Something’s coming. I can feel it. Everyone in the upstairs bar seems to be waiting for a call they’ll never receive.
Heard a rumor: a reel was stolen from the Flamingo’s DJ booth last week. Not a record—an actual reel. Said to contain the first TGQ studio take of “Chronic Spectacle,” the version where Erik collapsed to the floor screaming in pig-Greek. Only three people heard it. One’s in hiding. One joined the clergy. The third disappeared into a tunnel under Fitzrovia and is said to emerge only when the acid rains come.
A woman in sunglasses touched my arm and whispered: “Don’t follow echoes. They might turn on you and bite.” I turned to ask what she meant, but she was gone. I checked my coat pocket. Inside was a matchbook from The Scene Club. Written on the inside flap:
“October 21 – He returns.”
Entry: October 21, 1964 – La Discothèque, Wardour Street, 3:03 p.m.
(“Not all music is played. Some of it is just waiting.”)
I arrived early. Too early. The door was locked, but the air already pulsed like an oncoming migraine. I pressed my ear to the wall. Heard nothing. Heard too much.
This place was once El Condor. Rachman, gangsters, Mandy Rice-Davies throwing drinks at Krays. Now it’s La Discothèque—chrome toilets, wrought-iron bedsteads, music that feels like silk caught in a fan blade. Nothing live. Only curated shadows.
A boy named Solace let me in through the side. He wore gloves. Said, “You’re here for the missing track, yeah?”
I said yes, because of course I was.
He handed me a lady’s scarf soaked in gin and lemon oil. It read:
“Check behind the jukebox. If it’s humming, leave it. If it’s silent, press play.”
I checked. It was silent.
Entry: October 21, 1964 – The Sunset Club, off Carnaby Street, 4:40 p.m.
“When the jazzmen die, they reincarnate as house bands.”
Someone said Erik had been spotted here—alone, in a booth, tapping his temple in time with nothing. So I went.
The Sunset is heat and dust and highballs and sounds with teeth. Count Suckle in the corner, grinning like a prophet on payday. I told the girl behind the bar I was with The Get Quick. She said, “I thought they didn’t keep handlers.” Fair.
“They handle me,” I tried.
Nothing.
No sign of Erik. Just Duke Vin dropping 45s like spells and a woman in a yellow coat who kept asking if anyone had seen her shadow. I’m hoping that Shadow is the name of her cat.
A man called Blue (that’s all he gave me) told me, “He passed through around noon. Said he was ‘pulling down a frequency no one’s sung yet.’ Left for St. Anne’s.”
He gave me a matchbox from the Cue Club. Inside: a broken guitar pick and a feather that smelled of burnt oranges.
Entry: October 21, 1964 – St. Anne’s Court, 6:16 p.m.
The sun sets faster here. Must be all the old lies weighing it down.
I turned the corner and everything went blue.
Literally: a bloom of sodium twilight, as though someone had sprayed the alley with stage light. I stopped in front of the old Blue Gardenia entrance. Someone had chalked “ERIK RETURNS” on the bricks in looping art-school script.
Was this the moment? The matchbook had said today.
I waited. And the doors opened.
Not to Erik—but to sound. One long, hollow chord. Like a memory being played backwards. I stepped in. No band. No people. Just a reel-to-reel on a chair, spooling nothing. Beside it: a mirror cracked down the middle.
I looked into the mirror and saw the band—Mitchell, Coco, even Fabian, all walking away down Denmark Street in silhouette. Erik wasn’t with them.
I blinked and I was back outside. The air was normal. The chalk was gone. I held the reel-to-reel from the chair. No tape on it—just a note taped to the reel head:
“This wasn’t for you. But you’re holding it now. So what happens next… is yours.”
Entry: November 2, 1964 – Les Cousins, 49 Greek Street, 2:45 p.m.
“The folkies drink like kings and sing like prophets with sore throats.”
Rain again. Not stage rain—real, heavy rain that slaps your face like a forgotten debt, still unpaid. The band’s in Brighton recording drum overdubs. I wasn’t invited. I came to Les Cousins instead, half by accident, half because someone left the address written on my bus fare.
Inside: fishing nets, candle wax, guitars that look like they remember the Blitz. A girl named Tuesday (I asked; she didn’t laugh) was playing something in D minor that made two men weep and one man propose to a waitress. I sat in the back and scribbled lyrics that Erik would never sing.
I tried to order tea. They served me red wine in a chipped mug and told me “tea’s out today.” Fine. So was I.
Bert Jansch walked in. I think. Could’ve been a ghost with his face. He looked at me like I was a song still being written—and not very well. Said, “We all go electric eventually. The question is whether it’s our idea.”
Entry: November 3, 1964 – The 100 Club, Oxford Street, 1:15 p.m.
“All true jazz clubs smell faintly of revenge.”
I came in for lunch and stayed for memory.
The 100 Club is a temple with wallpaper. Its ghosts wear suits and still heckle. The jukebox only plays what the dead approve of. I sat across from an amp once used by Ronnie Scott himself and tried to manifest purpose.
There was a trio playing—half-practicing, half-haunting. Nobody applauded. One man threw a folded newspaper at the drummer and shouted, “It’s a bloody Tewesday, Brian!” No one explained what that meant.
I saw a flyer in the back announcing: “Spontaneous Soundings: Tiles Club 11.5.64 – WATERBORN TAPES ONLY.” I took it. It hummed in my pocket all afternoon.
Before I left I looked at the floor and saw the outline of an old trapdoor, traced in spilled beer and scuff marks. I touched it with my shoe and felt it throb. Something is moving beneath Oxford Street. Something older than music. Something recorded.
Entry: November 4, 1964 – Tiles Club, Underground Complex, 4:07 p.m.
“You can feel the city shift gears beneath your feet,” the old tramp growled. Not at me, but still, I had to see for myself.
Followed the flyer’s address. Found the door near the 100 Club. Went down too many stairs. The walls dripped with condensation and disused light. I passed a boutique called Plumage and a record shop playing Nancy Sinatra. A mannequin’s glitter eyeliner winked at me. I didn’t blink.
The Tiles Club itself is vast, low-ceilinged, like a dance floor built inside a whale. The speakers encircle you. The air pressure changes with every beat. Jeff Dexter was there—probably. Someone said, “You just missed him.” I always do.
