LK: Sir Arthur, good evening. Good evening, sorry I was a bit, bit odd yesterday.
LK: Oh, that’s alright. We come now to your tenth gift, and you’ve chosen ten pipers’ piping. Why is that?
SA: Ah, well, now, some years ago, I became very friendly with a chap called Peter Piper, who at that time was Britain’s leading pipe mogul, making low tensile industrial piping, riveting stuff. Well, not all of it was riveting actually, there was some welding as well, I would gather.
Anyway, he's doing pretty well on the business side, as he had one absolute passion in life. He was a cricket lover. I thought it was jolly peculiar and so did his wife.
LK: Why?
SA: Are you a cricket lover?
LK: Well, yes I am rather, as a matter of fact.
SA: Good grief, there’s a lot of you about it, aren’t there? Well, this will fascinate you then. Peter had formed a small cricket team sponsored by Piper’s Piping.
LK: A team of small cricketers?
SA: No no, a small team of crickets.
LK: Oh, I see.
SA: Ten of them. You know the wonderful sound of the cicada in the lime grove rubbing their legs together, producing this absolutely haunting, melodic, racket. You are doubtless familiar with the haunting cricket racket?
LK: Oh, yes. Yes. Indeed.
LK: Yes. You would be. Well, Peter absolutely loved this noise. He used to spend hours listening to these ten crickets of his. He felt they deserved a wider audience, and he wanted to take them on a national tour. I thought he was mad personally, but, you know, out of friendship, I went into partnership with him, and also out of sympathy for his poor wife. I think he offered me a fairly decent retainer of 50 grand or so, I think … well I can’t rememberi, I’m absolutely hopeless with figures.
LK: And did you take the crickets on tour?
SA: Oh, yes indeed. What did they do? Well, crickets, as you know, of course, are very tricky to train, almost untrainable. They’re individual creatures with precious little discipline. So in practice, all they did really was a lot of, leg rubbing as and when they felt inclined. Temperamental little sobs. An evening of cricket noises, we called it.
LK: And was the show a hit?
SA: Well, it was a tremendously good idea in principle. But as we discovered on the opening night, there was one crucial flaw. We’d turn up at the venue, set up the stage, install the crickets, and the crickets would all be there on their podia rubbing their legs together like nobody’s business. But as soon as anyone got within ten yards, they would fall into a deathly silence. Oh, dear. We were stymied.
What did you do? Well, while Peter tried to get them going again, you know, I I went onto the stage and tried to explain it away by, saying that they were they were miming. Don’t think anybody believed me for a second. And Peter came out frantically in tears, poor man, and begged the audience to rub their legs together to try and encourage his artiste, you know. What sort of noise did that make?
Basically the sound of twill on twill, really. Nylon on tweed. Nothing terribly inspiring, quite honestly. So to liven things up, I suggested that the men in the audience might like to rub their legs against the women in the audience to see if they produced a better sort of sound. And, indeed, a number of rather interesting noises ensued. I think the audience got value for money. It became something of a … of a bacchanal, so we … kept the format and became something of a succes d’esimte.
LK: Do you still see Peter Piper?
SA: No. We rather lost touch after the Wembley concert. His wife and I still have, lunch occasionally.
LK: You say the Wembley concert?
SA: Yes. I suggested to Peter that the cricketers are more likely to perform at their best in an outdoor setting. I took charge of the publicity promotion, lighting, sound system, merchandising, and so on, and Peter basically provided the financial backing as well as liaising with the crickets.
LK: Ten crickets in Wembley Stadium.
SA: Yes. A huge venue. Of course, staging a concert like this is very, very expensive. Preproduction costs were close on a quarter of a million pounds. And I took the view that this money would be better spent on, … myself.
LK: So the concert never took place?
LK: Oh, yes. It did. But due to a silly oversight, I’d booked the stadium on the same night as Led Zeppeelin. And as I explained to Peter on the phone from Bogota where I was staying with, … a girlfriend, at the time, ten crickets could never hope to drown out Led Zeppeelin, however adept their leg rubbing skills. But Peter, silly fool, insisted on going ahead and perhaps I was wrong in a way because if you listen to Led Zeppelin Two on Compat Disc, you can just about make out the sound of Jimmy Page treading on them during one of his riffs … UHH. Sounds somewhat like UHH, I can’t do it exactly, but it’s all but softer.
LK: This was their last performance?
SA: Alas, yes. The … the Final Gig, as I believe it’s called. The Final Gig of Peter Piper’s Piping Ten.
LK: What’s Peter Piper doing today?
SA: He’s retired from the biz show business, disillusioned by the Wembley tragedy and the gigantic financial losses. And, of course … the, the divorce from Clare.
SA: He’s thrown himself back into his piping, which is is really where he belongs.
LK: Thank you, sir Arthur.
[Trailing off] SA: I wasn’t ever, ever really very close to Peter Piper, you know, Frankly, he was a bit of a shit.