AFTERTHOUGHT

Mummers and poppers

JOHN WELLS

Pop critic and hooligan Tiny Chalmer and serious music critic Jack Bilge are usually on opposite sides of the fence. Here, in a specially unscripted debate commissioned by the Sunday Companion, they sit on it side by side.

CHALMER: Hello. BILGE: Hello.

CHALMER: Your column in the paper is called 'Music' and mine is called 'Pop'. I don't like that, because it makes it look as though you are a serious person and I'm not. BILGE: That's right.

CHALMER: But I am a highly serious person. I go through agony listening to pop music. I have it turned up so loud it makes my ears bleed.

BILGE: Oh.

CHALMER: And I don't see the difference between you listening to classical music and me listening to pop music. It's not all jigging about in the strobes snapping your fingers, you know. Some of the time I sit in an armchair with my fingertips together and my eyebrows up like that.

BILGE: And your ears bleeding.

CHALMER: And my ears bleeding.

BILGE: Could the difference be said to lie in the range of intellectual and emotional response, I wonder?

CHALMER: How do you mean? BILGE: Well, to put it another way, the difference could be that you are an extremely stupid person and I am wonderfully intelli- gent, sensitive, perceptive with a very exten- sive knowledge of theory and composition, an encyclopaedic memory and a deft, devastating mastery of the written word. CHALMER: **** off,****!

BILGE: Have a care, Chalmer. I will not sit here and be called a row of asterisks, and I would remind you that we have both been paid a large sum of money to conduct this ludicrous conversation and we had better complete it. CHALMER: But that's typical persecution. Just because I'm not Jewish. What's so wrong about having great thudding violent reactions? I make a film about pop music all mixed up with Vietnamese people being disembowelled and having their brains shot out on camera, or about a comedian and smash him up so his kids weep when they see the preview, and I get dismissed as a bleed- ing cultural sensationalist. It's a conspiracy. What's stupid about violence? It's like Shakespeare says, holding a candle up to Nature. Burn. baby, burn. And if that's not serious I give up. BILGE: I would say it was very serious indeed.

CHALMER: Then why is my column ridiculed?

BILGE: I am not ridiculing it. Some of your criticism is very nice. I just don't happen to agree with your own assessment that it is 'the greatest thing since Alexander Pone'. And I tend to prefer my own thoughtful assess- ments of Mantovani Plays the Classics Again or Winifred Attwell's recording of The Well-Tempered Klavier as being funda- mentally more 'serious'.

CHALMER: But listen. What has Pope got that I haven't got? I'm doing it now, right? What grabs me is my loudness, my sense of excitement, my sense of endless agonising crisis. Curiously enough it's something I recognise in a so-called 'serious' musician like Stockhausen.

BILGE: Oh sod Stockhausen.

CHALMER: But if I could get aggressive for a change, what's so great about a lot of long convoluted sentences and adverbs and con- cessive clauses and all that crap about opera and symphony concerts all filling up a column that could be used for chat about my latest battle with the censors or some- thing like that, interesting?

BILGE: Well I suppose it's a sort of museum really . . . people like old things . . . CHALMER: Well I'd like to throw a bomb into your office, slit your throat with a bread knife, splash blood all over the ceiling and down the walls, and write 'I am bloody serious!' all over everywhere in it.

BILGE: I see our time is up. Couldn't we settle for co-existence?

CHALMER: Oh yes. I was just meaning that my column ought to be given a chance. That's all. See you then.

BILGE: Yes. Goodbye.