A man was selling what he claimed were “river-washed records.” Said they’d been found in a locked cabinet two floors below. I asked what was on them. He said, “The soundtrack of the city, before they paved it.”
I bought one. No label. Just grooves, deep and erratic. I haven’t dared play it.
When I left, I found myself standing not on Oxford Street but in an archway near Whitfield Street. An angry woman of utterly indeterminate age in a dark silver jacket pointed at my bag and said, “That record was meant for someone else. Just don’t drop it near water.” I could swear she was a witch.
The Lavender Guillotine
Coco LeBree at The Cromwellian, South Kensington, 1964
The first time Coco saw The Cromwellian, it was through a cloud of Gauloises smoke and the shimmer of a silvered Rolls Royce hood ornament. It was spring of ’63, and she had borrowed Erik Evol’s dove-coloured double breasted trench to gain entrance—no one refused a woman in cashmere. Not at The Crom. Not when the night clanged with belladonna and broken glass, and the drummer from the Pretty Things was curled on the pavement like a punctuation mark.
Inside, the club was mood-lit like a confession booth. Black walls, peacock velvet booths, Moroccan brass swinging low like navigational hazards. She knew half the faces, most of the vices. Her bandmates had scattered for the evening—Mitch claimed to be meditating with a Jamaican mystic in Chalk Farm; Erik had gone off with La Maga and a film reel labeled “Duchamp’s Teeth.”
Coco ordered crème de menthe on ice and told the bartender her name was Mathilde. That night she was no longer bassist, no longer Coco. She was transforming again, subtly. Just another girl from nowhere wearing someone else’s eyeliner, waiting for the night to crack like a smile.
She’d barely finished her drink when a Frenchman with a Mondrian tie and an eye-patch asked if she played chess. She didn’t, but said yes.
Upstairs, the Cromwellian’s lesser-known feature was the glass-walled private room where European models pushed rooks against aging surrealists and exiled Balkan aristocrats. Coco and the Frenchman played a single, slow game as Jefferson Airplane drifted from the walls. With every move, he spoke in riddles:
“The steed is only free when it forgets its name.” “The patzer longs for geometry, but fears the thought curve.”
She was winning. Or losing. It didn’t matter. Something was happening with the board. Every time he took one of her pieces, she felt a pressure behind her eyes, like someone brushing her mind with a feather dipped in ice.
“Do you feel it?” he asked. “Le passage invisible.”
When he took her queen, a violet cape descended before her eyes. The walls began to shimmer like oil on water, and the chessboard—now just light and shadow—spun once and lifted from the table. Her king was vibrating, changing shape, morphing into... A new queen.
She looked up at her opponent. Blinked, and he was gone.
All that remained was the pawn she’d moved first, now carved from lavender glass and left standing on her side of the board. When she touched it, she saw the faint outline of her own face reflected in it, much older, lips moving silently.
Coco slipped the pawn into her handbag, descended the stairs, and walked back into the night. She said nothing to the others about the incident.
Three days later, a letter arrived at the band’s flat in Notting Hill. No stamp. No return address.
It read: “Checkmate is not an end. It is a key. Kill the pawn.”
Entry: November 7, 1964 – 23 Poland Street, above La Poubelle
“You don’t know how many shades of smoke there are until you’ve lived in one.”
La Maga called it a “favor.” I think it was punishment. Or initiation. Her darkroom’s above a failing strip club with a green-lit sign that reads GIRLS LIVE NOW but reeks of stale sweat, cheap perfume and unpaid rent.
Upstairs, it’s one large room with blackout curtains, a projector that hums like a nervous animal, and boxes—hundreds—of undeveloped film rolls, labeled only in pencil: “ERJK – WARDOUR – MOON FLICKER,” “CO2 / UNKNOWN / MIRROR DOORS,” “MG / HAMPSTEAD / VEIL.”
La Maga never explains the codes. She just says: “You’ll know which ones to open.”
Entry: November 8, 1964 – The Red Bucket Method
“We’re not developing. We’re excavating.” — La M.
We’ve created a system. I load the reels. She breathes instructions. There are no lights except red. Every photograph smells like water and memory. The ceiling leaks above the enlarger, but we don’t move.
Day three, I noticed a pattern: in nearly every roll, someone’s watching us. Not posed. Not part of the moment. Reflected in mirrors, car windows, puddles. Always the same tall figure in shadow, wearing a coat that I swear Erik used to wear—but never at that time.
Sometimes even when Erik wasn’t there.
I mentioned this. La Maga said, “That’s normal. Some images develop backwards into the future.”
I love my work.
Entry: November 10, 1964 – The Rash
“If the chemicals don’t get you, the ghosts will.” — La M.
Woke up with blisters on my arms. Angry red swirls like whirlpools or fingerprints. La Maga said, “You’re allergic to something you’re not supposed to know yet.” Gave me ointment that smelled like chalk and static. Helped. A little.
That night, one of the photos moved.
Just a small loop: Mitchell at Ronnie Scott’s, lighting a cigarette. But the match never catches. It just flares. Fails. Flares again. On repeat. No one else in the image. Just him. Trying to ignite something that won’t.
I asked La Maga how that was possible.
She said, “Some moments never resolve. That’s why we keep them.”
Entry: November 11, 1964 – “Man in the Reflection” Folder
“Images can lie. Or they can tell the truth before it happens.” — La M.
Found a folder I wasn’t meant to open—labeled simply “MQ.” Inside: ten rolls, all unprocessed. On instinct, I developed one. The photo: me. In a booth at the 100 Club. Laughing with someone who doesn’t I’ve never set eyes on before. I don’t remember it. I don’t wear clothes like that. But I knew the laugh. It was mine.
I showed La Maga. She went quiet.
Then whispered: “Mark, don’t be scared, but sometimes… we’re not the voice. We’re the echo.”
Entry: November 12, 1964 – Exit
“The light at the end of the darkroom is real, but the hallway is new.”)
I told her I had to leave. She nodded, handed me a single frame from a strip labeled “TO BE DEVELOPED WHEN IT’S TOO LATE.” It was blank. Or maybe overexposed.
“It’s blank,” I said, blankly. “Or maybe overexposed.”
La Maga gave a rueful smile. “Or maybe it hadn’t happened yet.”
She kissed my forehead. Said, “The band still needs you. But not the way you think.”
