Dear Mr Kershaw Read online

  Sadly, Mr Balakrishnan, whose daughter Neeta often brings authentic homemade dishes into school to share amongst her classmates and tutors, will not be in attendance as he will be away visiting relatives in Tamil Nadu. He would have been delighted to have provided you with bindi bhaji, stuffed paratha and Bombay aloo (of a fashion familiar to those inadvertently ordered by yourself on the Tales From Topographic Oceans tour and consumed during a lengthy ‘percussive interlude’), but as a compromise we will be happy to send the school captain out to go and get a 60 piece Indian platter from the Iceland on Christchurch Road, which will be balanced ‘close to the edge’ of the instruments during your recital.

  My wife, Jean, is something of a wizard seamstress and, as a token of thanks for your time, has acquiesced to run up a cape to add to your probably already varied and vast wardrobe, free of charge. The kaleidoscopic dolman would be adapted from last term’s Year 10 production of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’s backdrop, and she has asked me to enquire after your collar and chest measurements, as well as your height, so that she can ensure a perfect fit.

  We anxiously await your response, sir, and sincerely hope that it is one of acceptance, in order that we may not be forced to resort to Dick Fakeman.

  Yours,

  Derek Philpott

  Dear Mr Philpott,

  I am writing in regard to your kind invitation of the 18th March 2014, whereby you enquire of the possibility of my performing a mixed repertoire at your grandson’s educational establishment. I was immediately drawn to the notion of the pupils’ favouring both music and history and could not help but draw the conclusion that they must surely represent my next tier of fandom. One must therefore take such requests with due sincerity and dignity.

  I fear, however, that perhaps you are underestimating the workload therein, so feel duly obliged to appraise you of the undertaking.

  Firstly, to the matter of King Arthur. Whilst I do note your scheduling and the likely, but not impossible, lack of ice, I should draw your attention to our backup plan of having the performers wear roller skates in lieu of ice skates. Surely the newly waxed auditorium would not fare well with the oft performed braking manoeuvres of the skaters, all performed, of course, in perfect synchronicity with the music? I fear I must insist on a disclaimer totally freeing the performers from any requirement to ‘make good’ the surface after the event.

  And the horses? Perhaps the school has a gardening patch that could be used for the disposal of, well let’s just say any aftermath of the horses’ excitement at the Moog solos?

  Moving on to the Six Wives, I do note your time reservations, but I perhaps should draw your attention to one of my lesser known works which was in fact the 4 Wives of Rick Wakeman, a recording in four movements but the first three of these are rarely played due to the expense necessary to relive these pieces of my history. The 4th movement is playable but is still ongoing and we have yet to reach the ending.

  As to your kind reimbursement of petrol offer, I really think that given the somewhat charitable nature of this event, I could see my way to waiving those charges, especially now that modern orchestras are more than familiar with public transport – most bus doors these days being more than wide enough to accommodate the double bass and timpani that alas were ruled out by Routemasters – and most of the musicians I work with have bus passes.

  And I fear you haven’t read my riders of late. Whilst Mr Balakrishnan’s cuisine would indeed have more than accommodated my needs in times gone by, you’ll find me much slimmer these days. Perhaps the school captain could be persuaded to pick some choice salad greens, with perhaps a small request for radish? I certainly like to replace the curry effects where possible. These days most of my cuisine is in fact pureed.

  Finally, the tipping point of the request must surely be the temptation of yet another cape for my collection; you just cannot have too many and they do tend to get somewhat tarnished and torn on the aforementioned public transport and also during my moonlighting exploits by helping out Batman when he’s a bit busy. And to have it fashioned out of none other than a Technicolour Dreamcoat? Well, you obviously know my connections to dear Sir Tim Rice – a more fitting repurposing I cannot possibly imagine! I shall have my tailor forward current measurements forthwith (as previously noted, they’re shrinking by the week!).

  So in conclusion, Mr Philpott, I’m sure we can come to some arrangement for this performance. Whilst noting your standby of Mr Fakeman, I really don’t want to leave you with a replacement Dick on the night. Replacement Dicks are so often a letdown.

