SHALLOW RAVE

"I don't hate my country. I just despair at it."

Rufus Banks had just returned to England for the funeral of an old family friend. Being a lyricist and occasional poet, he couldn't help but see the funeral as being a broader metaphor for the death of the country he now had come to consider as foreign to him.

As he sat at the back of the village church where the modest service was being held, he hid behind his designer sunglasses and reflected not on the deceased, but on the state of the nation, his favourite subject to mull over.

Just the year before he had delivered an eclectic world music album that took famous English anthems and re-imagined them for the immigrant disapora that had come to Britain over the past one hundred years. Parry's Jerusalem had been given a West African makeover whilst Elgar's Land Of Hope & Glory had been re-worked in a Dub re-make to represent the heinous injustices committed by the British Government against the Windrush generation. Although the album had won a Mercury Prize, it had failed to engage the imagination of most music lovers outside of Banks's now ageing music critic peers which left him feeling bitter and disillusioned.

It baffled him that he had lost his connection to audiences as he'd got older. He accepted he would never be the same cheeky frontman of bands he'd once been when he was widely deemed a pin up for the middle class Guardian reading and North London celebrity crowd but he felt hard done by now finding current album sales and streaming numbers so low. As much as he considered his life relatively modest compared to the excesses he'd enjoyed decades earlier, his accountant warned him to be a little more mindful as he had a lot of outgoing expenses, including to the taxman. Plus, it was getting noticeably more expensive to afford a jet setting musician's life after both the pandemic and the 2016 referendum.

"Fucking Brexit!" he muttered under his breath as he pin pointed the one thing he'd identified as ruining everything good in his life in recent years.

For decades he thought he'd done so well to appear anti-establishment and for the people of the land, then Brexit came and caused a cognitive dissonance so jarring for his drug addled brain that he could no longer work out where the battle lines in society's culture wars had been drawn any longer.

And for a few years after the referendum he was in denial that he could so spectacularly miscalculate the will of the people, especially as he had once prided himself on having an exceptionally honed radar for national zeitgeist and had even once been claimed to be the "post modern pied piper of British declinism." Maybe he had predicted the general trend but not imagined such a final big bang to signify the end of Britain, or more specificially England, quite so explicitly.

One carping music critic took exception to the generally fawning praise for the lyicist/frontman, calling him the pop equivalent of that infamous sandwich board man who walked London's streets heralding the end is nigh.

Now living in exile in Norway, far away from the country he both deeply despised and felt zero connection to, Banks gave endless interviews explaining why England was ruined and how it had become the laughing stock of the world with nothing left to show for its greatness but old comedy repeats. The irony being, of course, that he was now so far removed from the reality of the average man, woman and child on the street that he didn't even know that most of those comedy repeats he casually derided were now cancelled, deemed too politically incorrect to be permitted on television schedules. Nevertheless, he was devoutedly wedded to the theme of his country as the sinking Titanic and seemingly had little else to write songs about.

It had become an unhealthy obsession.

As William Horsley's There Is A Green Hill began to play on the church organ, it recalled a vague memory for Rufus of being a child chorister before he got expelled at the private school he attended for decapitating a statue of Christ in the chapel one summer's afternoon.

He half sung the words of the hymn quietly to himself, surprised he remembered the words.

There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all.

Son of two socially mobilized academics, Rufus was raised as an internationalist. Every Sunday morning he would laze in the large garden estate, debating political matters with his father, a policy advisor for the Labour Party, and learning about contemporary parallels with the country's past with his mother, a historian.

As much as he was aligned to his parents' politcial beliefs, he also felt it was important to include an anarchist element to his creative endeavours. He hated the possibility of becoming a mouth piece for any one political party.

He could see them both now at the front of the congregation and it made him smile how they were all bonded in their scepticism toward anglican christian culture; he thought about how his father said that all the churches of England should be used for the homeless to shelter in.

"Put them to proper use. No point praying for miracles that will never happen when you can do something practical and help people in need."

O dearly, dearly has he loved,
and we must love him too,
and trust in his redeeming blood,
and try his works to do.

In his more grandiose moments later in his career, Banks proclaimed himself to belong to a long line of English mystics and poets, including John Dee and John Clare but deep down he had imposter's syndrome when pretending to sit in the same room as these great men. They were dead so couldn't contest his right to exploit their legacies as his own. Most interviewers found Banks sincere in his tributes to these men of history, but when the interviews were over and he sat with a frothy cappucino in his favourite cafe in Chelsea, he knew it was all a bit of a con, like when he used to carry the communist manifesto around with him at school to show off his faux political credentials.  

"At least you haven't gone the full Bono" his old mate Johnny Fluff had said to him that same day outside the cafe, vaping on a herbal fusion of smoke and water.

"There's still time."  

Though he was joking, he had considered going down the charity route as way of re-establishing himself.

The artist as altruist was a concept he liked in principle, but felt self conscious that he would lose his cutting edge as a consequence of such virtue signalling.

"Fucking Brexit!"

He just couldn't let it go. Even in light of a global pandemic and the threat of WW3 on his doorstep, it was still Brexit that kept him awake at night.

He still wasn't entirely sure which way Johnny Fluff had voted in the referendum and as he sat there lost in a haze of petuli oil and vape smoke, he finally asked him the question.

"You voted to remain, right?"

"I didn't vote. Don't believe in it."

The two men stared at each other through their dark sunglasses, neither one able to read each other's body language because their eyes were hidden.

"What?"

"You sure?"

"I'm fucking sure, man. Don't be so fucking paranoid."

Rufus let it go, but he had a feeling that Fluff would have caved at the last minute to all that nationalist nonsense and it bothered him not knowing. He vowed he would never collaborate with anyone who voted for Brexit from now on, so did the best he could to weed out the betrayers amongst his entourage.

He had barely listened to the eulogies when he noticed the service coming to a close.

As they all stood to sing Abide With Me, he thought how cool it would be to give it a middle eastern twist. Maybe he was making music purely for himself now and if the general public didn't get it then who cared anyway? He was closer now to becoming the pure musical intellectual he'd always aspired to be. Those moments in the sun, enjoying fame and wealth were great, but he now had licence to be true to himself and he'd be damned if he wasn't going to make sure that the people knew how he felt about their great betrayal. He had zero sympathy for stupid people, even the ones that long ago bought his records and made him a millionaire overnight.

"Fucking scum"

Catching a horrified look from an elderly attendee of the service, he realised he'd once again got lost in his own thoughts and forgotten his surroundings.

He sang a little louder to make it seem he wasn't some sort of satanist.

His strange, peculiarly nasally voice sounded the loudest of all the people as he inflected the hymn with his own idiosyncratic, angst ridden vocal style.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee
In life, in death, o Lord, abide with me
Abide with me, abide with me