When I stepped back out onto Poland Street, the neon sign downstairs had burned out except for three flickering letters:
G I _ _ S _ _ V E N _ W
I don’t think I’ve really slept since.
Entry: November 17, 1964 – BBC Broadcasting House, 12:33 p.m.
“Lunch with a man who once banned ‘Telstar’ for sounding too foreign.”
S. True brought me along as “his young associate,” which I think meant briefcase handler slash cultural scapegoat. We were here to charm a man named Monty Darwell, who ran something called Pop Inn. He wore a moustache like an exclamation point and kept calling S. True “Stuart,” which wasn’t his name. Not even close.
I said nothing, just nodded in the right places and tried not to sneeze. I’d developed a mild allergy to fluorescent lighting and institutional indifference.
S. True pulled out a 7” acetate of “Thistle Throne”, handed it across the table like a detonator. “It’s R&B with topological ambition,” he said. “Think The Who meets Navajo radio waves.”
Monty asked if it had “a clean chorus.” S. True said, “It has a necessary chorus.”
Monty said he’d “consider the Light Programme,” but the tone was funeralific.
Afterwards, S. True muttered, “We need more fringe.” I said, “We need less suits.” He lit a Turkish cigarette and said, “We need Luxembourg.”
Entry: November 20, 1964 – Hertford Street Studio (Radio Luxembourg pre-tape facility), 10:03 p.m.
“I don’t know what we’re selling anymore. But I know it sounds just as cool backwards.”
We waited outside the locked booth while someone inside finished a Bobby Vinton hour. The soundproofing was so thin I could feel the drum fills in my sternum.
S. True had brought Kevorkian this time. When I asked why, he said, “Credibility and menace.”
Fabian looked like a waxen priest. He held a reel labeled “Experimental C – Don’t Erase” and a letter signed by someone only called Vulcan. Said he’d offer Luxembourg “a sound artifact.”
The engineer—a man named Barney with gold rings and jaundiced eyes—took one look at the reel and said, “Not unless you pay double. Or promise not to blame me when someone hears dead languages cycling backwards in stereo.”
S. True knit his brow. “Are you...?”
“A fan,” Barney nodded. “Still, I must insist–”
Fabian whispered something into Barney’s ear. Barney went pale. He looked like he was thinking of something heavy. Then he looked like he wasn’t thinking at all.
Then he unlocked the booth.
I don’t know what they played in there. But on the way out, the lights in the corridor flickered in sync with my pulse. And someone had scratched “TGQ = 208m ∆” into the fire exit door.
Entry: November 22, 1964 – Café Europa, Berwick Street, 3:57 p.m.
“Pirate DJs don’t carry ID. They carry frequencies.”
S. True was meeting a man called Brick, who used to run signal relays for Radio Syd. Now he sells herbal tea and time-delay compressors from a suitcase. Says he's “between ships.”
Brick agreed to consider airing the “Moss Fool’s Balcony” single over an illegal shortwave slot that hits East Anglia “on lucky Tuesdays.”
Said he’d need a bribe, a codeword, and a blessing from Thor Scully.
S. True offered him a signed photo of Coco LeBree and acetate of “Aetherflux,” which Fabian had freshly pressed.
Brick licked it. Declared it “probable.”
Then he asked me, “Do you believe sound can open doors?”
I said, “Only the ones we’re not supposed to walk through.”
Brick winked. The tea kettle screamed.
Entry: November 25, 1964 – Radio Caroline Office, back room above a print shop, 6:45 p.m.
“Offshore hearts in landlocked bodies.”
We weren’t technically allowed in. But S. True has that aura of legitimacy that turns keys in invisible locks. Inside: a haze of smoke, reel splicing, two half-dismantled radios, and a man playing The Get Quick’s “Cold Umbrella Sky” on loop.
He said nothing, just pointed to the map—coordinates off the Essex coast—and asked, “Could they do it live? On the deck?”
S. True said yes.
I asked who else was on the bill.
He said, “No one. Just the sea. And the delay.”
Brilliant.
Entry: December 1, 1964 – Radio Caroline North, North Sea, 3:03 p.m.
“The sea is a kind of receiver. It holds everything that’s ever been said—until you say the wrong thing again.”
We arrived by tugboat. Coco vomited off the side, glamorous even in gastrointestinal collapse. Mitchell refused the safety rope. Said, “If it’s gonna take me, it’ll take all o’ me.”
Erik hadn’t spoken since we left Whitby. Just stared stoically into the horizon, as if waiting for something to beckon him back.
The ship itself was a reconfigured trawler called The Red Apostle. Rusted hull, antennae crooked like ribs. The DJ’s booth smelled like salty flotsam and foamy jetsam. Brick was there, of course, grinning through a sleeve of bandages. “She’s temperamental today,” he said. “Better sing sweet.”
The band set up on the rear deck under tarp and static. Scully miked the sea. Said it was “our studio audience.” Kevorkian brought a reel labeled CANTICLE 34B (DO NOT MONITOR DURING BROADCAST) and spooled it directly into the board without telling anyone.
We went live at 3:33 p.m. local time.
That’s when the fog arrived.
Entry: December 1, 1964 – Open Sea, mid-set, 3:47 p.m.
“Something is tuning into us.”
They started with “Moonstung Latchkey”. Then “The Dog-Eared Empire” with Coco alternating between furious bass rums and murmuring in Portuguese. Something in the reverb was wrong—delayed, yes, but echoing back in a different key. Beesley kept checking the meters. S. True was praying to a stopwatch.
Then Erik stepped up to the mic and unleashed a new riff—not rehearsed, not known—a rising series of tones that felt older than chordal structures. He opened his mouth to sing.
That’s when the sky broke.
A high whine across every frequency—human, animal, celestial. Every gull fell from the sky. The fog pulsed. The sea boiled, briefly, in spirals. Kevorkian clutched his fox-fur hat and muttered in phonemes not taught by any conservatory.
And from somewhere below the ship… something knocked.
Once.
Then twice.
Then again—in rhythm with Erik’s playing.
Mitchell tried to stop. Couldn’t. His arms kept pumping. Blood began to trickle from one nostril. Coco’s image was vibrating within itself. Suddenly he was levitating an inch off the deck. I swear it. I have it written down. I was not high. (Not that high.)
