Tony Moto and the Greek Dictaphone Scene

D. Coelacanth - Tony Eats Screws
CDR - No label.

Me and Mrs. Fisher were in Paxos doing our best to help out the Greek economy. Bleeding euros everywhere we went, trying to stay cool in the 40C afternoons. Its a small island, 2,500 people and about the same number of cats. Most of them are lazy and skinny with the heat. The cats of course.

We eat every meal al fresco and drink too much white wine and three star Metaxa. The Retsina's four euros a bucket but you don’t want to go there. The foods pretty good too; spanokopita, fresh fish, Greek salads, great bread. Then there’s the buns and and the cakes. We come back light on euros but heavy on the pounds.

One lunchtime, still early, the hot coals rising from a charcoal pit of the Taka Taka Taverna we’re sat under a shady tree ordering food and drinking wine when someone shoves a clear plastic bag in my hand.

‘You write about noise. I know’.

The face is half familiar but the reflective sunglasses aren’t helping. Five foot something, Ramones T-shirt. Strange accent. Nice tan. Must’ve been here for a while. Maybe a resident? An exile? An expat maybe? Maybe the bass player out of Dire Straits?

I look down at the CD’s. A plain cover with D. COELACANTH on one side and TONY EATS SCREWS on the other.

When I look up he’s gone.

‘Which way did he go?’ I ask but Mrs. Fisher’s been feeding a cat.

‘What are those?’ she says.

‘CD’s’ I say ‘ D. Coelacanth’.

‘Whose he?’

‘I have no idea’.

We’re in a villa on the edge of Gaios. Ionian Sea, ships masts, Parga in the distance. The villa’s on two floors, sleeping downstairs, all the rest up. Its big and virtually empty. The cheap shit music system blasts out D. COELACANTH and fills the empty space with random Dictaphone musings, words, scuzz, American 50’s radio plays, a half familiar voice, a menacing voice saying ‘Tony Eats Screws’.

I wish I could rip it to the iPod so I could wander the crumbling metalled roads and olive groves with it. A bottle of ouzo and water, mixed and chilled, me sweating and delirious, lost, getting bitten by mosquitoes, late at night, disorientated, unable to compose thoughts or stagger in a straight line. Until a local finds me and sits me by the side of an ancient cistern and pours strong Greek coffee down my neck, grounds and all.

He takes me back to the villa. D. Coelacanth is still playing. Maybe its looped? No, Mrs. Fisher has been playing it non-stop since I left. I’ve been gone four hours. It’s 2 a.m. The air temperature is perfect at this time of day. Outside cicadas grate away. Inside Tony eats screws.

Whats it like I ask her? She starts gibbering. I thought she’d been on the Metaxa but no, she’d been stood stock still since I left. Hardly moved from spot. The spot where the sounds, these sounds, this voice echoes around the empty space.

‘Its like being trapped in the mind of a madman’ she says ‘he’s talking to me all the time, he never shuts up’.

We stand side by side and listened together more closely. There’s burping, coughing, the speaking of lines from horror films, words, more and more words, words, lots of them, a never ending stream of them, short sentences, ‘desperate eyes at the funeral’, ‘strange perversions of boppers corner’, ‘with his hand in his sisters pocket’, ‘what a horrible pickle to be in’, ‘listen to the steroids’. Some words are cut off mid sentence, ‘Tony eats’, ‘destruction of’, everything covered in scuzz, drowned in mud, smeared in dirt and chopped in to three second fragments, fragments of songs and classical music but always, always that voice. Menacing, rambling, never stopping, sucking words in and spitting them out with lips close to the condenser mic of a Dictaphone. Poetry of the mad. Prose of the perverted. 

I did some digging around. I had to dig deep. Turns out there’s a Greek Dictaphone scene. Whodathunkit. Top of the tree is a guy called Tony Moto. Must have been him that gave me the CD’s. Maybe its him that eats the screws? I guess it couldn’t have been anybody else. But how did he know I was here? On Paxos. In Greece itself? As far as I know I hadn’t left any social media traces. A few close associates in the West Riding knew I was here. Maybe theres a link to that Posset/Chalmers/BBBlood gig in Bradford? A slender thread that links the Dictaphone machinations of Posset and Tony Moto? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never know. I have better thing to do right now. Salad to toss. Leaves to tear. Wine to uncork. The Greeks make some rather good wine on the quiet. It needs seeking out though. Just like Tony Moto.