A Blink of the Screen

. It was almost religious, really. He could out-talk John Peel in any case, but the records he really knew about were the ones he hadn’t got. He’d wait years to get some practically demo disc from a punk group who probably died of safety-pin tetanus, but by the time he got his hands on it he’d be able to recite everything down to the name of the cleaning lady who scrubbed out the studio afterwards. Like I said, a collector.
    So I thought, what more do you need to run a disco?
    Well, basically just about everything which Wayne hadn’t got – looks, clothes, common sense, some kind of idea about electric wiring, and the ability to rabbit on like a prat. But at the time we didn’t look at it like that, so I flogged the Capri and bought the van and got it nearly professionally resprayed. You can only see the words Midland Electricity Board on it if you know where to look. I wanted it to look like the van in
The A-Team
except where theirs can jump four cars and still hare off down the road mine has trouble with drain covers.
    Yes, I’ve talked to the other officer about the tax and insurance and MOT. Sorry, sergeant. Don’t worry about it, I won’t be driving a car ever again. Never.
    We bought a load of amplifiers and stuff off Ian Curtis over in Wyrecliff because he was getting married and Tracey wanted him at home of a night, bunged some cards in newsagents’ windows, and waited.
    Well, people didn’t exactly fall over themselves to give us gigs on account of people not really catching on to Wayne’s style. You don’t have to be a verbal genius to be a jock, people just expect you to say, ‘Hey!’ and ‘Wow!’ and ‘Get down and boogie’ and stuff. It doesn’t actually matter if you sound like a pillock, it helps them feel superior. What they don’t want, when they’re all getting drunk after the wedding or whatever, is for someone to stand there with his eyes flashing worse than the lights saying things like, ‘There’s a rather interesting story attached to this record’.
    Funny thing, though, is that after a while we started to get popular in a weird word-of-mouth kind of way. What started it, I reckon, was my sister Beryl’s wedding anniversary. She’s older than me, you understand. It turned out that Wayne had brought along just about every record ever pressed for about a year before they got married. Not just the top ten, either. The guests were all around the same age and pretty soon the room was so full of nostalgia you could hardly move. Wayne just hot-wired all their ignitions and took them for a joyride down Memory Motorway.
    After that we started getting dates from what you might call the more older types, you know, not exactly kids but bits haven’t started falling off yet. We were a sort of speciality disco. At the breaks people would come up to him to chat about this great number they recalled from way back or whenever and it would turn out that Wayne would always have it in the van. If they’d heard of it, he’d have it. Chances are he’d have it even if they hadn’t heard of it. Because you could say this about Wayne, he was a true collector – he didn’t worry whether the stuff was actually good or not. It just had to exist.
    He didn’t put it like that, of course. He’d say there was always something unique about every record. You might think that this is a lot of crap, but here was a man who’d got just about everything ever made over the last forty years and he really believed there was something special about each one. He loved them. He sat up there all through the night, in his room lined with brown envelopes, and played them one by one. Records that had been forgotten even by the people who made them. I’ll swear he loved them all.
    Yes, all right. But you’ve got to know about him to understand what happened next.
    We were booked for this Hallowe’en Dance. You could tell it was Hallowe’en because of all the little bastards running around the streets shouting, ‘Trickle treat,’ and threatening you with milk bottles.
    He’d sorted out lots of ‘Monster Mash’ type records. He looked pretty awful, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I mean, he always looked awful. It was his normal look. It came from spending years indoors listening to records, plus he had this bad heart and asthma and everything.
    The dance was at— okay, you know all that. A Hallowe’en Dance to raise money for a church hall. Wayne said that was a big joke, but he