In Competition No. 2920 you were invited to submit an extract from a novel written by a rock star of your choosing.

I was pleased that Adrian Fry went for Tom Waits, whose storytelling genius shines out on the likes of the grimly hilarious ‘Frank’s Wild Years’. But as Morrissey’s recent stinker demonstrates, being able to write decent song lyrics doesn’t guarantee literary success.

Gerda Roper, Mark Shelton and C.J. Gleed were unlucky losers. The winners pocket £25 each. Bill Greenwell takes the bonus fiver.

You know what it is to go thru the body of the beast, right? The heart, the crimson muscle, beating around you with soft & universal lamentations? All right, we shall go on. Into the blue mists, the territory of the Egyptian newt. Where the rooms are rented out only to strangers with naked brains & military industrial torsos. Where the killers have sacraments in their lockers & the girls abound in flowers. I tell you, this night shall you slumber with the ancients & eat their starlight, for this road leads thru the valley of incantation. Take off your shawl, which is red. Take off your faces, you will not need them. Take off your dialogue, & wear it around your cool neck.

‘Where are we going?’

‘We are going to follow.’

Is everybody ready for the cry of the maiden?

It is time to embark.
Bill Greenwell (from Newt Trips by J. Morrison)

Ed came back from ’Nam in bits, one of which fetched up in Vegas as a bourbon blunted card sharp. Another chauffeured for a Zoot-suited dwarf who’d sold his soul to the Devil for control of the toothpick business. Several bill themselves ‘curators of human flotsam’; they’re tending bar from Des Moines to Dubrovnik. Two holed up in a Mexican whorehouse where the hookers cadge make-up tips from the mortician next door, while another squats in the apartment of an ex boxer with a cauliflower soul. Six play Russian roulette every Tuesday at Mursky’s; none believes in luck. None had kids, though one fell in love with a pair of fine legs and wound up wed to a mouth. One has a plan to bring them all together but another, a Brooklyn bum in a tinfoil hat, claims a smashed up TV told him they’d never cohere.
Adrian Fry/Tom Waits

The time: circa approximately now. The place: Manchester. Surveillance pigeons prowl the City Centre, their microcameras feeding docusoaps yet uncommissioned. Old prole Joe, post job, post cancer death wife, post zero hour contract kids, corrals his bits in placky bag to sit in vertical drinking den. No Styrofoam coffee and house price corroboration confab for Joe: strictly Bremen vat brewed lager and Blatter bashing soccer chat with Stalinist émigré bar staff. Prole Joe downs same again after same again. Ought to return filched volume of MR James to Central Library. Media City engendered Nazi paranoia prevents this. Prole Joe makes zigzag bid for pub bog. Passes kitchen: mithers to self at corporate scran stench emanating therefrom. Porcelain pilgrimage attained, Prole Joe passes out. Wakes circa approximately later, dissonant shards of drunken dream fleeing like Mancunian Olympic bid sponsors. Prole Joe spits out final shard. ‘Northern Powerhouse-ah!’
Russell Clifton/Mark E. Smith

Clarissa slammed her gloved hand on the button and blew the airlock. It was now all down to Newton’s second law. Force equals mass times acceleration. Would the thrust be enough to take her to the safety of the other ship before the Van Allen radiation did her irreparable harm?

As she moved at a constant velocity, she marvelled at the zodiacal light as the photons from the sun were reflected off the interplanetary dust cloud. If she ever got back to earth that would be a great topic for her PhD thesis. Assuming that no one else had done it before.

As the other airlock approached, she saw that, across to the west, the brightest light came not from a star, but from a planet. Mercury! Clarissa had always felt that there was something special about Mercury.

John Priestland/(Dr) Brian May

Peace and love — most days, that’s what it’s all about in an octopus’s garden. Everybody has played there, so everybody knows. But today was a different sort of day. A day for getting away with murder.

The octopus flexed and rippled his eight supple tentacles. He let himself imagine each appendage brandishing a different weapon. All he really wanted was to flourish drumsticks and brushes and other music-making gear, but fate insisted on tossing him more dangerous playthings. Nothing to do but try to pick up the tune and play along.

‘Happy, safe. Oh, what joy!’ called out one of the guests frolicking nearby in the calm, salty water. The host did his best to remain impassive, cloaked in what he liked to think of as his invisible ink cloud. Best that nobody else know just yet how little happiness or safety there was in the octopus’s garden today.
Chris O’Carroll/Ringo Starr

Joe Langan binned the newspaper with a shrug of contempt. It was another story about Pat O’Malley, him and his dimples and his American wife who couldn’t sing a note. Of course he’d always been the cute, cuddly one when they were in the group together, and now he’d networked himself among the posh middle class he was the housewives’ choice and putting out MOR crap. Sometimes Joe regretted giving Pat his chance back in the early Sixties. Too trusting, as always. He smiled at Hanako, who was trying on hats with the intensity of a great artist. She’d been blamed for breaking up the group, but it was Pat who’d pre-empted Joe with his going-solo announcement. The Judas. But that was typical of him, always me, me, me.

‘You are bogarting, Joe.’

Joe passed Hanako the spliff and prepared to throw up before going on stage.
Basil Ransome-Davies/from Betrayal by J. Lennon

No. 2923: Martian poetry

You are invited to describe an everyday object, in verse, from the point of view of a Martian. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 4 November.