Liam had an extraordinary right aural tract

. The left one was horizontal, like most peoples, but the right one was at forty-five degrees. This meant two things:

· For all of his life Liam would have extreme problems with earwax
· He heard music just that little differently to most people

Guitars just passed him by; it was bass he needed, and plenty of it. His left ear was his James Brown ear, the one that liked Maceo Parker. The right ear was his darker side, his funkier side. This ear was Parliament, this ear was Larry Graham, it even looked a little like Bootsy Collins in his younger, early acid days, as long as you caught it in the right light late at night. He heard a part of any music just a little out of sync, and bass works better here. Music was truly a sensation to him, it reverberated through the whole right side of his brain.

Now Liam’s bizarre ear was to blame for some of his wilder ideas. His early nineties Neo-Beastie Boys rap combo Heckled by Sheep was a concept the Oxford Brookes Student union was unprepared for. All the record labels he sent the tape to were far more prepared, they have people trained solely in the act of telling young undertalented musicians just to stop fucking calling the office because the best in life they could ever hope for is to hum happy tunes to themselves as they front-face soup cans.

The whole picture was what Liam always saw. This week, whenever he closed his eyes, he pictured his big concert on the banks of the River Nile. At the foot of the pyramids at Gaia, he could see the huge stage lit by searchlights, lasers cutting through the sky overhead, guiding down the mothership


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