CRYPTIC: The Backline CP70's message from beyond the keys...
As you may recall, a few weeks ago I bought myself a rather rough-around-the-edges Yamaha CP70 piano. Even though it had been lying gathering dust down at a studio in Yorkshire for a while (and had to endure a sit-com worthy attempt at moving to Renfrew, courtesy of McDonald and Quigley Transport), it actually sounded pretty good when I started playing it (in my usual ham-fisted manner). However, it was obvious that it would benefit from some tuning to get it sounding top-notch across the keyboard, as well as needing some attention for a dropped C# key in the middle. So, after a quick web perusal, I enlisted the services of my local, friendly piano tuner Jamie McLaren to give it what I'd thought would be a quick tinker.
Of course though, in the world of Backline, things never actually run that smoothly and this was no different. So, when Jamie arrived with his tuning fork, handle and bag of goodies in hand, what we'd both thought would be a 1 hour job ended up taking the best part of 3 hours, with my poor CP70's list of woes and ailments growing with each passing minute. The diagnosis was grim: the piano had spent a lot of its time sitting somewhere damp and hadn't been given the attentions of a tuner for some considerable time, many of its felt parts (of which, it turns out, pianos have many) had been providing ample sustenance for moths over the years resulting in many of them crumbling away to nothing, there was corrosion on some of the strings, its front panel fitting had been well-and-truly bodged, as well as just the general wear-and-tear on the hammer coverings and dampers that you'd expect from a vintage instrument. I could almost hear a shriek of terror echo from my bank account as each further problem became apparent.
Fortunately though, Jamie believed that once we'd got it tuned up a bit better and bodged the balance felt issue for the dropped key, it would be able to survive for a while without needing to address the bulk of those problems. Trusting the expert's judgement (he's tuned Sigur Ros' CP70 before when they've toured), I left him to get on with it and marvelled at his ability to tune perfectly by ear, pleased that my beloved piano was in good hands. He was also a very amiable chap, even being polite enough to say that the mug of coffee I'd made him was good, rather than spitting it all over the keyboard and pillioring me for my ineptitude with the Gold Blend. A few hours later, once everything was all fixed up enough to let him get on to his next job (by which time he was running quite late), he left me to reassemble the last couple of bits of the piano and have a play around with it. A quick stab at A Bad Dream indicated that he was as good as his word, with both the sticky key now working sufficiently and the tuning sounding pretty much spot-on across the board - a job well done.
Now, if I were the sensible type, I'd just have left it at that and sat happily playing the thing until it next needed tuned, a string broke or one of the felts gave up the ghost. But, this is me we're talking about... even as a boy, I always had an overpowering desire to take things apart and see what made them tick. Model trains, transistor radios, computers... over the years, they've all succumbed to my inquisitive desires. Being the type of guy that I am, this inexplicable need to ignore the old adage of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in favour of "if it ain't broke, give it your best shot" is probably not entirely surprising - indeed, I suspect many of the womenfolk reading this may also be nodding their head, recognising that their own husband or boyfriend suffers from the same affliction. In my case though, the difference is that my lack of manual dexterity and skill tends to mean that although I am an expert at taking things apart, putting them back together (and then ensuring that they still work) is a bit trickier. "No matter though," I said to myself... after all, I'd watched as Jamie managed to get down to the keys with relative ease, so I was feeling confident. In much the same way as I'd experienced prior to the journey to actually pick up the piano and move it, once again the voice of Jeremy Clarkson popped into my head: "How hard can it be?"...
By this point, you're probably expecting me to tell you that the piano is still lying in pieces on the floor, while I await Jamie's return to try to ressurect it from the Frankenstein job I performed on it. But, I'm pleased to report that for once, you would be wrong. I hesitate to say it, but the disassembly and reassembly almost went like clockwork, with barely a hitch along the way. Having ordered a set of new balance felts from my not-so-local piano spares company and with a copy of the Yamaha CP70/80 Service Manual to hand (the equivalent of those Haynes strip-down-and-rebuild car manuals that fascinated my 10-year old self), I dusted off the screwdriver set and set to work. At this point, it is probably worth acknowledging that the relative smoothness of the operation is more down the sheer brilliance of the piano's design rather than any sudden development of skill from myself. Yamaha's Japanese designers and engineers really did produce a marvel when they made these beasts, managing to pack what effectively amounts to a baby grand piano (complete with all the strings, hammers and proper action) into such a compact casing - and that's even before you consider that it can then split into two separate parts to allow it to be easily "transportable" (I am of course using the word "easily" in the loosest possible sense). An amazing piece of engineering... however, I was not prepared for what I uncovered when I'd actually taken advantage of this relative simplicity and had removed all the keys.
