Brothers of the Head. Brian Aldiss

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      Fifty kilometres from the nearest river, two hundred and fifty kilometres from any township worthy of the name, we arrived at our destination in the bush. There stood a great disconsolate white building, its tiers of windows shuttered like closed eyes, its portico already in a state of collapse. This was the multimillion dollar hospital built merely to line the pockets of a few avaricious men. The main structure had been completed. Nearby, the foundations of an X-ray unit lay open to the sky. Goats wandered about the builders’ rubble.

      I walked through room after room, ward after ward, all deathly quiet. No healing would ever take place here. There was no way in which one penny of the investment could be retrieved. Only the termites would benefit.

      When I flew back from Nairobi, it was to find that the Bang-Bang had taken off and their first single was already in the charts.

       I walk left, I walk right,

       I waste no sleeping on the night –

       It’s two by two, the light the dark

       Just like animals in the Ark

       Because I’ll tell ya

       Tell ya

       I’m a Two-Way Romeo

       Hatched right under that Gemini sign

       Magic number Sixty-Nine

       We’re two in one and all in all

       Shoot double-barrelled wherewithal …

       Girls cumma my house, I let ’em in,

       I say Wait, I say Begin –

       At first it’s strange but then it lives

       They grow to love the alternatives

       ’N’ then they’ll tell ya

       Tell ya

       I’m a Two-Way Romeo

       Bang-Bang

       A Two-Way Thru-Way New-Way Romeo ¹

      Looking back, one is astonished to recall the fury which accompanied the success of this execrable song. On their first Northern tour, the Howe twins appeared as support to another of Zak’s groups. Their gig, as I understand the term to be, was closed down in Sunderland for reasons of indecency; with Zak’s financial backing, the manager of the Sunderland club contested this decision in the courts, and the affair was given some publicity. From then on, a trail of accusations of indecency and innuendo followed like exhaust fumes in the wake of the Bang-Bang’s speeding career.

      A question was soon raised in the Houses of Parliament. National debate followed, to the strains of that tuneless song. Should the physiologically deprived make capital of their deprivation? Was it fair to themselves and their public?

      We can see now why the Bang-Bang was difficult to take. At the time, much of the discussion centred on whether their songs and performances were good or bad; in fact, the question of art hardly entered into the matter. The question of morality was a good deal more pressing (but the British public is well accustomed to confusing art with morality).

      Two overlapping areas of morality served to make the Bang-Bang hot news. The Bang-Bang were Siamese twins and therefore represented a deformity (for libel reasons, the word ‘freak’ was rarely used in public); should deformity be exploited in this way – indeed, was it being exploited?

      And – this was the more painful area – should deformed people be allowed to flaunt their sexuality? The deformed, the handicapped, were supposed to keep quiet about their natural desires. There was enough material here to keep the pot of virtuous sentiment, seasoned with prurient interest, a-boiling for a long while.

      Self-appointed guardians of the country’s moral fibre claimed that sexuality and music were being debased, that national sensitivities would suffer. Then a Liberal Member of Parliament went on television to state that, in his humble opinion, it was all to the good that minorities such as Siamese twins should have their voice; and moreover that his family (although not he himself) had greatly enjoyed the energy of the Bang-Bang, as well as the pagan innocence of their songs. He considered them good-looking young men. He did not see anything unpleasant in deformity, and looked forward to the day when greater enlightenment brought multiple sclerosis olympics and similar events.

      This speech was so widely reported, with further photographs of the Bang-Bang and other deformed people who had immediately sought to cash in on the Bang-Bang’s success, that it drove out the news of two more African states, including Kanzani, being overtaken by Communist coups.

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