the twelve-inch single, a six-minute version for the four-track EP, a
five-minute version for the album, and a little magnetic card you
gave to the people who made the video, which evidently allowed
them to fit the song to the length of whatever they shot.
Danny said, ‘And I was getting worried that Tom was only interested in machines!’ That made them both grin, then Danny grinned too, and felt happy that he’d said it. You can relax now, joke
with them, be friendly. Everything’s okay.
‘Zoe’s really interested in your work.’
‘Yes.’
‘My work? I hardly do anything. They don’t need producers,
they just tell the computers what they want. Sometimes they sing a
few words into a microphone, and it comes out in a different language at twice the speed with the harmonic properties of a foghorn, or rustling leaves, or lightning bolts. And I say “hey, maybe we
The way she smiles, the things she says
55
should also do it with a sound like waves crashing, and have that
backwards in the background”. Then they stare at me like I’m an
idiot, go off and have a conference, then come back and tell me I’m
a fucking genius, that it’s the perfect “solution”. To what, I don’t
know. I don’t know what their problems are. I don’t understand
why anybody hires me.’
‘You must be a fucking genius, Dad.’
‘Don’t you start. I make tiny changes to shit.’
‘Don’t you enjoy experimenting? Trying to come up with completely new sounds?’
‘They’re all new sounds. Too many new sounds. Nobody can
decide what they sound like, they’re all so fucking unique. I rem em ber when I used to like songs because they sounded like other songs I liked. Not the same melody or the same words or the same chords
(well, sometimes the same chords), but the same mood. These songs
don’t have any mood, they don’t remind you of anything at all, they
don’t cause associations. They’re impossible to remember. I used to
really hate those fucking pop tunes they’d churn out, with the same
fucking beat as all the others, guaranteed to invade your head like a
fucking parasite after you’d heard it once, and guaranteed to have
you smashing radios and frothing at the mouth after you’d heard it
six hundred times, but good songs were different. You could
remember a good song by the way it made you feel, the things it
reminded you of. Strange moods, sure, the stranger the better. But
the shit nowadays doesn’t have any mood at all. You hear it, that’s it.’
‘But what if it sounds like waves crashing, or lightning, like you
said a minute ago?’
‘Yeah, sure, you can recognise that. But listening to waves crashing doesn’t do much for me. Lots of bands used to use synthesizers to make sounds like waves, like all kinds of things, and it was great,
it was part of the music they wrote and played. Themselves. Now
when the computers do it all it either sounds too much like real
waves or just like nothing at all’
‘It’s just sour grapes. Dad used to be in a band himself, did I tell
you? Oxymoromc Harmonies, they were called. He had a green and
purple mohawk three feet high, and ten safety pins in his ear. I’ve
got a photo of him somewhere that their drum m er gave me, Dad’s
always trying to steal it and burn it.’
Zoe reached over and ran her finger up from Danny’s earlobe,
which made the back of his neck tingle.
‘Did you really have ten safety pins?’
56
Greg Egan
‘Yes. Very handy when I was changing Tom’s nappies.’
They all laughed.
‘You’d better believe it. Dad was a genuine punk. Beaten up by
skinheads every Saturday night outside the Trade Union Club. My
mother included.’
‘She was not a skinhead!’
‘Rick said she was!’
‘H er boyfriend was. She wasn’t anything. She was unclassifiable,
unique.’
‘I bet she beat you up, though.’
‘No, her boyfriend did. Left me lying on the ground with five
broken ribs. She came back later and took me to hospital. She said
she hated violence, she was studying anthropology. I’ve told you all
this before.’
‘It’s different every time.’
‘Bullshit, you just don’t listen.’
She had studied him anthropologically for three years, and then
moved on to study someone else, leaving Tom, who was evidently
not thesis material. You’d enjoyed being a deserted father, hadn’t
you Danny? Radical feminists
