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it go up the charts!”
    Days later Aurora found herself being pushed out of a battered, psychedelically painted minibus and helping to carry boxes, amplifiers, and guitar-cases through an ordinary-looking green door, past the dusty and flyblown window of a small office from which an elderly uniformed man peered at them suspiciously, and down a long corridor lined with doors. Through another door and down some rickety wooden steps into a litter-strewn open courtyard between high buildings; up more steps into what looked like the warehouse it had once been.
    The inside of the warehouse was a revelation, though. Emerging from a short corridor, Aurora found herself surrounded by glass booths, some containing stand microphones, others chairs and music stands. Fluorescent tubes hung from the high ceiling, while thick black electrical cables snaked in all directions across the wooden boarded floor, on which stood several huge speaker cabinets. In a gallery right across one end of the room, with a metal stairway leading up to it, were more glass windows, behind which brightly lit figures moved about.
    The band, with other helpers and hangers-on, rapidly set up their equipment. Aurora noticed that the drum kit was placed in a booth of its own, and saw Doug fitting a pair of headphones over his bushy hair. When she found that she was expected to do the same, she became agitated.
    â€œNo!” she cried. “If I can’t have everyone with me, I don’t play.”
    The studio engineers tried hard to get her to change her mind, but she was adamant. So the rest of the band were clustered around the synthesizer, microphones were rearranged, and, after the usual twangs and toots of tuning up, the recording session began for real.
    The first number lasted twenty minutes. Although as soon as she began playing Aurora fell into her trancelike state, she did see one of the figures in the control booth pick up a telephone several times. Shortly afterwards, people began to file silently into the studio. All but a couple of red lights in the actual studio were dimmed, leaving the control room a bright oasis.
    The second piece was also over fifteen minutes long and, when it finished, after a respectful silence of a few seconds in deference to the tape machines, spontaneous applause broke out.
    A tinny voice spoke from nowhere. “ Far out! We don’t even need any overdubs. But you’ll have to do some shorter numbers—three, four minutes, five max—if you want to put out a single.” Aurora saw that one of the men behind the long control panel in the glasshouse was speaking into a microphone with a long flexible neck. It looked like a goose, she thought.
    â€œLet’s do the vocal?” suggested Ginge, hopefully. He had written the lyric, and was rather proud of it. Another batch of onlookers surged through the door while the red RECORDING light was out.
    â€œOK, the vocal. Then The Seagull —and let’s keep it short,” said Herbie.
    Lefty sang the lead vocal; he had a good blues voice, hoarse yet tuneful. Doug, with a mike slung over his drums, joined in the chorus line. To everyone’s surprise, for she had never done this before, Aurora pulled over a nearby live microphone and began to sing, wordlessly. Or was she singing in some foreign language? It didn’t seem to matter. Her voice, while not strong, was pure and clear. She sang a strange harmony to the middle-eight bars, playing the melody line on single, gliding notes. The result was ethereal.
    Once again there was wild applause at the end, and it was obvious from comments she heard that these studios had never witnessed such scenes before. Or such music. The effort was taking its toll, but Aurora couldn’t recall ever feeling so happy.
    At the close of the next piece, though, Lefty looked concerned, for she was white and strained. “Can we call it a day?” he asked the control room.
    The recording engineers were