Going out with a Bang

Going Out with a Bang

A Short Tale by Chris Page

© chrispage2022

Going out with a Bang

With the arrogant ease and timing of seventeen years together as a top rock band - including eight best-selling albums, five of which went platinum, twelve European, four US and two world tours, nine UK and three US top ten singles, and, especially in the early days, sex and drugs related scandals across the front pages of just about every tabloid from Sydney to London - Leonard Raider and The Warpath snapped from the driving twelve-bar of their legendary number ‘Mean Streets’ into an instant frozen silence.

Pandemonium.

On the button Raider struck a madman’s crouch. With his left hand arched stiffly skywards he dared the dying, hard-edged chords to leave the open top of Wembley Stadium. The snarling defiance etched on his face was gashed into further revolt by the perspiration-mingled green and purple warpaint daubed below his furious eyes.

Cacophonous hysteria.

Behind the suspended Raider the swagger of the band had also been cast into instant stone. The power amps and guitar stacks kicked and sizzled with the lumpen sounds of lard fat dropped into a hot pan as they strained against the inaction.

The only thing that moved on the huge stage was sweat.

One hundred and twenty thousand devoted followers screamed and stamped, raised clenched fists, cried, bopped or took a vainglorious swing at the guy stood next to them.

Everything went at a Warpath concert except inertia. Everything.

Almost imperceptibly the stage back-lighting began to fade, and then the powerful gangs of coloured spotlights began to dim. Soon there was only one diminishing green glow left trained on the still immobile Raider. Dry-ice smoke began to seep gently through the stage floor. As it swirled upwards the dim outlines of the band disappeared into the all-enveloping mist until all that was left was the ghostly arched hand of Raider clawing stiffly towards the dark night sky. Then it was gone; there was nothing on the huge stage but swirling smoke.

Time passed, nothing stirred or changed.

Was that it?

The cacophony began to falter; the adulation ran down with the passing minutes in a gradual slide through waning hope, faltering disbelief, amused quiescence.

The massed faithful began to stir and mutter.

Shit man. At a Warpath concert a fan had the sovereign right to expect the big finale, paid lotta money for it. Where the hell was the famous mega wind-up to the big finish? The mother of all nadirs, the world-renowned ending of such blatant bedlam that it had been described as a health hazard, blew decibel meters apart, left everyone wrung out, invaded, interrogated and blasted witless; cleansed even, by the sort of hard strident rock that no other band on earth could produce? Where was the history to recount down the generations, the unclean, harsh, deafening history? The immortality to howl with? The shit-kicking, foot stamping, gut-retching, ear-swollen bloody NOISE?

In desperate hope one hundred and twenty thousand pairs of eyes scanned the huge speaker stacks as the waning smoky whorls revealed their challenging silence.

The stage was empty. They’d even taken their instruments. Only Van Mander’s ten piece percussion set and Lederer’s multiple stacks of keyboards remained a fallow and silenced semi-circle of stretched skin and brass symbols on a raised dais at the back of the stage with the motionless Roland bland and whites alongside. Their bombast stilled by the absence of the perpetual motion owner and the bobbing finger they could only cast impotent chrome glints at the disbelieving masses.

Bastards.

In blighted droves the meek began to inch towards the exits. Meekness, however, was not a trait exemplified by the archetypal Raiders fan, oh bloody no, that title rested with malevolence. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the stadium a lone female backing singer began whispering a monosyllabic rap beat to calm everyone down. When rap is used at a Warpath concert you just know it’s all over man.

The disappointed crowd’s hostility began to surface.

A bonfire suddenly erupted in one corner. Fuelled by angry stream of Warpath tee shirts as their disillusioned wearers ripped them off, the fire quickly cast a black pall over the stadium. Fights broke out, seats were ripped from their mountings, and sporadic charges were made at the stage where a pitched battle developed between the minders hired to protect the stage and the feel-bad fans.

Gut rock engenders gut reactions.

Then it happened.

The annals of rock history record that it cost Leonard Raider and The Warpath two hundred thousand pounds to produce. Two hundred thousand pounds for a three-second effect that literally exploded its catatonic way into music history, upset most of the residents of North London and caused a snowstorm of writs to descend upon the band management, the promoter and Wembley Stadium itself for everything from punctured eardrums to an inability to control the sphincter muscles.

It was a bang.

An enormous, earth-shaking, mind-numbing bang. A bang from hell and wherever else almighty bangs come from.

Registered as the loudest peacetime bang London has ever heard it came from the air above the middle of the stadium. Soundings were reported from Reading, thirty-five miles to the south, and Stevenage, approximately the same distance to the north. Night fishermen in a fifty-mile radius of Wembley reported the sudden squawking flight of every water bird in the vicinity, Heathrow Airport began to divert all incoming flights to Manchester and every dog in London began to howl.

The gathering chaos in Wembley Stadium came to an instant, mouth-gaping halt. Fist and boot were arrested in mid-air as the motions of frustrated fury were braked by the cataclysmic detonation.

So loud and sudden was the thunderclap that fans not actively trying to set fire to the place or beat the shit out of each other, could only gape with imprisoned horror whilst their personal registers struggled with the aftershock. A terrorist bomb, Bin Laden - their scrambled thought patterns grabbed at possibilities. Like athletes who have registered the starter’s gun but have yet to react, one hundred and twenty thousand people gathered themselves for rabid mass panic.

Then their God growled.

“Gimme a wild hot woman an’ the country roads…”

There were a few isolated yelps but most of them could only mumble like confronted hermits. Events were moving too fast for addled, messed-with brains.

A piercing white spotlight snapped on.

Standing high on a platform at the opposite end of the stadium to the stage stood Raider. Caught in the bright glare like a celestial vision he clutched a microphone to his face as the platform moved slowly out to the centre high above their heads.

“An’ I’ll ride my luck ‘til the sun explodes…”

A fricative ‘E’ chord sighed through the speakers as another bright light snapped on to reveal Billy Ivan and Art Maxim, the famous sparring Warpath guitarists behind Raider, their Strats down low on fornicant hips and pointing. Pulled by the sound heads began to turn spilling fuck words from slack mouths, the stock reaction of youthful scrambled senses.

“Far away from the hookers ‘an the low-life cheats…”

Sneering arrogantly down at the fickleness of his adoring fans Raider rode the roar as it gathered momentum. Van Mander, the Jack in the Box drummer got the next light and immediately flailed up the tempo which was picked up Jubilee Jones, the laid-back black bass guitarist. Finally, Lederer, nodding master of the multiple keyboards, hit the rhythm with a left-hand flourish that pushed it straight into full-on Warpath territory of frenzied twelve-time.

Leonard Raider and The Warpath were once again complete.

“That rut in the slime…”

“Sucking blood like red wine…”

Raider’s raw voice had risen to a howl as he strutted his stuff on a rising tide of screaming adulation. Van Mander smashed and jumped all over his drums, Ivan and Maxim, guitars thrust forward on fuck-demon hips clawed screaming riffs, Jubilee Jones stayed machine-time cool whilst Lederer bobbed behind the wailing keyboards.

“Down…those…MEAAAN…STREEEEETS”

With every instrument, piece of equipment and vocal cord straining to the absolute limit, Leonard Raider and The Warpath bludgeoned and pulverised the faithful into a state of altered consciousness.

What a band…what a sound…what a way to go and what a brilliant shite bastard that Raider is. The Messiah of raw rock had pulled another seismic master stroke.

And everything is okay with the world again, fucked if it isn’t.

The End