6. Cockles and Muscles (5:15) | ||||||||
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Narrator (soprano): In Manchester city the scene was so shitty back then at a Christmas soon after the war But Alan M. Turing looked almost alluring with cockles and muscles alive, alive oh. Arnold: So why are you here guv don't tell me you're queer, luv? Alan: I'm working to build an electronic brain It wrote a love letter, sang songs even better, I want a computer alive, alive oh Arnold: I'm young free and single I'm writing a jingle Alan: I want a computer to go all the way. What game are you playing? Arnold: There's no need for paying. Alan: I want you to bring me alive alive oh Arnold: Your muscles are stunning! Alan: That's why I go running and now can I show you my cockles as well? My heart needs a warming [sigh] Both: I just want a lover, alive alive oh Arnold: I've no education! Alan: Just feel the vibration! It's my violin, I can play you a tune [violin solo] Arnold: Can I play your fiddle? [open strings G D A E] its no bloody good you should have a guitar. Narrator: And that was the session that led to confession when Alan was roasted alive alive oh Now Alan was driven to death, but they'd given his boyfriend the freedom to get up and go. He had the ambition to be a musician but the ghost from the past stayed alive alive oh. © 2000 Andrew Hodges |
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This song relates the true events of Christmas 1951 when Alan Turing, inventor of the digital computer, met
the nineteen-year-old Arnold in Oxford Street, Manchester, and (to use his own words) picked him up. The drama of the subsequent arrest and its consequences has been explored in my own biography of Alan Turing and in the play Breaking the Code. In his home, Alan played a tune on the violin to Arnold. I mention this on page 452 of my book, but did not say what tune he played: it was actually the traditional air Cockles and Mussels. This is the moment, weirdly surreal and also cheerfully tacky, which I have captured in this song. It uses a lot of harmonic devices to vary the traditional tune, including tinkles and soaring strings rather as in 1950s pop music.
There are several further musical elements in the true story, which I have made free use of. One is that Arnold played the guitar. After the 1952 trial he went to London, hit the music scene in Fitzrovia, and later composed a theme tune which he played to me in 1980 when I interviewed him. In fact one evening I went with Arnold to Bunjies folk club, near Leicester Square — he told me it had not changed much since 1953. So I have set Arnold's words to guitar strumming which becomes more cheeky, anticipating a tune which other Northern lads were to play about ten years later. It's an amazing coincidence that Manchester, at Christmas 1951, also saw the first computer-generated musical sound. The Manchester computer, the 'electronic brain' that Alan Turing told Arnold he worked on, was programmed to produce a version of Jingle Bells for radio broadcast. (Alan Turing's gay colleague Christopher Strachey was I think responsible for this, and also for the 'love letters' that the computer was induced to print out.) So this song has both the computer sound playing Jingle Bells and also the christian Christmas bells jingling with irony. Deeper bells also enter, reflecting the fact that Manchester bells were tolling on the day that the two men were arrested for their affair, since it coincided with the death of King George VI. This birth of computer music naturally connects with Turing's vision of machine intelligence, which I have put into the words, but I have also included another musical theme in counterpoint to remind us of his human spirit. Although the song follows the traditional tune relentlessly with verses and chorus, it also serves as a chorale prelude: that is, all the Cockles arrangement turns out to be just the background for yet another quite different tune, floating above. This other tune is the hymn associated with the death of Alan's first love, Christopher Morcom: Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost, ending with the words 'holy heavenly love.' You can see the context of this on page 76 of my book about Alan Turing, in the chapter Spirit of Truth. Musically, this tune fits perfectly despite being in a different metre, and it also propels the rather vulgar modulation from F to G and back again which enhances the tension of the central section. But it also prompts thoughts of the contrast between idealised and realised erotic encounter. I have also avoided any doomy, twilight-world, mood-painting. The meeting is exciting, if rather nervous. It is also funny (as when Alan and Arnold march home to a Northern brass band). There is a subtlety in the ending. It has an allusion to the brutal second movement of Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony (1947). Vaughan Williams is so often characterised as the composer of pretty 'folk' music; I see him as someone who wrestled with the problem of how to encompass in a work of art the tacky, the ugly, the evil, and the possibility of total defeat, as his Fourth and Sixth symphonies do. But the final chord is not in fact one of annihilation, but can be recognised as the same as that representing the eternal Platonic world in the Prelude. At the last moment, Alan Turing's mathematical thought lives on. The Manchester and Folk music themes are then taken up in the next song, Queer as Folk Song. © 2000, 2002 Andrew Hodges | ||||
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