10. The Flies Words and Music by Kevin Adams

The Flies was written for the 1996 Living Archive musical documentary Bigger Brighter Better, about the expansion of Bletchley after the war when it became an overspill town for London.

There was certainly great enthusiasm for their new homes amongst those newly arrived:

‘Oh! It’s lovely after what I’ve been used to,’ says Mrs J O’Shea of St Paul’s Road, who used to live with her husband and three small children in two upstairs rooms at Harrow. ‘We had to carry up our water in buckets and cook on a gas-ring,’ she adds. The Bletchley Gazette 27.7.53

‘When I walked through my own front door, it was just like I’d been given a million pounds!’ Doreen Brace[1]
 
However, not all was well with the problems created by such massive building development that the new residents faced:
  • from the water, where old mains pipes had accumulated abundant sediment: ‘We had to filter the water: I don’t know how they got away with it. It was brown – it was terrible.’ Iris Witcombe
  • from the sewage:  ‘Cllr C Head said that when he went to bed at night with the windows open for fresh air, what he got was the smell of the sewage works: ‘This end of the town is getting properly stunk out!’ The Bletchley Gazette 9.7.55
  •  overwhelmingly from the flies accumulating around the new refuse-tips: ‘Cllr Mrs Ramsbottom said that in one or two cases, babies had been put out in their prams and their faces had been smothered with flies… A mother related that on Sunday she had to stand over her children waving a newspaper while they ate their dinner so that the flies could not settle on the food… As well as proprietary fly-papers, cards and sprays, saucers of treacle and bundles of mint have been put forward as some of the counter measures: ‘We have killed literally thousands of flies in the past week or two,’ said one woman in Pinewood Drive. ‘It has been really horrible!’ The Bletchley Gazette 17.7.54
 
The stage directions for the song suggest an ingenious personification of flies with a notorious 1950s fashion: 

‘In the introductory music the Flies enter. They’re a teenage gang of Teddy Boys who intimidate the audience before the first verse starts. As the song progresses they soon have their giggling female Flies in attendance… One of them is pushing a pram full of maggot babies, and there are also maggot child Flies. The song may be sung by a member of the band, the lead Fly, who joins in the action (with radio mike).’

What ensues is a wonderful skit with the music of the song full of the bravado of rock ‘n’ roll - and its lyric is infused with Kevin Adams’ unique sense of wicked comedy2:

Household waste is very tasty,
Gives us such a buzz!
Throw your food away - and then I
Pick it up on my antennae.
Well-fed, well-bred guys: We are the Flies!
 
Rib Davis and Roger Kitchen devised the original musical documentary play. Rib says of the performance: ‘Although the final presentation of the scene was obviously down to me as I directed it, the initial idea and shape of it - the genius, if you like - was entirely down to Roger.’

[1] All quotations are archived in Living Archive MK www.livingarchive.org.uk .
[2] A cassette tape was made of all the songs in Bigger Brighter Better  from which a download of The Flies is provided on this webpage.
Picture
'Bigger Brighter Better', Stantonbury Theatre, 1996

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