'EMOTIONS' BY THE TIED HANDS

And, with inspiration from 'Emotions', some reflections about the past from The Thinker CIC's Glenn Skelhorn...

I first heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in December 1984. It was Christmas Day and I was in the loft of our house in Garston, Liverpool, with my older brother, Gavin, eagerly exploring our big present — an Amstrad CPC 464. I had no idea who Alan Michael Sugar was or that he owned a company that made this home computer, intended to rival Commodore and Spectrum. All I was aware of was that there was this strange plastic machine in our playroom with a TV and a load of cassette tapes with crudely drawn but exciting pictures on the inlays. Games with titles like ‘Roland in the Caves’, ‘Harrier Attack’ and ‘Sultan’s Maze’ promised thrilling and exotic adventures. Twelve games in total were included in the Amsoft pack that came with the computer, and we were transfixed. Over the coming months, we would immerse ourselves in these new worlds. Some of the games were a bit crap but there were real gems in there. The graphics were diabolical but we didn’t know any different. New games were purchased. Fond memories of waiting 9 minutes for ‘Minder’ to load up, accompanied of course by the unearthly, tinnitus-inducing screeching noises. And also buying Amstrad Action and sitting for hours with absolute focus on correctly typing out the written code for rudimentary fantasy adventure games, included at the back of the magazine. BASIC - a magical language that could make new worlds appear on the monitor. And if you got one letter wrong, you were f**ked.

I first heard Moonlight Sonata in December 1984. Now let me tell you, above and beyond the buffet of Amsoft treats was a game that really captured the imagination of home computer initiates up and down the country. It was a game with a weird title and a really weird cassette cover. The picture on the front was of a man with tuxedo tails and a pair of industrial working boots, clutching a bottle of champagne with his head fully down a toilet. The poor guy was clearly yacking his guts up. The name was ‘Jet Set Willy’. This was the superstar game of 1984 across all platforms. I didn’t bother to work out what the premise of the game was, but it was well enough to control the funny little sprite on screen with the top hat on, avoiding the various harmful objects, from one themed room of the mansion house to another. Some of the rooms had strange names that hinted at hidden meanings, such as the ‘Priest’s Hole’ and the ‘Dumb Waiter’. And there was the master bedroom, where the housemaid with the rolling pin would beat you back from approaching the bed for rest to resume the game. As it turns out the game is set the day after a huge party Willy has thrown with part of the massive fortune gained from his work in the preceding ‘Manic Miner’ game. 

But, to return to the recurring statement, I first heard Moonlight Sonata in December 1984. The soundtrack to Jet Set Willy was a collection of classical pieces by Bach, Grieg, Mozart and all the rest - one for each room in the mansion - and the title screen upon loading was Moonlight Sonata. I’m not sure what Beethoven would have made of his masterpiece being reinterpreted through the medium of an 8-bit computer, but I was sold. Strip away all of the fancy instruments and replace the luscious sounds with bleeps and you’ve still got the essence of the tune that constitutes its elevation. And in the mind of a six year old, oblivious to all of these futile concepts, there was a taste of the transcendent. 

Forty years later and The Thinker CIC website is hosting Emotions by the Tied Hands, on its worldwide web tour, the project born out of Bill Drummond’s relationship with the song, Past, Present and Future, by The Shangri-Las. The lyrics sung over a version of Moonlight Sonata.  But my relationship to Moonlight Sonata is via Jet Set Willy. And so, I did a bit of research, and discovered that, lo and behold, the creator of the game, Matthew Smith, had made the game in his bedroom over the other side of the Mersey, in Wallasey at the age of 17. Smith was the archetypal computer nerd, squirrelled away with an obsession to explore every nook and cranny of this new wave of domestic technology, and gain the knowledge and skills to create something new, in much the same way as kids in other parts of the world were taking samplers and synthesisers to task in making fledgling house and techno music. So Smith makes a fortune from his mega successful games, lives the high life for a while, fritters the money away, leaves the computer games industry, and apparently moves to Holland, lives in a commune, becomes a drug-addled dropout, before being deported back to the UK, and ultimately finds a degree of celebrity through a fan base riveted by his by now legendary status that had grown over time, fuelled by his time in the wilderness. For a few years before his reappearance, there was even a website devoted to the task of finding the elusive Matt Smith. 

But back in those early years of the 1980s, Matt Smith would hang around the tech haven of the Tandy store on Lord Street in Liverpool city centre, perhaps thirty metres away from a manhole cover on Mathew Street, as the crow flies, underneath which purportedly runs a mythical ley line, accountable for the repeated emergence of seismic cultural forces in the locale. Spotty, sweaty and socially awkward they may have been but surely Matt Smith and his ilk could lay claim to the same glorious DIY revolutionary spirit that birthed the Liverpool post-punk scene, in Eric’s, the music venue in direct sight of that seemingly innocuous manhole cover. 

Glenn Skelhorn, 16th October 2024

Postscript: a condition of hosting Emotions by The Tied Hands was that we had to record a version of the song Past, Present and Future and so, in tribute to all that’s just been written, listen: Jet Set Willy vs The Shangri-Las!: