Midnight

[Doly G]

I haven't told this to many people. It always seems at best pointless and at worst like it would get me into trouble. If somebody else was telling the story, I'd think: "That's soooo cool." But it's me, and when I've told bits of it, I got some tut-tutting for name-dropping and the story died away. Still... today looks like a good day to tell. Or maybe like a especially bad one. I'm never too sure with these things.

1.

Strange things did happen here,
no stranger would it be
if we met up at midnight...

Some midnights are... midnightier than others. New Year's Eve, Christmas Eve. New Year's Eve 1999 has to be the one in living memory.

2.

When all the clocks have run down
all over the world
we'll be the lovers that never were.

On 30th December 1999, former Beatle George Harrison was knifed by a stranger in his own home.
On Christmas Eve 1999, a fan broke into former Beatle Paul's home. There was no damage to property and no theft. The door had been left unlocked, but the alarm went on. I know this for a fact because the fan was me.

If you can't believe me and you want to take this story as fiction, I have little to prove it. Just a lawyer's letter that references later events, so you could as well think I'm making it up to make myself sound more interesting. But I know Paul's people have the proof. I know there was a photo of me taken when the door opened, because I saw it.

And I know another thing: being fictional may sound very romantic, but in practice it sucks. Try to imagine what it's like being told by the police that your word isn't enough proof that your neighbour knifed you. That happened to somebody I knew. Or try to imagine what it's like being told by a judge that your wife isn't married to you and your daughter isn't yours. That happenened to somebody I knew. Or being told that the HR database of your employer doesn't have your name any more, and nobody will produce a letter with letterhead that you actually worked there, even if they remember you, and even if your employer was a charity with a campaign about how important it is for people to have the right legal paperwork. That happened to me. Or being told by all your friends that they won't lend you money to visit your dying mother, because you never pay back. That happened to somebody, till I lent him the money. Most of those were fixed in the end, but then, I don't like giving up on a battle once I pick it. I don't know how often people go fictional, or for how long they remain like that.

3.

I know it's true
it's all because of you.

On 2nd November 2023, a new Beatles song was released. Christmas '23 may not be quite as midnighty as Christmas 1999, but it's as good as it's going to get for quite a while.

Those are the facts.

4.

Don't go chasing polar bears
in the Great Unknown.
Some big friendly polar bear
might wanna take you home.

If you are another Beatles fan, I can imagine you are thinking: /If you really were there, just say what it was like./ Easy to say, if you weren't there. Paul's staff made it abundantly clear that he does appreciate his privacy. I told one of them that one of the cops had been looking at a stack of photos that had been left on the table, and he was pretty upset about it. Now when I think back on it, it's funny. Back then, I thought the cop was just curious. Wouldn't you take the chance if you had it? Now I think maybe there was something else. The cop had just been searching through my bag. Understandably, he had to check if I had stolen anything. I hadn't, because I didn't even get a chance to contemplate it! The only time I went through that door was when the cops took me in. When the alarm went off, I ran away. If I had come with a scooter, I would have ran to the scooter and not stopped till I was at least ten miles away. But I walked there. I have never learned to drive anything. I couldn't go very far, the cops easily nabbed me, and because it was a cold December, they headed indoors. Then, when the cop went through my bag, he found a bunch of photos. Understandably, he had to go through them, to check if I had been going around taking photos of the place. But I hadn't. I could have, but I saw no point. Paul's taste in architecture wasn't uppermost in my mind. The photos in my bag were of my home town in Spain, to show to English people I met. After the cop went through them, he must have felt a little bit guilty. And when he saw the stack of photos in the table, he went through them, too, as if to say: "See? It's my job to go through people's belongings."

5.

She's got a ticket to ride,
but she don't care.

If you are a diehard Beatles fan, you probably care about everything about Paul, including his taste in architecture. /Just say what it was like./ What *can* I say? Sixtyish. Nice. No manacles hanging casually from a nail in the wall or any such surprises. /Anyone could guess that./ Yes. I'm sure you could. I think you could have guessed the place was his on sight, because I did. Nobody ever told me where it was exactly, only the general area. The summer before, I had walked around for three days till I found it, and I knew on sight it must be his. Then somebody saw me sitting there, and started asking me questions: "Are you looking for somebody?" "No." "Are you looking for a rock star?" "No." "Are you looking for Paul McCartney?" "No." While I thought: /Wow, thanks for the confirmation!/

6.

