Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (Pop Will Eat Itself)

If you prefer your aerophobic anthems to be up to their ears in ghoulish humor (assuming that mordant religious chant at the end of "The Wreck of The Fairchild" didn't go far enough for you), then "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" a track from Cure for Sanity, the third album by Stourbridge-based alternative band Pop Will Eat Itself (aka PWEI), might be the route to go. PWEI were pioneers of a subgenre of music known as "grebo", which incorporated punk rock with elements of hip-hop and the sampledelic electronic dance records enjoying their heyday at the time (eg: "Beat Dis" by Bomb The Bass). The movement at one point seemed set to lead the way for British alternative rock acts as we entered the 1990s, but was supplanted by that evil little thing known as Britpop. This track was so named for the Twilight Zone episode depicting William Shatner's one-man battle with the aerophobic's most iconic nemesis, the gremlin on the wing that only they can see (PWEI's fixation with the classic Rod Serling series was one of their familiar running gags - a previous release, "Def. Con. One", had sampled the theme tune, and parts of Serling's narration). Set to an extract from Beastie Boys' "Shake Your Rump", it offers a deep, darkly comic dive through the paranoia of an aerophobic having to confront his worst terrors, while being met with the hollow assurances that "you're safer in the air than on the ground." He doesn't encounter anything resembling the supernatural entity that Shatner (and John Lithgow, in the story's big screen equivalent) were forced to do combat with, but his experience up in the air is still pretty stomach-churning.

"Nightmare", on Cure for Sanity, is preceded by a short track entitled "Medicine Man Speak With Forked Tongue", containing what I assume to be a sample from a self-help cassette about overcoming aerophobia. An assuasive voice, atop a ticking metronome, offers repeated insistence that, "You can fly without fear, you will fly without fear, you are determined to fly without fear!" However, the track title (an inversion on the Native American proverb, "white man speak with forked tongue") casts doubt on the benevolence of the words in question. The voice of authority, it is intimated, is not to be trusted, the mantra less a call to self-empowerment than a despotic command, haranguing us into a dangerous situation against our will. So when we segue into the succeeding track and are greeted by another, more openly malevolent authoritative voice, assuring us that, "What you're looking at could be the end of a particularly terrifying nightmare...it isn't - it's the beginning!" (yet another direct reference to the titular Twilight Zone adventure), the effect is hair-raising, but we were kind of expecting the ambush.

A general distrust of authority, and the voices assuring us that all is well while everything spirals out of control, runs all throughout the track. Here, those voices are comically represented by soundbites from various Hollywood action blockbusters, which by their very nature suggest giddy adrenaline rushes and spectacular calamities. The suspiciously buoyant voice that instructs us to "Fasten your seat-belt" and "enjoy the ride", recalls Arnold Schwarzenegger's encounter with automated cabbie "Johnny Cab" from Total Recall (1990), whose mindless hospitality drove us deep into the uncanny valley, and resulted, inevitably, in a fiery explosion in which Johnny's plastic smile was eerily obliterated. Elsewhere, we hear the incongruously calming voice of the computer from Aliens (1986), issuing a dire warning. The lyrics, meanwhile, wittily construct the in-flight experience as a surreal nightmare, in which - if you pay attention - nothing out of the ordinary actually happens. The horrors of the protagonist's imagination ("This is no joke, we could go up in smoke, or plummet to the ground as the g-force pulls us down") are markedly worse than the reality, in which a bout of turbulence causes him to become nauseous. Nevertheless, his discomfort is emphasised with such lurid ferocity that we can even buy into his paranoid suspicions that his fellow passengers are reveling in his anxiety. It feels as if we are ascending into a kind of Hell up in the skies, which further accentuates the idea of everything being tortuously upside down; the sensation of being in profoundly unnatural circumstances that air travel generates. We also have the double meaning of the statement, "throw a seven in the air and out go your lights". "Throw a seven" can alternatively mean to die or to vomit (an interchangeable meaning I have exploited myself in the past) - either works in this particular scenario, which plays into the phrase's origins, denoting a losing throw in a game of craps, and underlining the protagonist's view that air travel is a dicey business that could alternatively result in either outcome. PWEI also throw in a sly reference to contemporary rave act A Homeboy, A Hippie and A Funki Dredd, best known for their 1990 hit "Total Confusion", with the lyrics "Far out, this dread ain't funky!"

The track reaches its grotesquely hilarious peak as we near the climax, when a particularly absurd (and abrasive) sample - "If I ever get my hands on the fucking son of a bitch who built that fucking plane I'll rip his goddamn fucking face off!" - plucks us from the claustrophobic nightmare and into the territory of a full-fledged cartoon (it is, in fact, from a cartoon, a 1975 French/Belgian adult animation called Tarzoon: Shame of The Jungle; the vocal, from the English-language dub of the film, was supplied by voice-artist Adolph Caesar, who also narrated a number of theatrical trailers). Here, the dreaded outcome of the aerial journey - the possibility of the malfunctioning plane crashing to the ground - is represented in the realm of madcap farce, with the occupant growling his ill intent toward the plane's creator after the calamity has occurred. A ludicrous reprieve from all the tension, or an indication that our in-flight ordeal has reached even more dizzying heights, the cartoon soundbite being the logical progression from those action movie extracts into something all the more eye-poppingly caricatural? One things that's never confirmed is if our protagonist lands safely; as the song closes, he's still trapped in his junk metal nightmare, so for all we know he just keeps on ascending into his asphyxiating daze, discovering that it only gets stranger the higher up he gets. Maybe that's even a good thing. Because apparently it's worse down on the ground, although PWEI leave the reasoning for that to our own irrational ideation.