- Alexander Mayor
Not from above! is the debut collection of stories from musician Alexander Mayor (Alexander’s Festival Hall). It’s a series of what ifs, how-abouts and darkly comic thought experiments. You’ll meet dictators with misplaced literary ambitions. Young spies pursued on bicycles. Passive aggressive board games. And fitful efforts at damage limitation in the surviving parts of Switzerland.
These are tales of decisive moments for indecisive people. Where dating has become more dangerous and ‘promenade theatre’ a little too immersive. Adventures are undertaken somewhat unwittingly, in stories that catalogue the increasingly esoteric ways Londoners try to keep themselves amused...
‘Not from above!’ is also an album of twelve upbeat, lush and romantic pop songs. Literate, hummable tunes that capture painters on the brink, women on the verge, and men lost somewhere on a hillside. Trumpets make a timely appearance. Double bass, likewise. Oh and there’s that moment when a breakdown on a country road might just be the start of something promising. Buy a book and gain an album. It’s new territory for all of us, but that’s half the fun.
And thanks for supporting this project! Alexander x
Alexander Mayor is a writer and musician based in London. He started his musical adventure as one third of early noughties synthpop band Baxendale, peddling unashamedly upbeat pop to European dancefloors. In 2013 he reinvented himself as the sole proprietor of a literary-minded pop group called Alexander’s Festival Hall, with the album “Not a dry eye in London”. He also writes for German culture magazine ‘Chart - Notes to consider’, pens sleeve-notes for the popular Too Slow to Disco vinyl AOR re-issue series, and turns out finely tooled paragraphs about brainy subjects for cold hard cash.
Managing expectations
The day we turned it on? God that’ll remain long in the memory. Of the survivors at least. Countless changes, great and small.
It’s ushered in something of a new era of discovery too – in fact, our aim had always been focused on solving one big question... and now? Now all the little things we took for granted seem to contain this new, previously unseen physical property: “quantum peril”. The location of towns, the weight of water, the possibility of heights, each a little bit broken. It’s heartbreaking really.
In retrospect the research was both amazingly detailed, rigorous and compelling, and yet also breathtakingly narrow. We probably need a new word for that. It might help to place the whole episode in context for future generations. Assuming there are future generations.
Problem is, you stop seeing some of these theoretical nuances when the equipment gets beyond a certain physical size. People get invested in it, the wiring, the colourful ducts, the sheer amount of lasers. I vaguely recall we gave some of them names early on, Henry, Cressida, Alonzo and so on, you know, to gin up some public enthusiasm during the build phase. It was a different time.
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