The Martian Cabaret

"We cater to all, regardless of gender, race, species, or number of limbs."

So ran the marquee for the Cabaret of Ares, backlit with electric light, glowing green above the medium sized backstreet off the West End. People had become used to Martians working in intricate labour - they were working in jewellery and clock making in the city these days - but never before in an arts environment.

After the invasion of 1897 failed it had been thought that all of these inhuman, unearthly creatures had been killed by Earth bound micro organisms they had no immunity from, but as it transpired, this was not the case. Younger specimens, it appeared, had an inbuilt immunity that gradually faded away as the creature got older. Taken into scientific care, and fed a diet of blood with iron supplements, the young Martians had unexpectedly thrived, and had even gathered an adaptation to the more strenuous gravity and heavier atmosphere of Earth.

So, twenty years down the line found these Martians, and their budded offspring, trying to make a way in a human society where the freak show novelty had long since worn off. They were able to communicate using a complex tentacled sign language, and their engineering skill had long since been noted. But as former world owners and world conquerors, they were bored, dissatisfied, and longing to stretch their experience away from Martian hive regimentation to some of the more human frolics they had witnessed over the years.

Hence the cabaret. Recruited by expert in Martian sign and theatrical agent Doctor Hornbeam, four Martians - three dancers and a pianist, were billed to perform at the Strandling Theatre, an off West End establishment with an experimentalist bent.

Advertised in the times, the evening was a sell out. Doctor Hornbeam stood satisfied at the door counting white bills of money, while the theatre owner, one Mr Arnold, beamed from ear to ear.

Insides the electric footlights went up as the main lights dimmed. On stage, were the four Martians. The former drinkers of human blood, destroyers of towns and villages with their deadly rays and toxic smoke, were ready to entertain their public.

One of them was 'seated' at a piano, its rounded green-brown body essentially just dropped on a purple cushion - now rather stained - at an angle enabling it to play the keyboard with its 16 mouth tentacles. In credibly dextrous, it played complex harmonies on a perfectly tempered clavier, the crystalline sharpness of the tuning causing wine glasses in the crowd to call in sympathy, the wine forming standing waves like rings in a pond after a stone has been thrown in.

The other three Martians sang, one clad in a bowler hat, the other a fascinator of sorts and the third a leather waistcoat engineered to fit the spherical body.

"Alllloooo aloohooo" they cried in augmented 5ths and sharp 9ths. "Alllllooooo oooo-oooo" and the spotlights were filtered red, and another light was trained across the crowd in slow swoops, reminding some older patrons of the heatray of the days of the invasion.

"Alllooo hoo-oooh ooo" and whatever they were singing about - a longing for home, a failed tentacle love affair, the beauty of the girl from Syrtis Major they'd never get to meet, they meant it. All the while they moved their sixteen limbs in the most extraordinary ways, creating a shadowplay of intricacy unrivalled on the backdrop behind them, hypnotising the crowd in all its finery.

Another piece was instrumental, and featured the dancer-singers linking their tentacles like Moebius strips and forming rings and spirals in shadowplay. Another piece was comedic in nature, and featured the three Martians exchanging their headgear with each other, and also with delighted members of the front row, who replaced shock with laughter, as the celestial cat burglars whipped their headgear off so fast you could barely see it done.

The final piece however, replaced bawdery and shadows with poignancy. A solitary Martian sang wordlessly in minor thirds as a picture of Mars taken with the Greenwich reflector was projected onto the backdrop behind it. The piano adopted terrestrial harmonics at last, and the whole effect was so moving that many of the audience found themselves complaining that smoke was getting in their eyes, as teardrops dripped down the canyons of their faces.

Stage right, pound signs were glittering in Doctor Hornbeam's eyes. At last! A hit!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08.12.14

The Untold Tales of "The War of the Worlds"

I've been watching Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds - The New Generation" DVD - originally bought as a Christmas present for my folks but still unopened 8 months down the line. The Victorian costumes the musicians are wearing are to die for and the updated music is still amazing, but some of the vocal performances are not as strong as the original DVD production.

Like the fact that the terrible Richard Burton head was ditched, and the noticeable steampunking of the stage show. Some of the extra dialogue is pretty risible, however.

Idle Jeff Wayne chit-chat is not why I'm here however. It struck me while I was watching that all the way down the line, "The War of the Worlds" is a story told through the eyes of a single person, the first-person journalist narrator. Later christened "George Herbert" by Wayne - as in Herbert George Wells - we only see what he sees, only interact with what he interacts with. Obviously there is his brother too (as I've stupidly only just remembered) but that is so essentially the same story that in all later versions it is easily converged with the narrator's.

One of Alvim Correa's beautifully atmospheric illustrations for a French War of the Worlds

I was thinking of all the potentially really interesting tales of the Martian invasion that have been left untold. The extended serialisation Wells wrote, if I remember correctly, features some corking extras, like the scientists who was vivisected by the Martians in a rather twisted piece of satire. But there must be others.

