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buddies.
    â€˜And who are your influences?’ I asked.
    It was a corny old question but I knew Jenny would come up with a lively and original reply.
    She thought for only a moment before replying, ‘Willa Cather, Margaret of Anjou, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pamela Des Barres, those sort of people,’ and with that she grinned girlishly.
    â€˜Do you feel in touch with the modern world?’ I challenged.
    â€˜I feel in touch with Charlie Christian and Eddie Durham,’ she said. ‘With Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and Hank Marvin and Duane Eddy, with Beck and Page and Clapton. With Guitar Slim and Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. With Henry Kaiser and Bernard Butler and Noel Gallagher and Vernon Reid and Winged Eel Fingerling. Sexy fellers, every last one of them. And I feel in touch with womentoo – though in a different way.
    â€˜But mostly I feel in touch with all those lonely boys of the future, still sitting in their rooms trying to play guitar, solemnly believing that if only they could coax some music out of the damn machine they’re holding then somehow everything would be better, everything would fall into place; their sex lives, their shyness, their bad skin. And you know what, fellers, you’re absolutely right, it would.’
    There was a poignant pause while she let that remark settle in.
    â€˜You know,’ she added briskly, ‘it’s a long time ago that I decided to be my own woman, my own musician. I decided I was going to tear up the rule book, and then I realized there
was
no rule book.’
    I smiled appreciatively but at last I thought it was time to end this verbal jousting. I looked her straight in the eyes and I said, ‘Who do you play for, Ms Slade? Yourself or others?’
    Arching one carefully plucked eyebrow, she said, ‘I play for the nice guys, the filing clerks and computer nerds, the deceived and exploited, for the dysfunctional and the confused and the just plain wrong, for those who are unsure about their identities, their body politics, their genders.
    â€˜I play for the decontamination squads, for the firework scientists, the mutants and sleepers. I play for the homely girls terrified by their first sight of menstrual blood, and for the sad boys suffering the attentions of their mothers’ special friends. I play for the number crunchers and the atom splitters, for the deformed and the brain dead, for the emotionally drained, for the synaesthesiacs (they make terrific listeners). I play for germ warfare enthusiasts, for the genetic goofballs, the Apple mystics, the road whores,the insurrection grrrls, the nylon broads, the fishnet lads. I often play for the tone deaf.
    â€˜I play for those with extra senses and extra heads, for the bad mothers and the cheerful patricides, for the wreckers and the recyclers, the scanners and cyberniks, the video jerks, the steeplejacks of middle space, the boys in the bunker, the hyper-drive cadets, the ovary barons, the born-again crucifiers, the twang bar princesses, the wah wah dudes, the radon lovers, feedback addicts, fuzz theorists.
    â€˜I play for the cryogenic fetishists, the orgone punks, the cosmetic surgeons with the shaky hands, the thrash throngs, the synth siblings, the napalm fanciers, the nuclear Klansmen, needlegun gangs, anarchs of the old school, neurone handymen, death metal alchemists.
    â€˜I play for the people next door. I play for people like us. I play for people like you, Bob’
    It was a tender and touching moment, but of course she was only telling me what I already knew.
    Reprinted from the
Journal of Sladean Studies
    Volume 4 Issue 3

LAST NIGHT I WRECKED A DJ’S LIFE
    Jenny Slade could no longer rememberwhich magazine had first referred to Jed Rhodes as a ‘drug-crazed bass player’. The epithet had stuck, but she’d always found it absurd. There was no denying that Jed had a lifelong appetite for,