Weird fog was rolling in. I felt as if I were slipping into a strange communal hallucination. The tape recorder beside me began to reverse itself. Not the tape—the machine. Screws loosened. The capstan unraveled. I could’ve sworn its humming was taking on animalistic tones, as if it were struggling to growl my name.
Entry: December 1, 1964 – After the signal collapse, 2:37 p.m.
“Not every broadcast ends. Some just change frequency.”
The transmission cut off. Just—gone. Static, then silence. Brick was gone. So was S. True.
The deck was wet with something that wasn’t sea. Muck, plasma. Beesley had passed out over the compressor, whispering, “It heard us. It heard me.” His chin was coated with vomit.
Coco hit the deck. Collapsed. Mitchell’s pinion wings finally stopped flapping and he slid off his throne and fell to his knees. Erik looked around, mildly bewildered and said, “It... it needs a name.”
La Maga had warned us about certain chords.
Fabian retrieved the reel—now steaming—and dropped it in a sealed box pre-labeled: “CAGE THE HYMNAL.”
As we left the boat, I looked back.
The Red Apostle had changed shape. Taller. Narrower. The antenna now resembled a tuning fork. The water beneath it churned in a perfect circle.
I swear, when I tuned my radio that night at home, I heard one last echo. A final phrase from Erik’s voice, looped on a fading pirate signal:
“Do not adjust. You are now inside.”
“Do Not Adjust”
The Lost Broadcast of The Get Quick
Ivo Keene
Originally published in Aural Anomalies Quarterly, Winter 1972 (Issue pulled after 48 hours)
There was no storm the day The Get Quick boarded The Red Apostle—just a steel-gray sky and a windless hush that didn’t feel like peace, only pressure. It was December 1st, 1964, when the band took part in a short-lived experiment: the first live transmission of a rock group from a North Sea pirate radio ship.
They weren’t the first to play offshore. But they were the first to vanish—in sound, if not in flesh.
The plan, orchestrated by their ever-resourceful manager S. True Smith, was simple: a live broadcast from Radio Caroline North to coincide with the winter solstice shift in the band’s sound—something S. True referred to cryptically as their “Magnetic Phase.” The band would perform unreleased material directly from the deck, broadcasting live to the British coast in what Smith claimed would be “a demonstration of transmission as communion.”
The ship, The Red Apostle, had once been a Baltic trawler. By ’64, it had been fitted with makeshift antennae, reel-to-reel broadcast rigs, and a thin sheen of legal ambiguity. Onboard were Smith, producer Fabian Kevorkian, tape engineer Thor Scully, and the band: Mitchell Joy, Coco LeBree, Erik Evol. Also present—though not credited—was a young man named Mark Question, the group’s unofficial hanger-on and enthusiastic windbag. His journal entries (later released in the posthumous zine In the Wake of the Reverb) provide the only first-hand account we have that wasn’t buried or burned.
What happened next has been disputed, suppressed, or flat-out denied.
The Signal
The set began at precisely 3:33 p.m., under a sudden fogbank that rolled in against weather forecasts. Coco opened with a stark, fluid bassline. Mitchell’s drumming was unusually locked-in—mechanical, even. And then Erik stepped forward and played a rolling arpeggiated single chord.
Listeners on shore reported interference immediately. Radios crackled. Power dimmed in pockets across East Anglia. One anonymous DJ who was monitoring the frequency said it felt like the coiled notes moved through him: “Not around me. Not past me. Through.”
Onboard, the temperature dropped five degrees. Scully’s recording gear began playing reversed audio of the song before it had even finished. Kevorkian reportedly sealed a master reel in a padded black case marked “CANTICLE 34B – DO NOT MONITOR.”
What little remains of the session—smuggled fragments, partial AM recordings—captures an eerie call-and-response between Erik’s guitar and something else. Tones that do not resolve. Silence cut with low-frequency pulses. And a rhythmic knocking beneath the sea.
It was Mitchell who later said, “After the first few minutes I lost all sensation of drumming. It felt like I was being played.”
The Collapse
At 3:47 p.m., the signal died. Not faded—ceased. No outro. No DJ handoff. Just static. The band emerged from below deck dazed, some bloodied. Scully had lost his voice. Question had developed a raised rash on both arms in the shape of frequency waveforms.
Kevorkian refused to comment for years. When asked about the session in 1982, he simply said, “We were broadcasting. We were receiving. It was a call... And we got a response. One beyond all expectation. Beyond all reason. Beyond all understanding.”
No master tapes were ever released or leaked. No songs from that set were ever performed again.
The ship itself, The Red Apostle, was reportedly decommissioned in ’66. But when I visited the dock registry in Harwich, there was no record of it ever existing.
The antenna—according to Mark Question’s diary—had begun to vibrate at a pitch audible only to invertebrates, then changed shape: “It became… narrower. It pointed somewhere else.”
The Return Signal
In 1970, a shortwave hobbyist in Reykjavik intercepted a faint signal on 208 metres: a loop of static broken by a voice reportedly repeating—
“Do not adjust. You are inside the music now.”
No one’s been able to trace the source. No ship. No station. Just that phrase. That warning.
What Was It?
Sound as signal. Signal as summoning. Whatever The Get Quick tapped into that day, it wasn’t meant for public consumption. Maybe not for human consumption.
Question once wrote, “Some broadcasts aren’t meant to be heard. They’re meant to be obeyed.”
I believe they heard something that afternoon—not with ears, but with the part of the soul that vibrates when you step too close to the edge of understanding.
And then they played back.
1965
La Maga and the Crystal Popes
The Scotch of St. James, June 1965
The doorman didn’t want to let her in, at first. Said something about “foreign types” and “too many cameras already inside.” But La Maga merely raised an already-aggressive eyebrow, dipped one bare shoulder lower beneath her Moroccan shawl, and murmured, “I’m not here to take photographs. I’m here to make someone disappear.”
They let her in after that.
Inside, the Scotch was a champagne boiler room: lights flickering like lava lamps on amphetamines, bands swapping between Northern Soul and Motown covers with the nervous energy of apprentices under cross-examination. A sweaty junior Ronnie Wood stood in the corner watching Lulu flirt with a Danish bassist. Jean Shrimpton had apparently just left, “in tears,” and Keith Moon was retelling the story of the time he tried to swallow a tambourine to prove a point—and almost succeeded. I, Mark Question, was nowhere to be seen.
