Grumpy Oldie Man
And it gets worse – my son took me to a Björk concert as a treat
‘Thanking you for the kind thought,’ I told the friend who rang one recent morning, ‘but don’t be silly.’
If that sounds ungracious, you will understand when I report that it came in response to the most viciously oxymoronic two-word phrase in the language.
‘I’m calling,’ she had begun, ‘to wish you a happy birthday.’
I dived deep into my reserves of strength. ‘A what birthday?’ I dredged up.
‘A happy one. I hope you have a really happy birthday.’
When I made the anti-silliness plea, she sounded as perplexed by that remark as I was by hers, which seemed to imply the existence of adult humans who relish this annual staging post on the road to death.
A few hours later, my son and I were on the road – the motorway between Edinburgh and Glasgow – to a metaphorical form of death.
‘To get you in the mood for your birthday treat,’ he announced with trademark sardonicism, ‘I’m going to play her latest album. The one she’s performing tonight.’
He pressed phone buttons, and from the car speakers emerged an assonant medley of musical notes, many emitting from a woodland pipe, and Scandiaccented English words. Despite the lack of any melody and the nihilistic meaninglessness of the words, technically it qualified as a song.
When, seven minutes later, it grudgingly yielded to another, he noticed me eyeing the sign to an exit road with as close to animal lust as a man of my age and testosterone levels could approach.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re not bailing now. No. You are not leaving this motorway. No. We’ve bought the tickets. No. This is your birthday treat.’
Three songs later, the satanic grin in permanent residency on his elfin face, he piped up again. ‘If you had the choice, which birthday treat would you prefer: having your testicles electrocuted by Syrian interrogators – or this?’
The first bars of a song called Courtship resolved the dilemma. ‘They’ll be needing to borrow Hubble to locate them,’ I said, ‘but I’ll take the electrodes.’
If he manages to arrange that for next year’s birthday treat, with a huge voltage coursing through those shrivelled little walnuts I might sound uncannily like Björk during this year’s.
If you’re not familiar with this mildly eccentric dóttir of Iceland, I refer you to Kristen Wiig’s Saturday Night Live impression of about a decade ago. Her account of Iceland’s masterplan to emerge from the financial catastrophe, by utilising the untapped commercial potential of clouds, errs on the side of sanity. But it offers some insight into a singular mind.
There was a time, first when she was with the Sugar Cubes and earlier in her solo career, when we loved Björk and her work. Some sound judges thought her touched by genius.
Those were such happy days, as her non-role model Karen Carpenter had it, and not so long ago. But that was then, and this was now on a dankly gloomsome Glaswegian night.
The attempt to entrap security into sparing us was crudely audacious, and almost succeeded. ‘Do you have any bottles or cans on you?’ asked a doorkeeper.
‘No. We assumed you’d serve hemlock in the bar,’ I said. ‘All we have hidden are a couple of flick-knives.’
‘You shouldna be saying that,’ said the guard.
‘Are you going to ban us? It would be grossly irresponsible not to.’
‘No – you’re OK to go in,’ she said, ‘but don’t be saying daft stuff next time.’
‘Next time?’ I whimpered. ‘You’re not suggesting we have to come back?’
The distracted gloom of the audience for this gangrenous leg of Björk’s Cornucopia tour almost matched the Olympian dolefulness of the artist, who wore white latex breasts on her shoulders and sporadically nipped into a kind of TARDIS at the side of the stage for reasons unknown.
What she was singing about, if anything, I cannot tell you. Nor, I suspect, could she. Judging by the irksomely spectacular light show, it may have had an environmental motif. There was a rumour that a message from Greta Thunberg would be played on the screen towards the end.
But the end for us came early, with the first bars of Courtship.
Craving the light and cheery, we spent the return trip listening to Leonard Cohen’s final album, in which he contemplates his imminent death.
‘Has this been the most miserable day of birth you’ve ever had?’ my son ghoulishly wondered while Leonard growled, ‘I’m ready, my Lord,’ in a basso profundo to make Paul Robeson with a heavy cold sound like the pubescent Aled Jones on helium.
I contemplated this for several fog-strewn miles, factoring in that my actual day of birth was among the most miserable in all of human history. On the day of JFK’S funeral, every midwife, doctor and post-partum mother was crying in counter-harmony with us newborns. The maternity ward must have sounded oddly like Björk.
‘Yes – I rather think it was,’ I finally answered. ‘I’m ready, my Lord.’