Picture yourself on a train in a station
with plasticine porters with looking-glass ties.
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile
the girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

I always loved that song, not only for the music, but for the words. Kaleidoscope. Looking-glass, as in "Alice through the looking-glass". Those were mathy, techie words. That was one of the things on top of my mind when I went to Paul's, though I wouldn't say it. I knew it must be a closely guarded secret. American and British songs always sounded so much better than Spanish ones. The Beatles back in the 60s sounded better than Spanish pop in the 80s. I wanted to get the secret sauce of rock'n'roll straight from the original bottle.

My dad told me once, as a great piece of wisdom, that he once heard a band in Spain that played perfect covers of the Beatles. He approached them and told them: "That's a perfect rendition, you sound just like the record! But why don't you give it a bit of your own touch? A little jamming?" The leader of the band explained: "You don't understand. The Beatles are perfect. Any change to a song can only make it worse." I thought: the Beatles couldn't possibly think like that! They would have never done anything but cover songs.

But I had no idea of what the right questions were. If my understanding of how to put a song together had gone any further than messing around with the sound recorder in my computer, playing (rather badly) the half dozen chords that I knew and thinking: /damn, this ain't easy/ I might have come up with an idea that was a little more sensible than going to Paul's place.

7.

There were bells on a hill
but I never heard them ringing.
No, I never heard them at all
till there was you.

Beatles fans will know that the story can't possibly be quite as neat and tidy as I just told it. There is the small detail that Paul had recently lost his wife Linda. And people may have some strong feelings about that. Including Paul himself, of course.

I'm not asking anyone to cross this bridge with me. But I think I have to say something about that because not saying anything won't do, either.

I can sometimes pick things in my mind. Pictures or words or ideas that I have no idea where they come from, about the future, or other places, and they turn out to be true. It's a skill I have and other people have. I know it isn't reliable, so I usually try to ignore it, but sometimes I can't.

I picked Linda's funeral before it happened. I picked it was in the woods, it was spring, and it was scattering ashes. That last bit puzzled me a lot. I thought that somebody with money would always get a proper grave, but I guess I was thinking in Spanish terms. And it upset me, because what the hell was the point of the message? Not like I could do a damned thing about it in any way. It was upsetting while I wondered whether it would happen, and upsetting when it did happen.

I didn't like how people reacted about finding me in Paul's place. I remember one little snippet that stung especially: "What was she after?" "Him." "I don't understand how they still see something in him." All of the unspoken things stung. That I was after sex. That a man his age couldn't possibly be sexy. That he was so famous he could be just Him, like Jesus. That the whole idea of showing up to knock at the door was ridiculous. I wished I lived in a world where none of those things were automatic assumptions. You could even say, I had gone there to try to make them not true. I knew I was plain and I didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell of seducing him. There was no need for the entire world to conspire to turn it all into a trainwreck. I wanted to believe something else was possible.

And in the end he married Heather Mills, and that didn't go well. So maybe the entire world was conspiring to turn it all into a trainwreck. In some alternative Earth, there aren't any really bright lights that completely side-track you when you are trying to get somewhere.

Like I said before, I'm not asking anyone to cross this bridge with me.

8.

Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer.
You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer.

One big reason why my take on the Beatles tends to crash spectacularly against most everyone else's is that in the end, I'm philosophically opposed to the idea that the Beatles are that terribly special. I know, going to Paul's place doesn't seem exactly non-worshipful. But it is a hell of a lot less worshipful than waiting in a queue for who knows how long to maybe, if you are lucky, see the man for a minute or two. Hell is going to freeze over before I do anything like that. At the very least, you have to admit I didn't go the way that the gatekeepers wanted to herd me towards.

The fact remains, though, that most bands of four regular guys don't turn into rock stars, let alone the biggest band ever. The better tech idea made some sense 24 years ago, but it's definitely not true today. And in fact, I was out of date even then, I just didn't know it.

I found out soon enough, because on summer 2000 I moved to Britain and continued my quest for the secret sauce of rock'n'roll, among other dreams. As far as I could tell, there was no ceiling here for my aspirations, the way there was clearly one in Spain.

The Paul angle proved not workable. When somebody shows up on your door to tell you to call it off, it's plain enough. Though my reason was less respect for a show of authority and more that my landlord had an office downstairs, and there was a very real risk of eviction if he ever saw a cop banging on my door. And besides, it just happened that I had a friend with mental health issues staying with me at the time while we looked for some suitable place for him, and the whole situation was just too strange for him to deal with. If I remember it right, I think I answered the lawyer's letter complaining about that. I may have screwed with your client's life, sir, but rest assured you're screwing with mine, too, so we're even.

What proved workable was meeting a guy that was close enough to a rock star, minus all the fans. Nick White aka the Macro in alt.darkside was the definition of a bad boy, raging alcohol and drugs problem included, and he knew more than I could possibly want to know about music software that you can run in a laptop, that would do 90% of the job of creating a song. I got shown songs on a frequency analyser, where I could actually see that I wasn't imagining it: Spanish songs sounded hollower because they were in fact hollower. I learned magic words like Fruity Loops and Audacity (everyone knows those) and Sawcutter version 1 (to show you really are in the know). There were also hardware magic words: "303 Devilfish" is definite proof you have been in the presence of coolness, I've been told on good sources.

I married him. They say nobody gets married thinking of the divorce, which is manifestly a lie, because that's exactly what I did. He was so self-evidently trouble that I meant to get divorced as soon as it was legally possible. Like most cunning plans, that one also fell apart when my heart started to demand a little more consistency. I stuck with him (mostly on, sometimes off) for 8 years, till he died of an overdose.

9.

Get back, get back,
get back to where you once belonged.

All right, dear fans, I think I know what you are thinking: I'm a self-centered bitch. I've been stringing you along with promises of Beatles stories and then I've been mainly talking about myself. As if I mattered. As if 8 years of my life mattered as much as a single hour of Paul's. I can do the math as well as anyone: 365 days a year times 8 times 16 hours (he has to sleep) is less than 50,000... and he's got millions of fans. There is just no comparison. I get you. I get you. I'm so sorry.

There is still the question of how four regular guys manage to get lucky and get millions of adoring fans. Because let's face it, we could all do with a few millions of adoring fans, especially with the world being in the mess it is now. If you think I don't sound like the kind of girl who would know that, why are you still reading? Oh, are you still hoping for more detail on Paul's taste for architecture? That one is tricky. Very tricky. I'll see what I can do to help on that department. Stay tuned.

10.

Did she understand it when they said
that a man must break his back
to earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he's dead?

I think the fact that the Beatles spent some time doing gigs in Hamburg just after WWII could be a big part of their secret sauce. Hamburg was a strange place to be performing in. For a start, the audience was German. They could understand a bit of English, but not quite. It must have taken some effort to get those girls and boys to understand what was expected from a rock'n'roll audience.

But also, Germans would sometimes freak out about things that would seem entirely normal to English lads, because they had just been living in Nazi Germany. It wasn't too long before when Germans had to watch a movie of Auschwitz in order to get their ration cards in post-war Germany, and that wasn't English style rationing: without ration cards, there would be nothing to eat. And in Auschwitz, people had to work in order to get payment in the form of a little bit of food. If they didn't work, they didn't get any.

That background must have warped quite a bit the way the Beatles ended up doing their back-and-forth with the audience. But in the end, an audience is always an audience. There are always the first-row girls that will show up no matter what, the ones at the back, the ones that could be here but didn't show up... where are they? I've never done gigs (what I got into was pirate radio and a lot of hanging around), but I've done plenty of community events, and after enough of them, you are either doing that automatically, or you'll never get the hang of it. Gigs have to be the same, but much more fun.

Then, after Hamburg, when the Beatles came back to Liverpool, that was another strange place. Girls were getting new ideas and the enemy had swiftly changed from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. But it was home, so the Beatles must have taken to it like a duck to water. They were just a little supercharged from their recent trip. I reckon they were also doing a double act without being too obvious about it: John and Paul, John sending things out, getting the audience to bounce back and Paul taking them in.

11.

Now and then I miss you...

That was then and this is now. There is a new Beatles song and what the hell? Why do they even bother? Especially when it seems fake as F. I mean, sorry if you believe that it's just a bolted together Frankenstein monster, like they've said. Personally, I think it's a lot faker than that, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It isn't as if I can prove anything. It throws off my sense of what John Lennon would write, but hey... "Now and then" also conveniently rhymes and has the rhythm of "nine eleven". You know where Paul was on 9-11, don't you? He's a first-hand witness, one with precisely zero reasons to lie.

Oh, I could go on. That's sort of the problem, that I could go on. I wasted five years of my life hanging around a blog of a guy that obsessed on synchronicities and obscure singer Liz Fraser, in that order. He also had written a book called "The secret history of rock&roll", that didn't make much sense, but it sure made him look like he knew something the rest of us didn't. I don't care much for Liz Fraser, but during that time I wanted to know all about synchronicity. Roughly the same thing as wanting to know the answers to all the mysteries of the world. Tough one. The reason I mention it, the whole activity left me with a skill that may be entirely useless and imaginary, but it means that I could really go on if I wanted to.