La Maga drifted through it all like an echo wafting back from a party ten minutes into the future. Her dress was sea-foam and sequins. Her eyes had been rimmed with blue kohl in the shape of ancient lakes. She ordered a gin and chartreuse and sat at a corner booth upholstered in pale yellow suede and gangster sweat.
She was waiting for someone—she couldn’t say who, not out loud. Fabian Kevorkian had told her to “watch for the Crystal Popes,” which sounded like either a rock n roll joke or a piece of Vatican espionage. “They’ll be wearing mirrors,” he’d said. “But only on the inside.”
Three men eventually appeared near the dance floor. They weren’t dancing exactly, but sort of pivoting in place like sundials at twilight. Each wore the same double-breasted mod jacket, and each bore a badge over his heart: a shard of glass shaped like a bishop’s mitre. She caught her reflection in one and saw herself standing beside someone who wasn’t there.
I remained in the shadows.
The band struck up a new number. Strange tuning. The singer wasn’t facing the crowd. The Crystal Popes moved toward her, smooth as jukebox static. One of them—blond, scarred, eyes like cracked eggshell—spoke through his teeth: “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The second exposure. The black negative.”
La Maga nodded slowly. I knew she’d found it last week, curled in a proof roll in the back of Kevorkian’s darkroom: the same TGQ promo shot they’d used for Beat Wave Weekly—except in this one, there was fourth member. Clubfoot. Blank-faced. Standing in the background, in the spot where S. True Smith’s office door should’ve been.
“We’d like it back,” said the second Pope.
“I burned it,” she lied. I watched as her left hand traced the outline of the photo tucked into the lining of her clutch.
They paused. Music stopped. For just a moment, the club dipped into silence as the needle had lifted off the vinyl.
“Then we’ll have to take something else,” said the third Pope, the smallest one.
When La Maga blinked, they were gone.
Backstage, The Action were arguing over the volatile nature of tuning pegs. La Maga found Mitch Joy vomiting absinthe into a vintage suitcase. “Did I miss anything?” he asked, gargling gin.
She opened her clutch, pulled out the photograph.
Now there were six figures in the image.
Erik Evol and the Green Door at Middle Earth
[undated]
Erik was never seen arriving, only appearing, like mist on mirrors or a lyric misremembered. The queue for Middle Earth twisted down King Street in a wet December midnight, spilling out long coats and lacquered hair and the clack-clack-clack of eyeshadowed girls in mod boots who knew how to get past the clipboard. No one saw Erik in the line. But at 1:20 AM, he was standing by the bar with a paper poppy tucked in his lapel, drinking Grand Marnier through a licorice straw.
The band onstage—some Cambridge kids in army jackets doing a raga-rock freakout—cut loose into something that sounded like an underwater mass. Behind his tinted aviators Erik blinked, and everything slowed to half-speed.
He was with a girl called Echo. Or Nico. Or Echo/Nico, a ghost in a white Afghan coat who claimed she’d modeled for Ossie Clark and could play Bach fugues on a dulcimer “but only if the humidity’s right.” They talked about silence. They talked about ligatures in Gregorian notation. She asked if he believed in ghosts and he said, “Only ones with the good taste to stay out of my way.”
Around 2:45, Echo/Nico dragged him down to the basement, past a fire door marked PRIVATE and another, unmarked, painted green. Inside was a narrow corridor with antique taxidermy mounted on the walls—antelope heads, a snowy owl, a goat with two sets of glass eyes. The air smelled like myrrh and scorched electrical tape.
At the far end: a reel-to-reel spinning soundlessly. A low hum rising. A light flashing behind a pane of smoked glass.
“I’ve been dreaming this place,” Erik said aloud without meaning to.
Echo/Nico was gone.
The tape machine stuttered and began playing back… something. The whir of a rotor. A woman’s voice, backwards, speaking German—or something like it, something broken, twisted and smoldering, like Berlin after the war. Then a burst of staccato laughter that could have been his own.
Erik walked toward the glass, drawn by a tone that sounded like a cathedral collapsing in reverse.
The last thing he remembered was a voice whispering: Amber is a frequency, not a colour.
The Dream Diary of Mark Question
Entry: March 3, 1965 – Watershed Studios (Tape Room B, or possibly a dream thereof)
I arrived late and glowing—again—and Mitchell scowled like some granite-faced Roman senator damned to shepherd a traveling cabaret through a plague zone. He never speaks directly to me unless there’s tea to be fetched or a body to drag. I respect that. Hierarchies are a sacred requirement in cults and rock bands.
Evol was already inside the Quantitative Chamber, if you believe in such things. I don’t — until I do. You couldn’t hear guitar, just the presence of guitar, like some sort of sonic mirage in the walls. Thor Scully called it “a feedback mandala.” He was weeping again, as he often does when they play below 30 Hz. Said his eardrums are “tuned to grief.”
La Maga floated in behind me, barefoot, with a dead sparrow in her hand. “It’s a message,” she said. “For Fabian.” I didn’t ask how.
Someone — probably Kip, that sinewy lunatic — had placed six fishbowls on top of the mixing desk, filled with water and colored LEDs, to “refract the snare hits into chakra-suitable tones.” I touched one and got a nosebleed. Beesley stared at me like I’d farted during Mass.
Dreamnote: Erik’s shadow detached from his body during take three of “Blood Honey Carousel.” It walked to the kitchenette and made toast. Nobody else mentioned this. I watched as it winked at me and mouthed “marmalade.”
Entry: April 19, 1965 – Club Mosaic, post-gig haze
Mitchell fought a bouncer with a triangle case. It was no contest. Said the man had disrespected Coco by misgendering “her phase.” Coco wore a lace nightie over a News of the World front page and played the set on a borrowed Fender VI. Said she was “channeling reversed-time decadence.” I pretended to understand and was rewarded with a kiss that tasted of horseradish and nail polish remover.
Walter Ego was in the crowd with an 8mm camera stitched into a teddy bear. He whispered, “We’re filming the truth around the performance.” Said he’s calling it The Screaming Mirror Has No Frame. S True Smith told him to “stop doing that, Walter. People are beginning to talk.”
Dreamnote: Everyone’s teeth fell out mid-song and became marionettes. They performed a barbershop version of “House of the Rising Sun.” I had a vision of Thor weeping. Again.
