Yeah. I’d been afraid of that. Fortunately, I’d also planned for it. I leaned back, trying my best to look cool and rebellious. And given that I’d once nearly been fired for being a sexually deviant party boy, looking cool and rebellious was actually something I was pretty good at. “Do you want to hear a secret?” I asked.
There was a twenty to thirty percent chance he’d just say no. He was contrarian enough, at least. But I’d played the odds well. “Go on then.”
“Nobodygives a shit about charities.”
“My dad did.”
I had no idea if that was true or not, but it didn’t matter. I could work with it regardless. “Your dad cared about being a charming eccentric. He cared about guys like Alex saying things like, ‘Oh, what? Hilary? Fearfully decent chap; dashed fond of beetles, you know, isn’t that queer?’ It was about the look of the thing. That’s all.”
“And you want me to be the same?”
“Not remotely. I want you to”—how to put this, because thereal answer wasI don’t want you to be the same; I’m just willing to bet you are—“think about the message you could send if you remade your dad’s pet project in your own image.”
He was tempted. I could tell he was tempted. “And what do you know about my image?”
“Nothing,” I said. Which wasn’t at all true. By now, I’d done alotof research on Hilary Topwith St. John Edmonton Bloom de Lancy. I didn’t just know how he dressed, how he talked, and what bike he rode. I knew he’d lived on three different communes, only two of which seemed to have been run by actual cults. I knew he’d spent most of the ’80s and ’90s touring with a band called Rancid Sputum and that he’d been trying to get it back together as recently as 2016. And I knew what his former bandmates said about him. I didn’t want to say he was an open book, but you could figure out a lot from the Wikipedia summary. “That’s the thing,” I went on. “It doesn’t matter.You’dbe the one in control. As long as we’re able to keep our core mission of researching and protecting coleoptera, you can do what you like with the rest.”
I was beginning to feel like a cut-rate Mephistopheles who really liked dung beetles because Saint was giving me a wary but tempted look. Unfortunately, I’d failed to account for the lazy rich bastard factor. “That sounds like a lot of work.”
“It wouldn’t have to be,” I course-corrected. “You could just”—I groped for a Saintism—“lay down your vision and then we’d make it happen. Or we put ideas together for you. And you could…” I extended my hand and did up a thumbs-up / thumbs-down gesture like a Roman emperor.
“Go on then,” said Saint.
“Go on then what?” I asked. I knew what he meant. But I needed him to think he’d gotcha-ed me.
“Ideas.”
Okay, this was it. I had to get this right, if not for myself, thenfor the—now I thought about it—minority of my coworkers who actually needed jobs. “Well, for example,” I offered, incredibly casually, “I’m working on a whole new fundraising initiative. Because I think you’re right…” I let that hang for a moment. Everyone liked to be told they were right, even if the thing you were telling them they were right about was completely disconnected from anything they were actually saying. “Our focus has been too narrow. I mean, the tweed-jackets-and-smoking-rooms model of philanthropy went out with fucking Live Aid.”
“Damn straight,” declared Saint, no longer pretending not to be interested. “You know Rancid Sputum would have been right there if Geldof hadn’t been such a cock.”
“Such a cock,” I echoed affirmingly.
For a moment, Saint just brooded on the cockishness of Bob Geldof. Then he fixed me with this intense stare. “So what you’re saying is we’re going to do Live Aid. But not shit.”
This had gone so much better than I thought it would that it was at risk of circling round into going badly. “In many ways,” I said. “Yes.”
He was nodding. Oh fuck, he was really in.
And I had some expectations to manage. “It might need to be”—don’t saysmaller, don’t sayless ambitious, don’t sayworse and more insect-focused—“lessmainstream.”
“Yah. Obviously. Sputum doesn’t do mainstream.”
The problem of pitching an ecological fundraiser headlined by a band named Rancid Sputum was a problem for future Luc to deal with. Future Luc wasn’t going to like me very much. I leaned in conspiratorially. “I think in terms of positioning, and attracting the right crowd—”
Saint was nodding again.
“—this needs to feel sort of grassrootsy. You know, authentic music, indie artists, more a down-and-dirty festival vibe than a slick,corporate concert vibe.” Because we literally could not afford a slick, corporate concert vibe. “Kind of more CRAPPstonbury than Beetle Aid.”
I didn’t know if it said encouraging things or terrible thing that Saint was the first person not to find the name completely laughable. “Okay,” he said. “I’m picking up what you’re putting down. But what makes you think you’re qualified to do this?”
There was, in fact, a pretty simple answer to that. As unsexy as it was, organising a music festival was a whole lot like organising anything else. It didn’t actually matter how boring or otherwise you were; it mattered if you knew how to book venues, stay on the phone to caterers, and send passive-aggressive follow-up emails to people who needed to be passive-aggressively followed up with. “It’s fundraising,” I told him. “It’s literally my job.”
Saint leant back. Shit, I was losing him. “And I can tell you’re passionate about your work. But Luc. This is not your job. This is rock ’n’ roll. It’s not a fête or a bake sale for a church roof.”
If I lost this fucker at the last second, I was going to…to probably go home and sit on the sofa and be sad at my dog. I summoned all the rock and/or roll I’d inherited from both my parents and tried to blast them through my eyes at the new Earl of Spunkwhistle. “I can do this, Saint.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think you can.” He paused regretfully. “Sorry to crush your dreams, but I’m a man who knows his own mind, and this lady’s not for turning. It’s a hard no.”