As for the music... I should leave it for proper musicians to comment. But I can't help myself. When I saw the lyrics, I was thrown off enough that I thought I wasn't going to listen to the song in a while. But the silly lyrics stayed in my head and I automatically started coming up with a melody, like I'll do with any bit of poetry that stays in my head. So I got in my head this silly robotic Japanese bubblegum pop sort of song. And then I thought I'd better listen to the actual song. And I swear it sounded almost like a hybrid between my silly song that sounded like it just had been spat by a robot and every Beatles song ever, mashed together by the same robot. Like the little bit of cuteness that my silly idea had, had been washed out, ironed, stamped with every Beatles album ever and left to hang quivering, whispering plaintively: "How could you do this to me? Wasn't Video Killed the Radio Star a good song?" I mean, I was hoping the song would sound quite different, but no. Maybe sad and heartbroken. But no. It was like a robot sticking to the most obvious thing.

12.

I wanna be a rock'n'roll widow
I wanna be alive
'cause at the end of the day
never mind what they say
I'm gonna be there
and he won't.

You won't find those lyrics anywhere in the Internet. I wrote them, and I didn't put them up. They gave ChatGTP pause - literally. I couldn't access it for three months after I asked it to write a song with that chorus. I was just wondering if it would come up with a song that looked anything like mine, which it didn't.

I can see how even an AI could get a little nervous about a woman that wrote that. Especially if it somehow had some sort of notion about other stuff about my life. Such as the curious incident of me at Paul's place, and the police records of my late husband. I have a heavily pixelated sort of past.

But I wasn't thinking about my life when I wrote it, back before I met my husband. What was in my mind was Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, Tina Turner. Even a little bit of Frannie. Frannie posted in the alt.music.beatles newsgroup and she was an ex-girlfriend of Paul for a short time. She was clearly stuck at that point in her life, and just as clearly she wanted to move on, but couldn't. Well, I definitely didn't want to be that girl. I wanted to be more than one half of a couple, especially one half of a couple that didn't even last that long. But I didn't want to give up on a great love, either. I wanted both.

I sometimes wondered how much of a chance Frannie had had. Everybody assumed back then that if she sounded a bit unbalanced, it was her own fault. But was it? It's like the assumption that I've heard enough times, that if all those grassroots hippy greenies failed to change the world and it's all happening in a top-down way, it was all their own fault. But there is no shame in failing when you attempt the impossible and you never had any idea it was impossible in the first place, and you never did any harm.

13.

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom:
Let it be.

Back to the Beatles. Why bother coming up with a new song? Maybe because the back-and-forth never goes away. Once somebody learns a way of interacting with large groups of people, it all becomes second nature. And diehard fans remain diehard fans, for the most part.

And sometimes it can get very, very messy. "Let it be" doesn't make much sense in Spanish. There are several ways of translating that little phrase, and none of them fit the song well. Mother Mary is the problem. In Spain you'd automatically assume it's about the Blessed Virgin. And the translation that doesn't sound majestic doesn't go with the Blessed Virgin, and the one that sounds majestic doesn't go with the rest of the song. Now, Paul said it was supposed to be about his dead mum, and then you start wondering why he didn't add "my".

That is only one little frustrating mystery. Pile up enough of them (and Beatles songs have quite a few), and one of these two things will happen. Either you'll say you've had enough and find something better to do with your life, which is what any sensible fan will do. Or you'll get some sort of crossed wires in your brain. Which is what I think happened with me and synchronicity. And there are lesser and greater degrees of getting your wires crossed.

But crossed wires aren't always going to connect to good places. In the early days of the Internet, I found an altered version of "Let it be" with lyrics about programming, with the verse changed to "Write in C". Clearly a programmer's in-joke. C has some very exasperating features that allow you to completely screw your programming and write variables in places that in other programming languages are always forbidden and fenced off, because you don't normally want to royally screw your computer. But the thing is, human brains are like that. There is nothing stopping anyone from reinforcing connections that do you no good at all. And we may like to think of our bodies as separated from our minds, but can you point where the firewall in your brain is? No? Maybe that's because there isn't one. I think it's possible at least in principle to set somebody, or a whole group of people, on a dangerous feedback loop for long periods of time, accidentally or on purpose.

Which is maybe why new a new Beatles songs gets released. It could be an attempt to keep everyone in the big Beatle family well regulated. Now, I've seen some weird stuff, and the world is changing fast, so I have no idea if anybody is sure of much of anything any more.

Still wondering what Paul's place is like? Tricky. Very tricky. ;)

https://energywatchers1.wordpress.com/2023/11/17/chapter-10-network-dynamics/

I saw you sitting in the middle of a circle
Everybody, everybody wanted something from you...

I heard you listening to a secret conversation.
You were crying,
you were trying not to let them hear you.
I heard you listening in.