Entry: May 1, 1965 – Aboard S. True’s Boat, Docked Somewhere Near Battersea
S. True hosted a “strategy luncheon” on his houseboat, which is also allegedly a diplomatic outpost for a country that doesn’t exist. I came disguised as my own uncle. Mitchell didn’t laugh. He’s still angry about the mango incident.
Fabian appeared in a coat made of carpet and carried a reel marked “DO NOT PLAY UNLESS APOCALYPSE CONFIRMED.” He smelled like ink, firewood, and revenge. Tariq saluted him.
La Maga photographed the sandwiches before we ate them. Said she was “imprinting memories to burn later.”
Dreamnote: I accidentally opened a cabinet under the deck and found a smaller version of myself playing a glockenspiel. He hissed at me and vanished in a puff of toxic hairspray. Kip says this is “normal around solstice.” Beesley disagreed—with a crucifix.
Entry: March 19, 1965 – The Ad Lib Club, Leicester Place
Elevator only. The kind of club where the walls breathe like bellows and the wallpaper stares back with an attitude. S True got us in by whispering the name of a forgotten ambassador to the lift operator. I arrived with Coco (in full Julie Christie mode: fox fur, space boots, black sequin minidress)—which made me feel like a page boy in a Braque painting.
Mitchell refused the booth and chose to stand—arms crossed, scanning the room for some suspected treachery. Said, “It’s not the scene I mind. It’s the fallout.”
Evol did not arrive with us, but was already there. No one saw him come in. He was deep in conversation with a woman in green feathers who may have been real, or part of the décor. La Maga appeared and snapped a photo of them without raising her camera. I asked how. She said, “Light knows who’s watching.”
Georgie Fame was spinning, but the needle refused to stay down during The Get Quick’s acetate. Thor Scully leaned in and said, “That’s what happens when stylus touches prophecy.”
Kip slapped the jukebox and it played a B-side by The Get Quick that he claimed doesn’t exist. But he loves messing with me. I hate him.
Dreamnote: Thatcher Humphries showed me a napkin on which he had scrawled a glyph “from a dream of Erik’s wrist tattoo.” He says the band logo now pulses under UV light, but only at frequencies matching payphone dial tones. I said, “What happens if it pulses out of phase?” He said, “Then you’ll hear the truth, and it will ruin your ears for lies.” I hate that guy.
Entry: May 11, 1965 – Bag O’ Nails, Kingly Street
This is where the heavy boys come to play. The air tastes like tweed. Mitch warned me not to mention Jean Cocteau to any Yardbirds. Not sure what happened last time.
Coco danced with someone claiming to be two-thirds of a publishing firm. Kip talked mixing theory with a member of Manfred Mann while feeding a budgerigar from his cuff. Meanwhile, Erik seemed uncomfortable, kept turning his pint glass clockwise as if dialing something in.
Fabian, nervous, refused to sit. Said the stools were “mic’d by rivals.” Ordered Fernet and spoke in French to British birds or no one in particular. He has been reading a book with no title, only a lock.
Samir was there too, lingering by the monitors, claiming he could feel a subharmonic throb “beneath the pub level.” He says Bag O’ Nails has a floor tuned to B minor. Over a scotch Beesley scolded him to “stop sniffing the bass.”
Dreamnote: I saw Mitchell’s reflection refuse to mimic his movement. Just stood there, arms crossed, unmoving. Mitch left through the front. The reflection stayed, fuming.
Entry: July 22, 1965 – The Scene Club,
Post-show, private basement playback.
First test of the “reverse encoding.” Fabian says the band’s latest single, when played backwards through Kip’s custom preamp, reveals not only a hidden vocal track but also a buried time signature that doesn’t belong to this century. I laughed. No one else did.
They made me sit blindfolded in a folding chair while the tape played. The air was thick. Kip said he’d filled the room with “marine delay” via condenser mics strung through buckets of seawater. Jerome just stared at me and muttered, “You’re not the antenna.”
Mitchell drummed on a desk with four fingers and one coin. Erik didn’t speak. He just leaned into the corner and vibrated, like a tuning fork of meat and leather.
After twelve minutes, I began to smell small foreign oranges. At minute fourteen, my eyes were tearing up. At minute fifteen, they turned the tape off. Everyone applauded. No one explained.
Dreamnote: That night I dreamt I was inside an amp. I could see everyone’s notes as physical objects—Coco’s basslines looked like mercury ladders, Mitchell’s kick was a boot made of brick, and Erik’s guitar appeared only as and 200-tonne heavy shadow and sensation. I woke up humming, but with blood on my pillow.
1966
Portrait in Smoke at the Scotch
Mitchell Joy at The Scotch of St. James, London, 1966
Mitchell Joy arrived just after midnight, damp from the fog and off-tempo from the pills. The Scotch wasn’t the kind of club you walked into—you descended through a narrow door near Mason’s Yard, down into the mirrored warren where dulled glances flashed like switchblades and whisky drinks and James Brown records warred with the burgundy ghosts of de Bergerac and de Sade. Tonight was a record release party for someone who’d been managed, briefly, by S. True Smith before vanishing into a French art commune, but that didn’t matter. No one came to The Scotch for the music. They came to forget that it mattered.
Mitch wore his lime and olive satin Nehru jacket, the one he claimed the Maharishi had personally embroidered during a stolen layover in Bombay. Coco called it “the lizard’s tuxedo.” Erik refused to be seen near it. But Mitch wore it anyway, because the world was a costume party and he was the leader of Heaven’s house band.
Inside, the air was smeared with Yardley rose powder and the electric scent of bad decisions. Princess Ira von Fürstenberg was slow-dancing with a man who claimed to be Terence Stamp’s cousin. S. True Smith waved briefly from a corner booth—deep in negotiations with an agent from EMI or MI6, depending on the night.
Mitchell swiped a bottle of gin from the bar and fell into conversation with a set designer named Claude, who had once painted a sex dungeon for Salvador Dalí and now only designed Escher stairs. They were debating the merits of ceiling mirrors when a low chord thudded from below.
Not the house system.
A sound like a church organ detonated underwater. A warning. Of something ancient and malevolent. Something older than jazz.
“Did you feel that?” Claude asked. But his voice didn’t match his lips.
