We lock ourselves in the van. We could be here for some time. At some point we'll have to go back in, pack up our equipment--or what's left of it--and try to get some money out of these bastards. Meanwhile, we watch the carnage. We hear glass shattering and women shrieking, and then sirens as three police cars arrive. A couple of bruised and bleeding drunks stagger outside. One has had the collar torn from his shirt. The other props himself against the wall and throws up, almost, but not quite, missing his shoes.

"You started this!" says Graham.

"Me?!" I say, incredulous. I didn't start anything! Suddenly I feel like throwing up, too. All I ever wanted to do was to play the piano. All I ever wanted was to make beautiful music, like Beethoven, like Charlie Parker, like the Beatles, performer and audience merging into one entity...

"Another gig bites the dust," says Mark, and we all groan. That's what our previous drummer Steve Hollins, the one we sacked, used to say after every bloody show.

"'The Pen and Parchment Club,'" says Dave. "What sort of stupid fucking name is that for a club, anyway?"

"Piss and Punchup Club, more like," says Mark.

Then we just sit in silence. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Who did start this, anyway?

Here goes the hyperactive brain again. Who started music? Surely it was always there. In the Beginning was the Note. A deep, deep note it must have been, at least six octaves below middle C. Higher harmonics slowly came into being, until a vast chord of stars and planets hummed throughout the universe. Primitive creatures crawled out of swamps to listen, and pretty soon (we're talking in Cosmic Time here) they were walking on two legs and howling Cro-Magnon arias at the moon. And over that ever-present Note, a Greek plucked the strings of a lyre, a China man bashed a cymbal, and so it goes across the ages, as musical empires rise and fall: Byzantium, Vienna, New Orleans ... Basingstoke.

I open my eyes. I'm sitting in a Transit van in Basingstoke, and I'm thinking: how the hell did I get mixed up in all this?