  I look forward to hearing more from you in due course…

  With deep anticipation I await your reply,

  Rick Wakeman

  Dear Slade,

  It was all I could do last week to stop myself from getting on the train to Wolverhampton and giving you all a good clip around the ear, knocking your ridiculous mirrored top hats off in the process.

  For three glorious school terms, next door but one neighbour Gordon’s grandson was the proud, if you will pardon the pun, ‘holder’ of his year’s spelling trophy, and his lexical deftness and accuracy under tournament conditions made him the Bishop of Winchester Scrabble Club Champion. There was even talk of this linguistic prodigy ultimately being groomed for district championships as a springboard to Countdown.

  Pandemonium, however, ensued in the assembly hall when he answered a routine preliminary challenge as ‘P.L.E.E.Z.E.’. On a very icy (as in socially awkward as opposed to a frozen road surface) drive home from the tournament the disgraced young man admitted that his blunder was down to an overexposure to the printed track listing of your ‘Sladest’ hits compendium, which I have now read with repugnance. One may sadly remark, ‘Look Wot You Dun’, Slade. Your litany of orthographic shame does not, I regret, end here. Coz I Luv You, Take Me Bak ‘Ome, Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Cum On Feel The Noize, Skweeze Me Pleeze Me, and arguably Merry Xmas Everybody, are further reasons why young Matthew is now regularly tripped up between lessons and shunned by his classmates and teachers alike.

  Indeed, much of the blame for today’s teenage texting dyslexia (and perhaps the Rubettes) must surely lie at your stack-heeled feet and I sincerely hope that in order to protect and uphold correct spelling of the English language, your future revival remains far, far away.

  Yoorz sarkastiklee

  Drk Filpott (Derek Philpott)

  “Boll okks, wot pray eez rung wiv mee spelling?”

  Noddy Holder

  Dear Wang Chung

  Re: Dance Hall Days, I was appalled to learn from Magic FM this morning of your infant abuse encouragements. To take a minor by the heel, hair, ears, wrist and hand with a view to forcing her to do a highstand is just not on Wang Chung, no matter what ‘phase’ of gyration in a large public building you may be within, to say nothing of the admittedly unlikely to succeed practice of placing am amethyst in her mouth and sapphires in her eyes. You have my assurance, Wang Chung, that were I to witness any attempts at extremity or follicular yanking or facial cavital corundum or quartz insertions I would alert police force or social services without hesitation

  Dear The Kinks,

  It is strongly recommended that you ask to examine the bottle or, heaven forbid, can, from which your drink has been poured in a club down in old Soho, to ensure that you are not paying for an exorbitantly priced beverage which could lead to the establishment being prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act

  Dear Was Not Was,

  Re: Walk The Dinosaur

  Just last week I had to carry our budgerigar’s cage from the radiogram in the lounge to our kitchen worktop, so as to gain access to our net curtains and bring them down for cleaning, as they were a bit grubby. As every schoolboy knows, prehistoric animals were the evolutionary prototype for the bird, so perhaps I was not too far off ‘walking the dinosaur’ (derived from the Greek ‘deinos’, meaning terrible, and ‘sauros’, lizard). However, you have expressed a literal des
ire to attempt to undertake what is in my opinion a ludicrous task, presumably with the animal on some kind of industrial strength leash. Fortunately, Don and Dave, your scheme is rendered impossible by its ill-researched chronological aspect.