Mitchell looked toward the back hallway where the addict scrubbers kept their ammonia. The red light over the service door was pulsing in and out of time. He stood. Walked toward it.
The hallway smelled like bleach and the sea. A humming came from behind the door. He pushed it open. I tentatively, silently followed.
Inside was not a broom closet. Inside was a white room filled with televisions—dozens, all flickering the same image: a stage, empty but for a drum kit smoking gently under hot light. And in every frame, Mitch saw himself. Different clothes. Different ages. All of them tapping out the same, impossible rhythm.
Then the televisions blinked out—every last one.
Behind us, someone—or something—whispered, “Not yet.”
We turned.
The door was gone.
A Thousand Left Shoes
Mark Question and the Whispering Arch, February 1966
I hadn’t meant to stay so late, but then again, I never meant to do much at all.
The Speakeasy—lit like a submarine disco, air thick with aftershave, amp hum, and Rothmans smoke—was thinning out. Donovan had vanished in a tangerine drift of honeyed girls. Mitch was gone an hour ago, off to someone’s borrowed Bentley, muttering something about a snare drum made entirely of silver thread. Erik Evol had been hovering by the coatroom, flirting with the girls and eyeing the lacquered peacoat of a man who claimed to have invented a four dimensional piano.
But me? I’d made a mistake. Clearly. I’d leaned too hard against the backstage door trying to fish out the last scrap from a Rizla packet—and tumbled backward into a narrow black corridor, which promptly clicked shut behind me.
No handles.
No signs.
Just a broken umbrella and a single low-wattage bulb swinging from a wire.
There were shoes here—hundreds of them. Piled in rows and spirals. Mostly women’s. Mostly left feet. A few men’s boots—polished, pointed, unlaced. I recognized one particular pair, glittering in a heap beneath a cracked mirror: the sapphire slingbacks Marianne Faithfull had been wearing earlier that night. Was it that night? It was some night, surely.
I called out. Not sure why. Nothing. The corridor widened, turned, narrowed again. I followed the wall by feel, shoes crunching softly underfoot like beetle shells.
A voice emerged. It sounded like a Dudley Moore imitating an American newscaster. “You’re inside the Roundhouse, Mr. Question. But not the one you came through.”
I turned, spun, and found nothing.
There was a poster flaking off the wall. Happening: Dialectic Delirium and the 3rd Manifest Music Ensemble. One Night Only. Doors open when forgotten. The date was scrawled 1963. Or 1973. Or both.
Okay. By now I was staggering blindly, muttering half-formed prayers to Screaming Lord Sutch. Finally found a spiral staircase that seemed to lead upward and inward at the same time. Every step blinked underfoot. Or winked. At the top was a door made of velvet ropes twisted like DNA. I paused, thinking it might mean something. But quickly realized that, if so, it was beyond me.
Beyond it: dull softly glowing lights. A small stage. Empty audience chairs with mannequin heads in them. A reel-to-reel slowly turning. A champagne glass of ginger ale. Now a go-go girl appeared, dancing forlornly in slow underwater motion. Something reminded me of Erik. A vibration... The room was tuned to F-sharp minor. The air smelled like tonic and turpentine.
Marianne’s voice whispered again, though I couldn’t tell from where: “Put them on. You’ll find your way home.”
What did I have to lose? Strangely, the shoes seemed to strain, to grow to fit me, more or less. Now I was in it. I clicked the heels once. The room changed color. I clicked again. A new door appeared.
I stepped through.
I woke up in a phone booth on Holloway Road with glitter in my eyelashes and a receipt for two flaming absinthes signed in ballpoint: “M. Faithfull / for the boy in the left shoes.”
The Benthic Pulse
Fabian Kevorkian at the UFO Club, 1966
There was always a queue, even in the rain, and it always rained. On that particular Friday in March ’66, Fabian Kevorkian hunched his shoulders beneath a waxed Barbour jacket, his left hand clutching a square envelope of acetates from the Watershed. The jacket still smelled of reel-to-reel tape, teakwood, and curry powder. The queue outside the Blarney Club on Tottenham Court Road—known by night as UFO—snaked toward a pair of red double doors pulsing faintly with light. You could hear it already: the phased hum of speakers reverberating off a low ceiling, Syd Barrett’s slide guitar like a siren caught in molasses.
Fabian gave a quick nod to the bouncer (a sometime roadie for the Soft Machine), ducked inside, and was eagerly enveloped by the swirling colour flashing vortex.
Beams of oil-slick projections wheeled like chariots across the walls like hallucinations with agency. Strobes popped. Films looped silently on suspended bedsheets—astronauts in reverse, tribal dances from Ghana, Rorschach blobs... A girl in a space-age PVC dress floated past me blowing soap bubbles. A Canadian anarchist tried to sell me a mimeographed tract about the Invisible Insurrection. Somewhere, Pink Floyd were jamming—or tuning up, I was never quite sure.
Fabian was looking for Mitchell Joy—they were to mix down a test pressing that weekend, a weird thing called “Chamber Procession / O’Hara’s Magnet,” with spoken word from Evol recorded backwards and inside a dumbwaiter shaft. But this night had its own gravity. He moved instead toward the bar and ordered a brandy, though they were only serving Watney’s Red Barrel and a mild acidic punch in paper cups.
“Fabian.” A woman’s voice. La Maga, crowned in peacock feathers, stood beside him with three teenage girls in tow—aspiring models from Carnaby Street, or agents of some exotic southern government. La Maga had the look of someone who knew her own legend in real-time. “You must see this film.”
Kevorkian blinked— the Title flashed before his eyes —
Fabian Kevorkian at the UFO Club
Tottenham Court Road, late spring, 1966
There was a crisp tension in the air that night — an edge to the glitter, a chill to the tremble of the bass rolling up from the floorboards. Fabian Kevorkian emerged from the back of a black cab and paid the fare in crisp military notes, eyes flickering under the bulb of a streetlamp as if decoding semaphore in the smog. A small queue curled down the pavement, mod girls with panda eyes and jet hair leaned into tweed-jacketed film students quoting Antonin Artaud and popping pills like breath mints.
Inside, the UFO Club was certainly breathing heavily. It pulsed like a jellyfish wrapped in gauze—projections from oil slides writhed across the ceiling like alien kelp, the Floyd’s amps growled like livestock in some burning barn, and scents like ghoulish fingers—patchouli, smoke, sweat—dragged time (and minds) down into a heady herbal honey. Fabian lingered at the lip of the staircase, adjusting his tie like a man about to descend into the underworld.
