NEW SHORT STORY PUBLISHED

 

Neil Randall is delighted to announce that his new short story Open Mic has been published by literary magazine Literary Garage.

     Having become a midweek institution almost, an open mic night presents a veritable cornucopia of auditory and visual sensations to any given audience. A place where the supremely talented and criminally overlooked singer/songwriter rubs musical shoulders with the tuneless meander and routine murderer of many a fine tune, it’s often hard to supress a plethora of extreme emotions. Should I dance, sing along, plug my ears, drink my drink and leave, or wait for one more performer on the off chance that I might be dazzled all over again?

    The choice is yours…but is it, really?

 

Here are the opening pages of the story:

 

From the first bum note – a plinkety-plonk-like strum of a woefully out-of-tune acoustic guitar – and the strangled cat vocal that followed, Kathy’s face contorted, like a stroke-sufferer, mid-seismic-seizure.

     “My God,” she whispered to Niall, “he’s literally making my ears hurt this week.”

    “It really is awful,” he whispered back.  “Somebody should tell him. Put him out of his misery.”

     Their eyes met; wicked smirks broke out across their faces; schadenfreude at its most playfully malicious.

     Every Thursday, they called into the Black Swan for open-mic night. Why this had become a regular thing, neither would’ve readily admitted, certainly not to each other. One mid-summer evening, a few months back, they were walking home after a disastrous (and hugely overpriced) curry, conducting one of those petty, pointless, yet hugely spiteful arguments moderately unhappy couples of long-standing often conduct. Caustic jibes had quicky turned to blanket silence. Neither could bear the frictional formalities that awaited them if they returned home right away.

      “Hey, look.” Niall pointed across the street. “There’s live music on in the pub. Do you fancy a nightcap? Who knows? It might be interesting.”

      As they walked through to the still sun-drenched beer garden, an old man in his late sixties – balding, paunchy, red-faced, more retired plumber than former rock god – was halfway through a rousing rendition of Bob Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat.

     “You were right,” said Kathy. “That old guy is brilliant. It’s like having a full-blown live gig right on your doorstep.”

      “Who needs Glastonbury, eh? Why don’t you grab those seats over there? I’ll get us some drinks.”

     There was a short break after the old man had finished his sterling Dylan cover, which gave Niall plenty of time to get the drinks before the next act started.

      “I wonder who that guy is?” He placed two pints of golden, frothy-topped IPA onto the table. “The one over there with the camera.”

     Discreetly, he nodded to a young man dressed like a sixties’ beatnik – long straggly hair poking out from the sides of a fedora-style hat, goatee beard, John Lennon glasses, leather jacket, frilly purple shirt, bell-bottom cords, and a pair of Cuban-heeled boots that must’ve elevated his height by a good seven to eight inches. With a vintage video Sony camera in his hand he was ducking in between tables, intently filming the next musicians as they set up, moving in a hugely stylised, almost choreographed, affected manner, as if he was the one being filmed, not the one doing the filming.

      “Maybe there’s someone quite well known playing tonight?” Kathy speculated.

      “Yeah, maybe there is.”

     The next act – a young hippie-type girl on vocals and a long-haired forty-something playing soft acoustic guitar – performed a mesmerising version of Fade into You by Mazzy Star. Then an American guy with a frothy cappuccino perm sang one of his own compositions, a husky, involving ballad about never being able to get over his first love

      “He was the best yet,” Kathy enthused, still clapping long after the applause from everyone else had petered out. “Absolutely brilliant. Joe Cocker meets Harry Nilsson.”

      “On par with the first act, the older guy, no doubt,” Niall grudgingly conceded, not liking the way his wife was still staring at the singer. “It’s incredible how much talent we’ve seen tonight. Most of these acts could be professional musicians, maybe they are. There’s such a fine line between making it big and playing to a half-empty pub on a Thursday night.”

      “So true.” Kathy drained the last of her beer. “I mean, who decides these things?”

     “Simon Cowell, I guess. Then again, why do something you don’t get paid for?”

     “Such a shame.” She picked up their empty glasses. “Same again?”

    By the time Kathy returned, the guy with the camera from earlier was tuning up a guitar on the makeshift stage at the bottom end of the garden.

     Maybe if he hadn’t performed, they wouldn’t have given a second thought to ever returning again, regardless of how much they’d enjoyed the music, and how effectively it had distracted their minds from a disappointing meal and the same old arguments that had been dogging their increasingly fractious relationship of late.

     “Oh, look,” said Kathy. “Stanley Kubrick in flares is about to sing a song.”

     Sitting down on a stool, he strummed the acoustic guitar with a peace sign on the front and thanked everyone for coming, with all the casual assurance of a seasoned headline performer.

      “Right, people, this is a little number I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Earlier in the summer, I was walking barefoot on the banks of the river at dawn, just as the sun was rising and a wispy mist hung over the water, and I had a kind of epiphany about life, love, and poetry. All the good stuff that nourishes the soul. This is called Melancholy Man, Man. Dig it.”

 

If you want to read on to the end, you can do so on the Literary Garage website.

 

And if you’d like to learn more about Neil Randall’s published work, why not visit his amazon page?