  I am rather surprised to be entertaining such a scenario, but let us assume that we and said creatures are both occupying either the Triassic period to the end of the Cretaceous, or the Quaternary one, and are living together at the same time, not separated by 65 million years. If you take it upon yourselves to want to travel on foot, each with one such gargantuan reptile totally within your control, either for recreational purposes or, more worryingly, to try to demonstrate that you are ‘hard’, you are going to face challenges. Achillobators, Velociraptors, Tyrannosaurus Rex and other sauri such as allo- and carcharodonto- are all likely to either wrench your arms off, dine on your still-living frames, or both, before you can begin your expeditions. Should you be (slightly more wisely) considering strolling with a more docile herbivore breed, it is difficult to imagine that a diplodocus or brachiosaurus could be kept still for long enough to slip a vast collar around its neck. If you did manage it, I believe that not only would your ‘charge’ be oblivious or ignorant to any efforts on your part to steer or manoeuvre it, through verbal commands, jerks or other pressure upon its lead, but that it would be directing your course and not vice versa. It must also be borne in mind that these vegetarian sauropods are under constant threat of ambush from their aforementioned meat-eating cousins, and are prone to stampede when being hunted. ‘Your’ ones will surely not give a fig leaf about you as they frenziedly stomp away from their hungry attackers, in the process tossing you around like rag dolls, dashing and dragging you to your certain demises.

  In short, please reconsider your position. If, however, you are hell-bent on sub/dom pedestrian activity with extinct life forms, I suggest that in future you restrict yourselves to affiliations with obsolete species more within your handling capabilities and closer to your size, so as to avoid the pitfalls previously outlined. In line with this less ridiculous plan, future excursions into ‘funk lite’ may be entitled Perambulate The Quagga, Dawdle The Dodo, Saunter The Great Auk, or Ramble The Crescent Nail-Tailed Wallaby.

  Yours,

  Derek Philpott (with help from neighbour Wilf Turnbull)

  Honorable Gentlemen,

  Well, you supposedly jolly gents turn out to be a couple of real sauro-pusses, don’tcha? Walk The Dinosaur was never meant to encourage an unfair or precipitous relationship between pet and owner, quite to the contrary!

  In your far too literal reading of the sacred text, you have omitted one ineluctable element: the psychological dominance that Real Men like myself have achieved with all manner of lower life forms – from paramecia to parakeets, rhesus monkeys to Republicans: The Power of the Mind.

  As I learned at an early age while watching a first-run screening of the 1973 pimping epic, The Mack – ‘Anybody can control a bitch’s body: you have to control their minds.’ That bauble has seen me through some potentially dangerous situations while strolling with Rex and Diplo, whether the beast in question was male or female – though I must confess the LGBT dinos are tougher to rein in. Inscrutable, I would call them – no insult or injury intended (I don’t want to get angry letters!).

  And if you must know, I wrote said classic as a love song to my dear firstborn son, Nicholas, who at age five was a bit flummoxed by the notions of eternity and extinction, and wondered aloud thusly: ‘Daddy, when the dinosaurs come back again, will we still be here on this earth?’ I hemmed and hawed impressively, then assured him the prospect was indeed rather likely, thinking that Old Fred Nietzsche would approve – you know, that whole ‘eternal return’ business. Quite plausible to a Pythagorean, and to Arthur Eddington acolytes to boot (of whom I know exactly zero, by the way).

  Lastly, I don’t know what kind of Ed Snowden cyber-rabble you have been consorting with, but obviously some very talented hacker infiltrated the NSA-proof Was (Not Was) Digital Archives located in an underground vault in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, and confiscated the four song titles you so brazenly revealed to the world in your dismissive missive (so to say).

  As long as you promise not to further unveil any priceless couplets from said songs (e.g. Dawdle the Dodo  / From Notting Hill to Soho), I will spare you the true prehistoric terror of a call from my very old school attorney, Mr Sol Faigenmoish, Esq. Now that’s a guy you don’t want to take a walk with once the sun takes its nightly dip in the western waters. You’ve been warned!

  With more fondness than respect, less rancor than stupefaction, I remain yours truly –

  David Was

  Dear Mr. Amitri,

  It is refreshing in this day and age of Lady Gagas, Princes and Marquis Smiths, to encounter a pop star whose very title shuns bogus social elevation and encourages warm familiarity with his ‘fanbase’. I too am sometimes referred to by the abbreviatory term for Derek, but normally this informality is reserved for immediate friends and family.