He didn’t belong here. Not really. He was BBC. Radiophonic Workshop-adjacent. A man of cables and envelopes, reel-to-reel tape and psychotropic tapestries recorded in dead-of-night sessions with whispered permissions. But tonight, something had called him down into the belly of London’s new consciousness.
He passed beneath a banner that read “Unite or Perish: A Happening for Vietnam” and into the depths of the club proper. I followed discretely, watching as Trudy from International Times kissed his cheek and passed him a leaflet covered in third-eye doodles and a list of banned herbals.
“Have you seen The Get Quick?” she asked.
Fabian blinked. “I record them.”
“Then you should really see them.”
And then, there in the belly, there they were—or parts of them anyway—scattered like strange runes among the crowd. Mitchell Joy at the back, in a red military coat, tapping out phantom rhythms on the wall with a cocktail straw. Coco LeBree hovered near the stage, cloaked in black and speaking softly to a technician about “resonant frequencies in the human breastbone.”
But it was Erik Evol who Fabian truly saw.
Or rather—what stood in the center of the dance floor, slowly turning.
Erik had his guitar slung over his back like a sacrificial sword and was locked in something that resembled neither dance nor performance. His arms extended, eyes closed, he traced slow arcs in the air—summoning or directing something invisible, perhaps in rhythm with the oscillations of Syd Barrett’s slide guitar or something far deeper and less melodic—in the human sense.
And Fabian felt it. As did I.
A chord—deep, wide, and weird—not from the amps, but from below. A subterranean hum.
Erik turned his head and the vibrations thickened. No one else noticed.
Kevorkian made his way to the back room, where a cat named Jack Henry Moore spun reel-to-reel tapes between Floyd sets. Fabian pressed forward. “Did you mic the floor?” he asked.
Jack didn’t hear him. He was smiling with blacklight teeth and cueing a loop of Gregorian chant played backward over Moog pulses.
Then Fabian saw it.
Behind the speaker cabinet—a shimmer. Not light. A ripple in something. Like heat, but cold. Like water, but sideways.
A glimmer... In the shape of a person.
A girl in a Twiggy fringe reached toward it, giggled, and then seemed to flicker, like a faulty film reel. For half a second she was gone, replaced by something glistening and utterly insectile. Then she was back, still giggling, unaware.
Fabian stepped backward, knocking someone’s drinks to the floor. He looked around, pushed people out of his way. Saw Erik, across the floor, his eyes open, completely white, irises and pupils gone...
Fabian fled.
Into the corridor, up the stairs, and back into the wet, sober air of Tottenham Court Road. I was right behind him.
Behind us, the UFO Club pulsed and rippled, the floorboards humming like the walls of a satellite dish turned inward.
Kevorkian would never again set foot inside the club. But that night—in tapes and whispers, in strange sonic artifacts that would never be published—we would try to decode the resonance of that ripple.
We would never find the girl with the Twiggy fringe.
But Kevorkian would never stop trying.
“How did you like the film?” Coco asked.
S. True Smith and the Sticky Business of Rapture
May 1966 — post-UFO Club, Dean Street, Soho
Fabian didn’t walk home. He phased home. There was a difference.
Three streets from the UFO Club, he stopped beneath the awning of Bar Italia and lit a Gauloise with a hand that trembled too evenly. He was trying to remember a name—not a woman’s, not quite—someone who had once said, “You can’t copyright revelation, but you can package it.” And then, as if summoned by cue, the shadow of S True Smith emerged from the black cab across the street, trench coat billowing like the ghost of a double-breasted banker.
S True moved like he owed time money. A precise man, despite the tie always askew, the sunglasses at night, the faint smell of crispy aftershave and mimeograph ink that clung to him like falsified fingerprints.
Tonight, he wore a Carnaby Street suit with a lapel too wide for television, too narrow for Parliament.
“Kevorkian,” he said, already lighting Fabian’s next cigarette before he’d finished the last.
“S True. I heard you were in Paris,” Fabian murmured.
“Briefly. Cult collapsed. They called it a film school.” S True winked. “You saw something, didn’t you?”
Fabian didn’t answer. He just stared into the silvered reflection in Bar Italia’s glass—a reflection that shimmered a second too long before it resolved back into a normal Soho night.
“Forget it. I need you,” S True said. “Or rather, your machines. I’ve got Coco voicing a dead Countess for that Danish horror record. Erik’s sent in a tape that won’t stay in mono, and Mitch—God bless him—says he received a rhythm in a dream so complex it broke his arm—or rather both arms—of his alarm clock.”
He slipped a folded flyer into Fabian’s trembling hand. It read:
THE VIBRATION SOCIETY PRESENTS:
THE GET QUICK — LIVE BROADCAST FROM THE THIRD EAR. Thursday. Secret Location. By Invitation or Signal Only.
Fabian was about to ask how a signal was to be received when S True continued. “You’ve seen the club. You’ve felt it. The resonance. It wasn’t from them.” He looked skyward. “It was from above, or under. Doesn’t matter. It’s responding to The Get Quick now. They’re dialing it in. Unconsciously, chaotically. And I’m managing the interference.”
“And monetizing it?” Fabian muttered.
“I prefer distributing initiation. We all do our part. Yours is tape. Mine is belief.”
A scooter howled past, and S True stepped back into the alley without ceremony. But before the shadows could take him, he turned once more. “Oh — and if you hear it again,” he said. “The hum. Don’t follow it. Not with your feet. Follow it with reel. That’s where the gates open, these days.”
He was gone.
Fabian stood a long moment in the neon soup of Dean Street, the flyer limp in his hand, already warm with static and damp with fog. Then he turned back to Bar Italia, finished his cigarette, and ordered an espresso he knew he wouldn’t be able to taste.
I joined him. But he seemed not to notice.
Tomorrow, he would visit his tape vault. He would pull the reels labeled “TQT—UFO/May” and “Evol/Echo Sketches 4.” He would take them to a studio S True had procured near the Euston catacombs—the one with the humming walls and the locked control room no one remembered building.
The name of the signal was already forming in his head.
Grotesque Prismatic Godhead, Movement Zero.
I had never wished to be back in Birmingham so badly in my life.