"What haven’t I weighed or measured? I’ve done all Beethoven, all Verdi, etc. It’s fascinating. The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B flat of medium size. I can assure you that I have never seen anything so revolting. I called in my man to show it to him. On my phono-scales a common or garden F sharp registered 93 kilos. It came out of a fat tenor whom I also weighed… "

‘What I Am’ from A Mammal’s Notebook, Erik Satie

"Now, I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord…"

- Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah © 1984

Regardless of how energetic, engrossing or gross the action, whether causal, coital, brutal or futile the reaction, we may, all of us, fall asleep. And believe me when I say I did just that, while listening to a nineteen-nineties rock record. I shall note no nomenclatures, for we have all heard one in our time, if we are now living, and they are all much of a sameness. Falling to sleep was a natural act, like the opening of Ms. Delaney’s A Taste Of Honey, and requires no further comment; rather it was what followed that I would like, broodingly, to dwell upon, some thing that could be considered only a supernatural act, like the closing of Mr. Britten’s operatic setting of Mr. James’ The Turn Of The Screw.

Feeling renovated, I rose primly and checked the time lost. It was a shorter period than three to five days, but longer than a full-stop. Although, it is known that, in such matters, I have no idea what I am talking about. Sufficient time should have been torn off, unused, for the stylus arm on my old elpee-player to have arced entirely to the middle, hummed and lifted itself up into the reset position, but there it bobbled, seeming to edge its way only exponentially towards the end, with each movement slowing to half-pace but never stopping. The speakers, so haunted, emitted a low noise, a lurching loop of lo-fidelity (there are certain Islamic countries, where such poor fidelity is punished with stoning and I rather wish… etc. etc.). I heard voices, pained voices, like those heard in the nineteen-nineties, when life was bad. They uttered unintelligible words or words, at least, ill thought through and not amusing.

The machine steamed on and I moved closer to look at it in more detail. I was fascinated by the strange way in which in the stylus seemed to warble in one place, while the music turned in a wider orbit. It would be wrong to suggest that the music constituted a song, certainly not in the sense of a song a band would record and place on a record, but there was enough delay between the gentle skip of the needle and the violent, unrehearsed loop of the sound that it could not be excused as a mere glitch or scratch. I waved my hand across the apparatus to see what magnets kept the whole contraption running, but, in my clumsiness, knocked it off.

There are rubber gloves that I keep by the bed, in case I plan to touch fossils, and I put them on before starting the record all over again. I lifted the elpee itself by the edges and revolved it to what I imagined would be a suitable beginning position. Then I dusted down the stylus. When it began, I eyed carefully each speck of dirt that the needle ploughed out of the grooves and eared carefully the warm crackles from the speakers. It was exactly as before; I will describe no descriptions, as we have all heard a nineteen-nineties rock record in our time. To avoid the same soporifism that led exactly here, I would have to tongue carefully a mug of coffee. However, I only have tea, as I don’t like guests.

At the end, though, nothing came. Or nothing unusual, at least. The same, sad, slow pop song gradually receded and the elpee-player clicked into off.

Various legends exist about the hidden track. I have heard it suggested that the cosmos, which seeks equilibrium always, will balance out all records with an alternate ending. Those elpees that finished with a squall of unpleasant noise are appended, to the somnambulist’s ear, with a universe-approved quiet acoustic wisp. And those that ended the other way are secretly ended the other way but one. Or, if you rewind your seadee far enough, you will find the single primordial mess from which the record in its whole hath sprung, perhaps placed there to show the band in their completeness, to glimpse the platonic ideal, wherever it may hide or to save the listener time. And it has been said that the hidden track, if it apparites at all, is the ghost of sessions dead and unused, off-cuts cut-off in their prime.

The hidden track sublimates on artistic endeavours only. Appearances on compilations are seldom and, then, only if the distributor is independently small and desperate. They are thought never to be heard on Greatest Hits collections, but I am sure, one darkly night, I discerned something of the stripe on Ms. Springfield’s Best Of. Although, I may have simply left it on repeat.

It isn’t exactly his field, as the plaintiff said famously in the agrarian land dispute of the same name. Nor is phonometry Mr. Hatcher’s field either, but I called him to my home all the regardless. He set up a number of microphones and tape-recorders around the player, as clairaudients suggest for recording the voices of the dead in an empty room. If left running, the cassette would exhaust itself and, we hoped, electro-magnetically inscribe the odd sounds of my half-dream.

In another room, I made tea and thought of those 45s and wax scratchings of female mediums recorded way back when. Channelling their spirit guides, who only ever seemed to be hulking Indian chiefs, they seemed always to prefer singing in gurgling, supernatural baritones than demystifying the truths of the here-after, which is funny.

But, of course, the taping of copyrighted music without the implied written or explicit oral consent of the copyright-holder is a crime of criminal proportions and no one is ever to benefit from it. It is for this very reason that we cannot reveal the results of that investigation and it remains the only possible explanation for why that brand new cassette played-back blank.

There are experimenting razors that I keep by the bed, in case I plan to edit some stock footage, and we shared them out between ourselves. Mr. Hatcher took the sharps and I the flats; he the grooves and I the hole in the middle. And we would take one side each. Carefully, we scored our way through the vinyl, excising each note one by one. The hidden track could not have come from outside of the record, so must be somewhere amongst the small pile of black shavings. Perhaps, like Mr. Python’s rumoured Matching Tie & Handkerchief, there was an extra groove somewhere. We unwound the groove from side A and pulled it taut; it was mere microns thin, but went on for several feet. There was nothing above or below it and there was no secret music engrained through any of the cross-sections we sliced, despite cutting at numerous different angles.

The hidden track, as a phenomenon, as well as an incident, was revealed as an elaborate confidence trick. Young men, barely even children, were making this music, but not next-door to my room or to the rooms of the dozens of other people cruelly taken in. Somewhere, they had been rehearsing and recording their awful noise and receiving letters of rejection from A&R people, less intrigued by the demonstrations when they had a press release in their hands than I was without. Too impatient to improve and too confused to concede, they distributed their music, ingeniously I must admit, through the space left at the ends of other people’s records. The system is too complicated to explain here, but through a combination of willing mothers and the drunken security guards of vinyl pressing plants, or separate uses of the two, these same secret songs appeared, unknown to anyone, upon otherwise overt recordings. Certainly, they must be commended for their independent spirit, if not for their musical abilities, but other than that I do not feel obliged to provide them with the oxygen of publicity and choose not to print their group name.