20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.
Season 1: PC13
Previously on Peachy Coochy I had chartered a coach and filled it to capacity with zombies in order that I could attempt to blend them with an equal number of ghosts, phantoms or wraiths. My objective was to determine the proportions of softness and hardness required to make a balanced individual.
We drove at dawn through the suburbs of North London. The zombies seemed fairly content – I had found a skip full of condemned meat outside a shoe shop in Leytonstone and filled the coach with it. All that could be heard was the tearing of flesh and the intermittent but shreddingly violent breaking of wind.
The last time I visited Leytonstone with any particular objective was in 1972 when I went with my girlfriend Carol to see Roxy Music play in a pub. We had seen the band on The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2 the previous evening and had been shocked and entranced. I thought I had found the musical answer to everything.
Kari-Ann Muller, the 18 year old model on the first Roxy Music album cover, came from Cornwall. I remember meeting her when I was at the Royal College of Art. She was a speed-freak – allegedly – and her enraptured expression, while entirely apposite in this context, is quite probably comprised of tooth–grinding and free-floating anxiety. She is now a yoga teacher in Highgate.
It could be argued that both Bryan and Kari-Ann look as though they’re having a shit but actually their expressions are ecstatic. This is not to disparage the act of defecation – it is, after all, an act of evacuation associated with purgation and release. My own attraction to Roxy Music, however, stemmed not from its affinity with the transcendent so much as its embrace of artificiality.
Before I went to the Royal College, back in the late 60s, I thought of myself as a beatnik. I was, in fact, a middle class undergraduate reading books about beatniks. Of the many things that could be said about the Beats, one is that they were committed to a search for authenticity. When I went to the RCA I encountered other ways of being.
Being authentic was more complicated than being. It involved a peeling away of artifice in order to reveal – well, what? At my new college were whole departments dedicated to the layering on of artifice as if that was simply what you did. Despite my view of myself as an acid-fuelled outlaw I was both fascinated and disapproving.
