As this is my first blog, I might as well confess to my magnum opus of bastardness. This was my Sgt. Pepper’s. The time I made my little brother believe that he was about to die.
It was 1984. I was 14 and my brother was 3 years younger. We’d watched the TV drama “Threads” about a nuclear attack on Sheffield and quite frankly it scared us fucking shitless. The Cold War, I now know in retrospect, was reaching a new height, pre-Gorbachev, with that gun-slinging cowboy Reagan at the White House, declaring the USSR an “Evil Empire.”
The moment that stuck in both our minds from “Threads” was when everyone freezes at the sight of the mushroom cloud and there’s a shot of a woman’s leg with a trickle of piss running down it. That seemed to encapsulate the fear that I was soon to exploit for my own amusement.
If you were around then, you’ll remember that the music world was highly aware of the nuclear threat. Sting was a year away from releasing “Russians” and Frankie Goes to Hollywood had topped the 1984 charts with “Two Tribes”, the accompanying video showing a brutal hand-to-hand fight between Reagan and the Soviet leader Chernenko. I bought the extended version of this single on cassette. It began, before any music commenced, with the air-raid siren, the 4-minute warning that signalled a nuclear attack.
My brother was quite aware, thanks partly to “Threads”, what that noise meant. And I had a new portable stereo, you know, the old 80’s ghetto blaster. While he played in the garden one afternoon, I put the stereo on the window sill of our bedroom, concealed by the net curtain, and turned the volume up to full.
The tape went in. I pressed play. The air-raid warning screamed Banshee-like out across the garden, signalling the imminent explosion of a nuclear bomb and the end of all of us.
“MUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My poor brother had never run so fast. How he didn’t emulate the woman from “Threads” I don’t know. Maybe he did. Maybe he did worse. I nearly did just through laughing.
That, my friends, is a truly cruel and unforgivable act of pure bastardness.
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