‘Charlie Charlie’ and the shock-and-horror factory

All this talk of ‘summoning evil spirits’ at school brought back a few distant memories of my own: most of them involving the greatest hits of Black Sabbath (volume I to V), and trying to play ‘Stairway To Heaven’ backwards on an old turntable. 

Sadly, I never got to hear whatever Satanic invocations were supposed to have been recorded that way on the song. All I got for my pains was an irredeemably scratched vinyl edition of ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, with the result that I could never play its most famous track forwards again.

But oh, the good old days! And how we laughed when our teachers warned us about the dangers to which were exposing our immortal soul, each time we head-banged to AC/Dc’s ‘Highway to Hell’, or Sabbath’s ‘N.I.B’ (with its rousing chorus of: ‘My name is Lucifer, please take my hand…’). 

The funny thing, of course, was that our teachers were very evidently more frightened of such things as ‘devils’ than we were. And I remember thinking, even back then, how odd it was that an older and supposedly ‘wiser’ generation would actually take all that ‘black magic’ nonsense seriously… when to both Ozzie Osbourne and all his teenage fans, it was obviously nothing but a gimmicky stunt to sell records.

And a fine bunch of records they were too (and still are today), I might add. But make no mistake: the school I went to did take all that nonsense seriously at the time. It was a little bit like the plot of that movie about a town which bans music and dancing on ‘morality’ grounds… what was it again? ‘Last Tango in Paceville’? No, that’s not right… 

Ah yes! Footloose. Knew there was a Paceville connection somewhere…

Anyway: as in Footloose (the film, not the popular Paceville vomitarium), an attempt was made to ban heavy metal in my schooldays, for fear of exposure to the legions of Satan. The ‘Music of the Devil’, it was called: which I took to be was a tremendous (if unwitting) tribute to two of my childhood heroes, Ozzie and Jimmy Page… both of whom would have been to say the least chuffed at the compliment. 

They even made us take letters to our parents at home – to be returned signed the following day – informing them (Lies! All lies!) that not only was such music ‘dangerous’ owing to its obvious affinities with the arcane arts of sorcery and witchcraft; but that heavy metal, as a musical genre, had no other merit whatsoever. That it was, in a word, ‘trash’.

Preposterous! Personally, I was never into trash metal myself – actually I’m not sure it even existed at the time – but still: if you’re going to demonise (ahem) an entire genre of heavy metal, at least get the goddamn sub-genre right. In any case, like that songbird in that track I could never listen to again, it made me wonder.

If our teachers knew so little about this, yet claimed to know so much… what about all the other subjects they taught us? How much did they really know about them?

Come to think of it, I’m still wondering about that today. But the good news is that they never actually succeeded in banning heavy metal in the end. In a sense, they were outpaced by technology: the invention of the ‘Walkman’ enabled such forbidden genres to go underground… or more specifically, to go to bed, and be listened to with the lights off.

As for the supposed ‘effects’ of the Satanic influence of such music on vulnerable little souls such as myself… well, with the exception of a rash I got once, which seemed to spell out the numerals ‘666’… oh, and the fact that my head sometimes spins 360 degrees, and I automatically projectile-vomit green puke every time I meet a priest… no, I can’t say I ever noticed any myself.

This brings me to the current brouhaha concerning today’s schoolchildren, who are – unsurprisingly – doing pretty much what we all did when we were younger, and toying with the same old black magic nonsense that seems to scare adults so much. 

I suppose it’s sort of commendable that such a solid, well-founded tradition of schoolyard pseudo-Satanism has been kept alive over the generations. It would be sad indeed, if all that head-banging had no other lasting effect than to spawn an entire generation with neck problems.

But at the same time, I have to say I’m a little disappointed with today’s youth. I mean… Pencils? Paper? ‘Charlie Charlie’? You call that devil-worship? Seriously?

In our days, at least we accorded our devils a certain presence and gravitas… even if we didn’t actually believe in their existence for a second. These, were after all, the minions of the Prince of Darkness himself. And long before Iron Maiden and Sepultura started taking an interest, they were the principle protagonists of such epics as Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ – from which nearly all doom metal bands pilfered their lyrics sooner or later (‘no merit whatsoever’, indeed…) 

Now: can you imagine Satan doing the roll-call in Pandemonium, following the calamitous precipitation from Paradise?

Be’elzebub? Present.

Belial? Present.

Moloch? Present.

Mammon? Present.

Mephistopheles? Present.