The first thing that left me taken aback was the mind-blowing amount of dust, fluff and grime that had gathered beneath the keys. I'd expected it to be a bit dusty - after all, its over twenty years old and probably hasn't been stripped down particularly often... plus, if you've ever looked at the top of the wardrobe in your bedroom, you'll no doubt have discovered that dust manages to gather remarkably quickly. However, considering the area under the keys is mostly enclosed unless you start to strip the whole thing down, the sheer volume of dirt that had accumulated was truly staggering. There's less debris left behind when a 20-storey tower block is demolished than had gathered under the keys... it was so bad that even my vacuum cleaner recoiled slightly when presented with it. Some significant time later, as the worst of the dirt had been sucked away, a small black scrap of paper emerged from underneath the layer of filth, along with a used match (perhaps the latter was left after a failed attempt to set fire to the instrument at the end of a gig, Hendrix-style). "Bit odd," I thought to myself... however, it got even stranger when I picked up the scrap and turned it over. It contained 3 words, scrawled in quite child-like handwriting: "Leed are sad". Yep, your guess is as good as mine...
It set my mind wondering... what did it mean? Who wrote it? How long had it been there? Why put it there? Is it a message from beyond the grave? It was clearly ot just a random event, given that all the keys would have had to be stripped from the instrument to get it there. After a bit of head-scratching as to its meaning, I was hoping that a Google search would throw up an answer - after all, the Internet is the ultimate repository of randomness - but even that drew a blank. It really is a conundrum that even Carol Vorderman would struggle to unravel. Perhaps it is a rather extravagant form of "message in a bottle", where a child somehow wanted to leave a message from the past and, not having a bottle or an ocean to hand, decided to use their parent's piano. Or perhaps not. I did buy the piano from near Leeds, so maybe it was nothing more than a misspelled childish diss to the city or its football team... but given the amount of fluff and dust it lay in, the message looks like it had been there for some period of time, and the guy I bought it from had only owned it for a year or two (it had been in Wales before that). It is the definition of the word "odd".
But then, it came to me... maybe it is part of a larger message. Maybe it comes from the original engineers of the CP70 and they put a separate part of the message into each one they built... only once all owners open up and strip down their pianos to uncover their section of the message, will we be able to piece it together and reveal the truth. Given that Keane have been slowly accumulating all of the world's supply of surviving CP70's over the past few years, I think Tim seems like the ideal candidate to start the check for other messages in his CP70s... after all, each one could be holding its own secret that is just waiting to be uncovered. What if it transpires that the message is of global importance? A warning of an impending apocalypse, or perhaps even greater - the answer to life, the universe and everything? What if 42 was just a ruse, and those humble geniuses at Yamaha actually had the spiritual insight that we lack and they were using the humble CP70 as the vehicle to spread the message? Undoubtedly, many of these vintage instruments will have perished over the years, so parts of the puzzle may already have been lost. For this reason, Mr. Rice-Oxley, it is vital that you personally strip down each of your CP70s immediately to find any hidden messages that lie within them and report your findings back to me... don't worry about the fact that you'll be needing one for the first live show next week - the potential future of the human race could be at stake (and besides, if I can manage to reassemble one successfully you'll have no worries). If we work together, we can crack this thing - it'll be like the real-life X-Files, as we fight to uncover the truth (though admittedly, neither of us will really be able to pull off a convincing impression of the foxy Gillian Anderson).
Or that might all be rubbish. Makes you think though, doesn't it...
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| CAN YOU TELL WHAT IT IS YET?: It's a CP70, Jim, but not as we know it... The stripped and cleaned CP70 awaits its new balance felts. |