Verse/Chorus Loop
A piece of fiction about a tune that keeps going around and around and around.
The earliest account I’ve found is from 1872, in a pamphlet containing lurid tales of unexplained phenomena. A churchwarden named James Long of Bracknell opened up his church one Tuesday morning to discover an object he described as looking ‘somewhat like a pianoforte or seraphine’ on the altar. Assuming it had been left there in the night, but unable to account for who had done so or why, he approached with the intention of putting it somewhere out of the way, only to be ‘accosted by an awful and unearthly roar emanating from the instrument’. He turned, left the church and locked the door, and according to him the noise continued for about an hour. When it ceased, he cautiously returned to the building, only to find the instrument had gone.
The sighting made in 1911 by Lillian Dall, a postmistress who worked and lived near Acton, is more concrete. In a letter to a friend she said she heard odd, unsettling music emanating from the woods behind her house one evening. She followed the sound and saw ‘what I took for part of a chapel organ’ with a series of switches and knobs located above its keyboard, standing by the foot of a tree. Though baffled and disquieted by the noise, which she said was ‘peculiarly mechanical in nature’, she stepped closer to the instrument and examined it, finding its keys moving of their own accord. This she believed was a stage trick of some kind, though as with Long, she could not understand why anyone would put it here.
Then the noise stopped, though the keys kept moving. And a few seconds later, in the blink of Miss Dall’s eyes, it seemed to disappear. She wasn’t looking directly at it, her vision ‘seemed to turn white for the merest fraction of a second’, and it simply vanished from the periphery of her vision. Once it had gone, everything seemed a little sharper suddenly, a little more vivid, adding to the impression the instrument had been part of a delusion. But Miss Dall was capable with a pencil and when she returned home, she sketched what she had seen from memory.
The result is understandably imperfect, but it’s good enough to be sure that what she saw was in fact a Minimoog Model D on a custom-built stand. We can therefore link it to the sightings in 1957 and 1971, which were captured in photographs. The witness of the latter was less perplexed by its form and the noises it made, having heard similar devices on the soundtracks of film and television – however, like everyone else who saw it, they could not touch the device. If they put a hand near it, their muscles would lock up until they stepped away. Witnesses often associate this sensation with the music itself. Appearances of the instrument last anything from a few minutes to the hour experienced by James Long.
I’ve personally pinned down further incursions dating to 1938 and 1998, and there are possible sightings I can’t verify. But the sighting made on 5th December 1962, at 15 Carrington Crescent, Wendover is the one that introduced me to this phenomenon.
This was made by Alison Peck, a young woman who had to hand a reel-to-reel tape recorder belonging to her employer, which she used for transcription work and often brought home. When the Minimoog made its appearance in her bathroom (it was apparently stood in her bathtub), she brought the recorder upstairs and pointed its microphone at the instrument. From her recording, which filled an entire 32-minute spool (unfortunately not recorded at the highest quality setting), we know that on this occasion at least the Minimoog continuously repeated the same section of melody, lasting 76 seconds and consisting of two parts, which fit together like a verse and a chorus. This is consistent with other descriptions of its music, and though it’s hard to be sure, I suspect this is what it did every time it appeared.
You may wonder at my interest in this. The thing is, I wrote that piece of music several years ago. I have a demo, but I couldn’t come up with lyrics that worked so it just stayed on my hard drive in a file of unfinished sketches. Last year I played it to the vocalist Angela Glyne, who I’d been working with on some other songs, hoping we might be able to finish it together, and she told me she’d heard it before. She brought up Peck’s 1962 recording on YouTube and played it to me. And not only is the tune identical, but the sound is too – I recorded my demo using a Minimoog Model D emulator.
Angela said I probably subconsciously picked it up when I was young. Maybe I was asleep and the instrument appeared outside my window, and it wasn’t loud enough to wake me, but the tune embedded itself. Maybe she’s right. But we know it travels in time, so maybe I’m destined to meet it, and it will acquire the tune from me. And I worry about how that might happen, and what might happen next.