Charlie Charlie? (Silence) Now where’s that dratted Mexican imp got off to this time…

No, in the name of all things foul and perfidious, NO! If you’re going to dabble with black magic, at least do it with a bit of panache. ‘Charlie Charlie’ is the stuff of chocolate factories, for crying out loud. It’s the name of comic characters with dogs called ‘Snoopy’. 

And besides, with so many imaginary devils to choose from… why start at the bottom? It’s a little like hiring a lawyer (in, oh, so many ways): if you can afford it and you want to get results, you go for a veteran with a proven track record in the field. Not some young whippersnapper no one’s ever even heard of.

Same (unsurprisingly) with devils. If you want results, go with the first generation of fallen angels. Summon Be’elzebub, the Lord of the Flies. Or Moloch, who is ‘all for open war’. (Note: don’t bother with Mammon, he’s already been summoned and granted a Maltese passport through the IIP scheme). Heck, how about Lucifer himself? Right to the top of the food chain?

And yet, with all these tried-and-tested demons to choose from, all just dying to get another shot in the limelight…  who do schoolkids try to invoke these days? ‘Charlie Charlie’: the Mexican demon who only exists because he was invented as an internet meme last month to promote a horror film. 

Today’s kids… they just don’t get it, do they?

But then… what about today’s adults? Some 30 years ago, I was contemptuous of an entire school administration for its primitive, superstitious belief in devils and their presumed ability to infiltrate the world through the power of music. 

But at least, there was the music to object to. 

Yes, I can well understand how generations brought up on Bach and Haydn – and, in some of the younger cases, maybe Elvis and the early Beatles – would be utterly horrified by the slow introduction to the track ‘Black Sabbath’, on the eponymous album by the eponymous band. Rolling thunder in the distance. A lone church bell, striking forlornly in the rain. Then, that sudden, bone-crunching, distorted G-chord, searing through the darkness like a sweeping cut from the scythe of Death himself… 

Make no mistake, it’s enough to make a grown man soil his trousers; and that’s before you even get to hear Ozzie Osbourne’s gut-wrenching cries of: ‘Oh, no, no, please God help me…’

Naturally, the fact that so many adults succumbed to this (intentional) effect of horror in rock music does not excuse them for their shocking ignorance in actually believing that the connection with Satanism was real. It merely confirms what a great goddamn bunch of records that ‘trash’ really was. But you can at least appreciate what it was that appalled them so much about our fascination with the dark side of the rockosphere. 

But today? The reaction of schools to the whole ‘Charlie Charlie’ thing was beyond hysterical, in all senses of the word. One school even summoned an exorcist to expel the little imp from the premises, in the event that students actually did summon him through the use of a piece of paper and two pencils. 

You can hardly blame the children for getting scared, can you? It’s like the Ministry of Magic summoning the Dementors to Hogwarts in ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’… in the end, the Dementors turn out to be far more terrifying than anything Voldemort might have done had he actually been around. 

And this is the problem with the ongoing scaremongering concerning ‘devil worship’. All the supposedly ‘wiser’ adults who are meant to be educating children about the bad, wicked world (in which there so much to fear that is REAL)… they’re beside themselves with horror at the thought that an imaginary devil, concocted just the other week as a viral marketing stunt, might be running amok in the school corridors as we speak. 

So it’s not the game called ‘Charlie Charlie’ itself that is currently terrorising those children out of their wits. It’s the idea that the establishment they are brought up to believe and respect is actually endorsing this nonsense and giving it an aura of legitimacy. They are frightened because their school has become a factory of fear.

So how about this as an idea to mitigate the ‘Charlie Charlie’ craze? Give the exorcist a miss next time round, and instead simply ask your physics teacher to give the class an explanation of why two pencils balanced on one another might impart the illusion of metaphysical kinesis. 

I imagine it would go something like this: the one placed on top is precariously balanced and subject to both the pull of gravity and the exertion of any other force upon it… such as, say, a gust of wind, or the collective breath of half a dozen schoolchildren crowded around it at the same time. 

As there are only four places the pencil may ‘point towards’ when it inevitably moves… for move it will… and the two ‘No’s’ and ‘Yesses’ cancel each other out… that leaves a 50% percent chance of getting either a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ to any question you ask, and zero per cent chance that anything else will happen.

The rest is filled in with your imagination. Devils and demons certainly do not come into it at all, as they didn’t come in (except as conscious references) to the music they tried to ban at my old school. And again, this should hardly surprise us. They are, after all, only a figment of the imagination to be filed alongside ‘monsters under the bed’. 

Only a child would take either seriously.