CROCKS, HEVVO, PORKY & DRIZZ is a Forty Second Play by Tenzing Scott Brown.
CROCKS, HEVVO, PORKY & DRIZZ has been written in response to an Angus Batey, who is to write a piece celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Long Playing record Heaven Up Here for the online publication The Quietus.
CROCKS, HEVVO, PORKY & DRIZZ is set in a cardboard box in a dark industrial unit on a light industrial estate not far from Sizewell B, on the Suffolk Coast.
The cardboard box is crammed with Long Playing records. They have been squeezed in this box for the last 27 years. The vast majority of the Long Players in this box have not had a needle in their groove for over forty years. Some more than fifty years. This is their lot, in what now passes for the afterlife of a Long Playing record. That said, this might be better than most of us Human Beings can expect in whatever we might have handed out to us for an afterlife.
Four of these Long Playing records know too much about each other. A rarefied generation of men of a certain age, have spent whole chunks of their lives comparing and contrasting these four Long Players.
Their names are Crocodiles, Heaven Up Here, Porcupine and Ocean Rain.
But known to each other as Crocks, Hevvo, Porky and Drizz.
The immaturity of Crocks means that he has never been able to get over the fact that he is still languishing in a lower league of debut Long Players, whereas the likes of Songs Of Leonard Cohen is continually in the top four of the Premier League. And to make things worse there has been rumour that this top four are going to split to join a Super League along with some of the other greatest works of art of the 20th century, thus taking away any chance of Crocks getting to where it rightfully thinks he belongs, once the history of art of the 20th century is properly assessed in the coming decades.
As for Drizz, he thinks he is above all of this. He might be fooling himself, but he totally believes the hype, or at least the wording on the advertisements of the time. Those words being "The Greatest Album Ever Made." I mean it was supposed to be ironic but… Drizz likes to just sit there in this cardboard box safe in the knowledge of his grandeur. If we could peer into his mind we would hear him think to himself at least once a day "Those other three didn’t even have a proper orchestra on them" or "And I was recorded in Paris, where real art happens." But Drizz does not even mutter these words. His silence is Regal. And he doesn’t even care that he will never ever be played again. No virgin needle will sully his deep, dark and majestic grooves.
Which leaves the other two, Hevvo and Porky, as in the two that are squeezed between Crocks and Drizz. It is Hevvo and Porky that have been chatting away for these past 27 years in this cardboard box. Sometimes they chide each other. Sometimes they gang up together to try and get some sort of response from Drizz or goad Crocks, like a pair of playground bullies. But nearly every day there is the same bickering between the two of them, the kind you get from siblings close in age. Today is no different.
And this is where this Forty Second Play begins proper:
Hevvo:
- You just don’t get it…
Porky:
- What?
Hevvo:
- I am a proper Long Player.
- I am all of one piece.
- Every bit of me works together.
- And I have a sleeve to match.
- The glory and the pain.
- The poetry and the distance…
Porky:
- Do you even know what you are talking about?
- I mean where is your hit single.
- At least I got our band into the Top Ten.
- Top-of-the-Pops and everything.
Hevvo:
- Yeah, but what a sell out single that was.
- "Spare us the cutter" for fuck sake?
- And all those schmaltzy keyboard parts.
- I mean…
Porky:
- Get over it…
- I mean they went all the way to Iceland to do my cover.
- They just went to a miserable beach in South Wales for yours.
Hevvo:
- None of that means nothing to me.
- And as any proper fan of our band knows I am the one.
At this point Porky falls silent. Whether this is him holding his council because he knows better or he is just sulking because he knows it is the truth we will never learn in this Forty Second Play. What we do know is that these four Long Players, as a complete piece, are one of the greatest works of art in Western history. Or that is what I, Tenzing Scott Brown thinks on a day like today.
The End =======