No, the song he was hearing came from one of a couple of vinyl LPs his uncle Larry used to play to death that had kind of stuck in his head over the years since. Some sort of headbanger music from the early 80s or late 70s or something for some reason his Uncle seemed particularly attached to. But Iain’s dad had always said his brother, ‘Crazy’ Larry had some weird ideas about what constituted music. That was true. At Larry’s place, a single entitled ‘Fuck of 1984’ had earned an honored place behind glass in Larry’s home temple to probably best-forgotten rock and roll.
Iain stopped in the middle of the street and wondered what the name of the band was, remembering it sounded like some sort of kid’s toy. A few of the aliens bumped into him and grumbled but most walked around him once he completely stopped moving.
Was it the Feebles? Greebles? Gerbils? And then it hit him.
He recognizes the band and the whole sound fit together. The Reebles! The band which had vanished.
“Could have been as big as Mötley Crüe,” Larry had once told him, standing there in the middle of his sound room, eyes closed as he absorbed the crunchy 80s crap playing on his turntable dressed the fashion of early 90s grunge after claiming it was ‘Neil Young’ couture. “But like, 1983 they just... poof! vanished off the face of the Earth. Never heard anything since. It’s like they were erased.”
Of course, that had been back in the olden days before social media. In Iain’s lifetime, people knew everything about every single band they ever listened to. Iain remembered half the music Larry listened to he’d never heard of and whose musicians didn’t even come up on Wikipedia or even deep internet searches, not like modern bands who all had their own sites or had some kind of a Facebook or Bandcamp page.
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More excited now he gazed towards where the music was coming from and it was this big block that looked like a kind of nightclub, its entrance was guarded by really big, heavyset aliens who were scanning anyone who came in with some kind of light projector. Alien bouncers, he snorted. Laugh it up, he told himself, but they looked like they could mash him into a flapjack. Maybe some big pals might be in order to go with him.
Ian wandered back to the twins who were, surprisingly, not that far away and were arguing over some fruit which looked a bit like papaya and except if the papaya had tentacles which sort of wrapped around their fingers as they were. After a brief flashback of horror to all the Alien movies he’s ever watched, Iain slapped Arc on the shoulder to get his attention.
“Okay you wouldn’t believe this guys but I think I might have found some of my own kind of people, human beings from Earth,” he said.
“Really? Where?” both of the twins looked around and not spotting anything return to their alien fruit argument.
“They were a rock band from the 1980s and disappeared,” Iain told them. When another power chord drifted by he added, “I mean, listen! Those are guitars. Only Earth had electric guitar’s right?”
“Oh come on,” Arc argued. “There hardly any base humans anywhere. Everybody knows they all pretty much died out. You’re probably imagining it, primitive. All I hear is the sound of a Baleeni being strangled to death. Now, what do you think of this.”
He thrust the alien pod at Iain who stepped back five full steps.
“No way I’m getting near that,” he ordered.
His ‘Zos were strangely silent on the matter.
“And then cooked,” Arl kept to his original argument completely ignoring Iain. “Just like it is supposed to be.”
“No, no,” Arc disagreed. “Raw is best.”
“You always say raw is best!”
Iain decided it was a good time to just walk away. He took in a breath and marched towards the alien disco or whatever it was. He could do this. On his own. There were stringier and smaller aliens than him being allowed in. He would get in, and find out one way or another if it was the Reebles or not, live or hologram or just some alien jukebox or implausibly some kind of alien cover band