The Gospel Truth

                                                        
Sitting here in the Fourways Bar, Fraser felt like a foreigner in his own town. The trendies who organised this Open Mic night really only did so to listen to each other and themselves. If exposed to a truth serum they’d have to reveal that they’d really rather that anyone outside of their own little social clique didn’t play and sing at all. He sat nursing his pint, didn’t want slurred speech when his turn came, if it ever did.

Tanya Torrance (or Tanya Twee as Fraser called her, though not to her face for she was as hard as nails) was busy playing her latest Norah Jones-esque opus, which was actually closer to Norah Batty in its lyrical content and musical worth – you’d begin forgetting it while she was actually still singing it. Still, she thought she was good – they all did! Which was why what they, the meagre Tuesday night audience, were about to witness was so wrong on so many levels. Tanya, and her equally untalented and banal friend Penny Presley (‘The Illiterate Alliterates’, as Fraser had dubbed them) had announced earlier that ‘Tonight Matthew..’ they were going to introduce their new gospel quartet.

This he had to see.

Four middle-class white women from the outskirts of Edinburgh were going to attempt to sing black American gospel music. A music borne through the indignities of slavery and degradation of hundreds of years was going to be done justice by a quartet of privileged white women who wouldn’t recognise indignity if they sold it in Harvey Nicks. Apart from the fact that you had to have a certain ‘quality’ of voice to sing gospel , you didn’t have to be Mahalia Jackson but something along those lines was definitely desirable, quite a vocal ‘range’ was required not to say ‘power’ and ‘soul’. Unless they transformed dramatically within the next hour or so, Fraser had not witnessed any evidence whatsoever of any of these qualities among those comprising the quartet. ‘Insipid’, ‘mediocre’ and definitely ‘soulless’ these were words that more readily sprang to mind when witnessing their collective or individual performances.

Such arrogance amazed him, and a complete lack of any sense of irony, and a very dark irony it was too. It left him aghast in the same way that he couldn’t believe that a crowd of middle-class, rugby-loving, solicitor types could adopt ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ a song from the plantations of nineteenth century America, as a way of serenading their ball-chasing heroes. And they were English too!  Slave-traders extraordinaire! And yet, no-one ever commented on the cruel irony of this appropriation. Now a similar criminal act was to be committed in the Fourways Bar in Hartsburgh, East Lothian.

He was up next. Introduced by Tanya herself

‘Someone you’ve all heard many times before...’

‘Thanks for the big sell Tanya...’

The audience may have thought this was gentle verbal sparring but the protagonists knew it was ignited from mutual loathing. He was beginning to think he only attended these nights to spite these people. The enmity was barely concealed.

‘This is a song by Laura Cantrell about premature ejaculation. It’s called ‘Two Seconds of Your Love’’

They hated his crudity. These were your po-faced, middle-class Scots and he hated them for that.

They were from the other side of the town – the ‘good’ side. Where the ‘alternative therapy’ crowd lived. Life coaches, reiki healers.

The well-connected people.

Fraser – Davie Fraser – had spent his life on the other side of town with the unemployed and the shop workers, and the bar staff from The Fourways, the alkies and the jakeys, the damaged and the damned.

Even the beach in this little Lothian haven was unofficially segregated. Go east from the bottom of Fore Street and you got Beach House cafes that sold sandwiches made from bread other than pan, plain or broon and kayak clubs. They had their veggie barbecues on the beach nights and Tai Chi at sundown. Go west from Fore Street and you had two amusement arcades, a chippy and a Wimpy bar. There they drank tinned lager and flung balls for their devil-dugs.

And never the twain shall meet.

The punters at the bar liked him. They cheered and bought him pints after he’d done his little turn. He understood that this was not wholly in appreciation of his talents and more because they knew that it annoyed the interlopers who took over their pub every second Tuesday.

He got little applause from them.

They had on occasion stopped him playing at all, saying all the ‘spots’ had been filled, usually by their friends and friends of friends from the music college in Edinburgh, people they’d ‘networked’, who were deemed worth knowing, but they weren’t always able to rig this and had then no alternative but to let him play.

The gospel choristers made their way to the tiny stage, giggling excitedly and obviously in their own little bubble of anticipation. Maybe they’d been practising this for a while and were now keen to expose their new joint persona to a bemused and largely disinterested public. Everyone but they and their little coterie seemed to think this was a bad idea and were gearing themselves to cringe.

And cringe they did, for what followed was excruciatingly bad. Even Fraser didn’t expect it to be so appallingly awful.

White women from East Lothian cannot sing gospel music.

But, they sure as hell would try.

‘Go tell it on the Mountain’ was the first song they battered to death. Tanya on shaky lead vocal and the others ‘oohing’ and harmonising sometimes dangerously close to the tune. They smiled and beamed at each other as if they were The Southern Gospel Singers incarnate. Desecration was the word closest to Davie Fraser’s mind, an assault on something sacred, and they couldn’t and would never see it that way. To them it was a tribute, probably to black sisterhood or some other equally twee and fatuous notion. It would have been far more of a tribute if they’d killed the whole idea at birth.

After the inevitable and tortuous rendition of Amazing Grace they left the stage to whoops and hollers from their own little group and a tired spatter of hand-claps from those at the bar.

In their own little self-interested, cosy world they’d talk of this night as a triumph; when they, the sisters of East Lothian had joined hands with the oppressed and disenfranchised. To show they really were all one, that music could cross boundaries of culture, race and creed.

-Silly bastards, thought Davie Fraser turning west towards home.