  Sadly, I must take issue with one of your ‘folksy anthems’. For example, the very fact that Post Office clerks display signs reading ‘position closed’ and secretaries unplug typewriters and put their coats on are clear indicators, contrary to the title of the piece, that ‘nothing ever happens’. The very acts of displaying cashier non-activity notifications and de-activating electrical machinery both entail kinetic energy and the movement of inanimate objects. Furthermore, even were it to be correct that the stylus returns to the song’s introduction, said occurrence can only be construed as repetition and not, as you state, a vacuum.

  I sincerely hope that you have ‘something’ to say about these erroneous lyrics in the near future.

  Yours,

  Derek Philpott

  Dear Derek,

  Many thanks for your enlightening comments on my masterpiece of gobbledygook, Nothing Ever Happens.

  Your points are valid and the general theme of your argument – that by virtue of describing things happening in the song, the chorus ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ becomes contradictory – holds much water.

  However the ‘nothing’ to which I allude in the song is really a metaphorical ‘nothing’. I do not literally mean ‘nothing’ happens. I mean to imply, through poetic nuance, that the things I describe ‘happening’ in the song are really nothing much more than the futile, meaningless and desperate gestures of a civilisation sleepwalking to its perdition. For ‘nothing’, read ‘shit-all of any consequence’. Shit-all of any consequence, however, just wouldn’t fit into the rhythm of the tune, though believe me, I tried very, very hard.

  I appreciate your raising of these issues with me and look forward to resolving any further queries about my lyrics that you may have.

  Yours,

  JR Currie

  Dear Fiddler's Dram,

  Even allowing for inflation and given from our research that you appear to originate from Whitstable and the surrounding areas, my wife and I find it difficult to comprehend how you were able to achieve your day trip to Bangor (a ten and a half hour 620 mile round trip, no less) have lunch on the way, a bottle of cider, chocolate ice cream, eels, a cup of tea each, the hire of a boat and a trip to the fun fair incorporating a ride on the ferris wheel all for under a pound ‘you know’. Even allowing for 1979 prices, under the circumstances we will require a full break down of costs and disbursements including receipts before your folk claim can be taken seriously, in order that we may then replicate this remarkably economical excursion, then duly smugly boast about our own savings on Trip Advisor.

  Dear Mr. Straker. Firstly, a walk in the park involves multiple steps rather than singular. Also, most parks close at dusk, hence in order to gain access I am assuming that you have scaled a perimeter fence and have therefore trespassed. Your subsequent "trip in the dark" therefore elicits little sympathy in these quarters

  Dear Keith West, Re: Excerpts From A Teenage Opera. Please forgive me for stating that the m
inor chorus ensemble goading the weak hearted and respiratorily suffering Grocer Jack (82) to get off off his back and go into town in your adolescent aria snippet are most likely complicit in the octogenarian vegetable merchant's demise. Could they not have ordered via Ocado Oline for heaven's sake?

  Dear The Stereo MCs,

  Together with my neighbour Wilf Turnbull, I am arranging a surprise 70th for our friend Gordon Gillard, and having recently heard of you whilst on hold to my network supplier, wonder if you will be available for the evening do, as we believe that having two disc jockeys either side of the dance floor, i.e. Stereo MCs, instead of the conventional singular, is a novel and innovative idea, given that if one requires a ‘comfort break’ or even a vol-au-vent, the other can take over, rendering the ‘boogie boogie’ and ‘shout-outs’ uninterrupted.

  Under normal circumstances we would have approached ‘Nothing Else Platters’, just off of Commercial Road. However, although their main and suspectedly sole host Pete ‘Goes On’ Mallard is admittedly very good, his highly inappropriate ‘moves’ subjected upon the chief bridesmaid at a recent wedding reception in Westcliff during the fifth consecutive dubiously-sourced request for Horny Horny Horny have understandably tarnished his standing within the local community and arguably cost him many booking engagements. Also, Gordon is a keen enthusiast of country and western music, hence we think that your slogan ‘to the left, to the right, step it up, step it up’, adapted to apply as line dancing instructions pertaining to Achy Breaky Heart and Rednex would be a particular advantage in securing your services in preference.