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"What Is Art?"

As Gabriel is being molested off-camera, as it were, Ray changes the subject to himself. He discusses the spiritual quality of the bend in the river Thames near Richmond where he lives and Gabriel was molested. Ray then jumps to his art school days and a class in design where he and a tutor named Harold Silverman argue over newly devised alphabets. From there Ray goes into his rise as a rock star, his early electronic experimentation, and how he ended up in retirement in a glass house on the river side. This segues into the plot of Psychoderelict, of how his manager Rastus Knight and a celebrity journalist named Ruth Streeting conspired to give his career a short bump back into notoriety.

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"Ikapikapoo"

At age 13 Gabriel finally asks his Aunt Trilby to teach him to play the piano he's been banging on since age five. He quickly learns to play well and joins with his friend Josh to write songs. Playing one of them on a ukulele out in the street, Gabriel attracts the attention of Leila and her friend Dottie.

The second part of the chapter concerns Gabriel's love of the river Thames and how he occasionally witnesses sexual predators prowling its banks. He talks his father, against his father's initial concerns, into letting him go on the river with a group of adult Sea Scouts. The hum of the boat's motor induces an angelic vision with a sexual edge in Gabriel's mind. He begins to pass out as the reader is given the impression that the Scouts may take sexual advantage of him.

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"I Could Fly"

This chapter starts with Leila. Her dad Damoo wears an outfit made by his mother that he thinks makes him look like Eddie Cochran but everybody else thinks he looks like Elvis. Leila wears fashionable but strict Muslim clothing. Gabriel and Josh begin to notice her.

The story then jumps back for more of Gabriel's history. From four-and-a-half on he is raised mostly by his Aunt Trilby while his parents are away on tour. Aunt Trilby gives Gabriel the love his parents don't and introduces him to music via her upright piano.

What to do?

What to do if you're a Conservative-leaning newspaper? Make a point about how little is left of a late rock star's money after estate taxes or malign the late rock star's 60's lifestyle by falsely impugning that his girlfriend ran through close to a million pounds on drugs before her death? The Telegraph (U.K.) goes for the latter:

Entwistle's girlfriend leaves only £495,000

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"I Heard Voices"

In the 1975 wing of the story within a story, Josh, the one who "hears voices," has his Bar Mitzvah. During the service, he sings to God that he will become a poet.

Meanwhile, we learn more about Leila's background. Her mother dies in 1967 when she is three. She worships her father Damoo who lives with his strict Muslim mother in a house on the Hillcrest Road. At an early age, Leila discovers that she can fly.

Ray, meanwhile, revels in his love for Abba's hit song "S.O.S.," recalls his first trip to India to meet his guru Bollo about whom he wrote a Rolling Stone magazine cover story in 1975, discusses reincarnation and the religions that arose in the mountains of Persia and India.

New Who book...to avoid


Nigel Cawthorne has a new book out in the U.K. called Vinyl Frontier: The Who and the making of Tommy. According to U.K. poster John Hughes who had the misfortune of buying it, the book is full of inaccuracies.

The author is, by the way, best known for his The Sex Lives Of... series.

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Pete has already posted Chapter 3 a week ahead of time.

"I Heard Music"
Ray remembers his childhood in the bombed-out post-war streets of London. Now that he has finished his lunch, he sits in his rocking chair, staring out the Thames outside his window and lets his mind drift into the story...

...In the story a teenage Gabriel is sitting by the Thames in 1975. He gets up and runs down the bank by his friend Josh's house, all the while hearing music emanating from the world around him.

We learn that Gabriel always wears a Yarmulke even though he isn't Jewish as it was a present from his friend Josh. Both live in Acton. Josh's parents are Orthodox Jews, his dad a traveling salesman, his uncle studying to be an accountant.

Gabriel's parents are in showbiz. Known as "Donnie and Connie," they appeared on radio and TV while leaving Gabriel to stay with his aunt when they went on tour or holiday cruises.

Ray, meanwhile, reveals that his own mother, whose name was Rosalynd (the same as the fictional pre-teen girl in Psychoderelict), was a singer who met and fell in love with his dad during World War II while he was performing as a magician.