There are obvious ones of course, like that of the narrator's wife in Leatherhead - what traumas did she suffer while waiting to be reunited with her husband? Or that of the Artilleryman, what sense of purpose did he lose after the Martians died when he realised his dream of being a working class Lord of the Underworld was over?

But think too of all the people never mentioned in the book...the nameless dead, the anonymous survivors. Who were the people who discovered the dying Martians before the journalist? Who survived being kept as a living blood donor in the invaders' food baskets, and don't say Tom Cruise with his bloody Hang Grenades.

Who met a Martian close up, and attempted face to face communication, or perhaps hand to tentacle fighting. What happened to those who stayed in an East End of London that still remembered the Whitechapel murders? Who got closest to  a Martian cylinder without being razed out of existence by the Heat Ray?

So many stories.

I wonder how many people have tried to create "spin offs"(ugh I hate that word)  from the original novel; I would imagine it's a tricky thing to do because the rights to the Wells estate are complicated. I shall research this.

Research, then perhaps see if I could produce something of my own.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.08.14

Spaceship Moon

I have to admit, with a really shameful and apologetic face, that I find UFO culture to be endlessly fascinating. I have a number of books on the subject, some of them of the classic “The Unexplained” magazine reports collected in a single volume, another with some wonderful illustrations of Nordic blonde spacemen apparently dressed as fish. And account of the classic sexual encounter between a Brazilian called Vilas-Boas (not the football manager) and a spacewoman with blood red pubic hair.

Another is a rather more sober volume with a black cover illustrated with the so called Washington Invasion photos of definitely-not flying saucers giving the Capitol a buzz in the 50s. Within it, are some rather strange theories about the moon.

Now let me say straightaway that the UFO stuff is all utter rubbish, and most of the reports a four year old with a reasonable sense of scepticism could see through. I find them interesting as a cultural document of their times, and the deep seated sub and supra conscious fears of folk through the various tumults of the nuclear age. And one idea that a few people had on the go was that the moon was some kind of spaceship, expounded upon in the sober black book.

We don't really know how the moon came about – a fissioning of an original larger body into the Earth and Moon, a capture of a straying Moon, separate accretion from proto-planetary matter, or the most supported new theory, that of a Mars sized object striking the proto Earth and splitting the Moon off from it. So I suppose if your mind is out there enough, why shouldn't the Moon be a spaceship (Populated by who???!!!) that has decided to plonk itself in a pseudo-tidally locked orbit around the Earth (Why???!!!).

The evidence? Well the fact that the craters are all the same depth, supposedly, indicates that Spaceship Moon has an outer “Weather Shield” to protect it from extremes of heat and radiation that is easily penetrated by meteorites before they are stopped by the second Space Shield, a far more substantial barrier. Others claim to have spotted glittering bridges, buildings and even giant lettering. Apparently a couple of Russian scientists put this theory together in 1970 – avoiding deportation to the salt mines – saying the lunar seas were the result of molten slag and lava being created and spewed out by the giant machines that powered Spaceship Moon.

So remember this, the next time you to to bed with the moon shining in through the window. The man in the moon may harbour a terrible secret, and who knows, it could be far deadlier than what HG Wells envisaged dropping in on is from Mars.

And it wouldn't have so far to come, either.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 21.03.14

Punching a Martian

I used to have Martian dreams a lot.

I'm always saying this...dreams of trying to keep away from fearsome tripodsof varying colours in a deserted modern London...paralysed as finally one loomed up over Tower Bridge and reached for me with grapple claws sharply open.

Another time I was trying to cross a wood near Horsell Common, in the dead of night, and the Martians had sent out strange bio-machines to patrol the woodland – mechanical metal birds, with big cone shaped heads, lit up in christmas light flashes and hunting me making soft synth owl sounds.

It cornered me behind a fallen, burnt out tree, and I woke up a-shiver.

But for all there technology, as HG Wells kept pointing out, the Martians were feeble and vulnerable under Terran conditions. But no-one ever did the obvious.

No one ever waited until they had all climbed down from their fighting machines for the night, and then treated them to what Wells rather more talented rival Jules Verne would have said was “A fine application of English fists.”

In short, why didn't anyone ever just walk up to one and twat them?

I imagine doing it myself. I leave the artilleryman to his delusions of underground society, seek out the nearest Extra-Terrestrial nest, and evade any patrolling tripods and drop upon the tentacled monsters unaware.

And then I'd just march up, and punch their lipless, slabbering faces smack in their luminous disc – like eyes. I'd punch them over and over again, fist making a sound like someone hitting a bag full of liposuction by-product. Look at its tentacled flabby body trying to get away, when it can barely move in our gravity.

Kick it for good measure. Kick hard and often, leave army boot imprints in its leathery hide, fungal lesions starting too ooze a pus type substance. It can “Ulla” all it wants, it won't do it any good.

Kick it like a deflated football until it bursts. And then start on its friends, until the world is our again. Don't wait for the bateria! Smash their alien faces in!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22/11/2013