When I listen to this I imagine your average town centre on a Saturday, especially busy around this Christmas shopping period when the streets are packed, making the perfect breeding ground for the varying groups of buskers that tend to thrive in such environments, drawing large volumes of men and children, desperate for something else to stare at apart from the floor next to the awkward bench at the back of Top Shop.
As if in some X Factor come Running Man contest fought out on the streets, the buskers are deposited at various locations in the town centre, equidistant from the prime busking spot directly outside Marks and Spencers and told to race for it.
The Peruvian Pan-Pipe artists are leading the way from the off (they have had high altitude training in the mountains of Cusco after all) but incredibly someone actually wants to buy their CD, this is a better time than any for a first sale, so they slow down to take the transaction.
This allows the bloke who saw stomp once and decided to base a career around bashing dustbin lids and other brick-a-brac lying about his Gran`s, to sneak his way through. Not far behind him though is the bloke dressed in a cardboard box covered in tin foil, doing the robot to that "Robot Sounds," CD he found in the bargin bin at the Esso garage. He is neck and neck with the ubiquitous saxophone bloke, playing the same three songs he does every Saturday.
Coming up the rear, symbolizing their late, laid back and contemporary influence in the busking scene, are the industrious group of kids who brought a P.A. and started rapping to some dub on the streets rather than their bedrooms on a Saturday morning. Frankly, they don`t really care about the race or the money but are gaining ground solely because they are far fitter than the rest of them; unhealthy from years of spending all their earnings on Maccy D`s
Eventually they congregate simultaneously on the busking patch and engage in a busker battle in which they all try and out-perform each other for the pennies of the public. The resulting sound isn`t that bad and draws quite a crowd, who unusually for these credit crunch times, reach for their pockets. The resulting pot, even split so many ways, is greater than any individual effort, which induces the buskers to enter negotiations about working together again in the future, blissfully ignorant to the actual cause of the crowds generosity; a united epidemic of miss-understanding. The public, seeing this conglomeration of odd balls and miss fits, had assumed this must have been a charity event organized by the council and gave generously expecting the arrival of a Z list celebrity imminently.
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