Revolting Cocks: London Astoria, January 24th, 1991

Reporters are used to facing danger: Sandy Gall in Afghanistan, John Pilger in Cambodia, Kate Adie in…just about anywhere there’s trouble. Though even she might have thought twice about braving the Astoria theatre in London, on the night of the Revolting Cocks concert.

The current LP, ‘Beers, Steers and Queers’, starts off with a taped phone-call from someone operating under the misapprehension that the Revolting Cocks were a male strip show but I doubt anyone turned up at the Astoria thinking the same thing. The propaganda had been flying: flamethrowers, mechanical broncos, live cattle and a road crew armed with urine-filled water pistols were rumoured to be ranged against us.

It didn’t quite live up to this hype: there were no flamethrowers, no animals (artificial or real), and the road crew were too busy repelling wave after wave of potential slam-dancers to reach for any small arms they may have been carrying. A disappointment? Not really, as it still crammed more deviance and sleaze into ninety minutes than a Ken Russell movie: a topless go-go dancer simulating oral sex on a man wearing inflatable breasts (one punctured), a mask of the Queen and a policeman’s helmet is not the sort of behaviour likely to get them on the next Royal Variety Show.

Mention must be made of the support who were better than average: Godflesh started by apologising profusely for the poor sound before delivering some gut-knotting power noise, while Bomb Everything were solid thrash metal and showed remarkable good humour in the face of the enemy: “if you see anyone chucking a can, smash his face in and I’ll give you a free T-shirt”.

To Revco, though any description will be inadequate. This was apocalypse music with a bad attitude, noise for a corrupt generation, the soundtrack to a remake of ‘Caligula’ set in the seventh level of hell. Even at the sort of volume that would be illegal coming from a jack-hammer, the sound quality was excellent. Long, unrelenting versions of songs from ‘Beers, Steers & Queers’ joined old favourites like the utterly tasteless ‘Union Carbide’ and ‘Attack Ships on Fire’ (bonus point if you can tell me the movie that line comes from!) to give the brain a good kicking until your reality was squeezed to a singularity. The high spot for me was a cover version of Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” which took an already dodgy song and mutated it into something verging on the perverse.

Visually, there was probably too much going on: with three lead singers working in rotation, the idle hands were often found occupying themselves with the charmingly named Revolting Pussies, two ‘dancers’ whose simulated affections were also lavished on each other, the audience and road crew with wild abandon. All of which was terribly distracting, as said dancers kept sinking to the floor of the stage, just out of my line of sight – next time, I’ll head upstairs! Other props included a blood-stained blow-up doll, a fluorescent ski-mask and large numbers of beer bottles used (at about groin level) to spray froth over the go-go dancers. Like I said, any description is inadequate.

If you can imagine being inside a lift as it plummets to the ground, you might get a flavour of the atmosphere that was generated. Your parents wouldn’t like them, Teddy Taylor M.P. doesn’t like them and they’ll never be on the British Rock and Pop Awards – who can argue that when music is safe, ozone-friendly and socially conscious Revco are indeed, in their own words, “making the world a better place for you and your hog-bitch girlfriend”.

[2020 update: The entire gig is on YouTube, and is embedded below for your viewing pleasure…]

Flameon: “You’re absoluteley”

Five things to know about this band and their cassette:

1. They’re not from Manchester.
2. They don’t think this is 1967.
3. The guitarist thinks he’s with the Buzzcocks.
4. No-one in the band is wearing a flowery shirt in the cover picture.
5. The lyrics do not give the impression the author was totally stoned when he wrote them.

I don’t have a high opinion of the indie music scene at the moment. Most bands seem to be vanishing up their own backsides in a drug-crazed frenzy of retro-delia, so the appearance of an almost totally unsolicited tape in the post was greeted with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for bank statements. A four-piece band, from Stoke as far as I can tell. “Single and LP out on Release Emotions Records sometime this year”. Hell, I’d better listen to it at least once…

Hang on, this isn’t bad. Eight tracks, most of which leave you wishing they’d go on a bit longer, three songs I definitely liked a lot (“Words can’t say”, “l.p.h.” and “3rd world dream”) and twenty seconds of guitar at the start of “What you said” that involuntarily made me stop what I was doing and grab for the cassette box. The overall sound reminds me of the Buzzcocks, though the vocals bear no resemblance at all – ok, this means it is backward-looking, perhaps, but at least it’s to an era I can remember without having to undergo hypnotic regression!

The tape may sound slightly rough & ready, ‘White Lady’ did seem to be ladling on the drugs references a bit and while all the songs have a similar style, I liked it so I’m not complaining. Heavens, I’ll probably end up buying the LP – unless (hint, hint) I get another unsolicited package…

[No idea where you can get the tape! For further information, contact: Flameon, The Willows, Vicarage Lane, Barlaston, Stoke on Trent, ST12 9AG]

Paul Evans isn’t a name familiar to most people. He had two hits. The first one, recently massacred by Bombalurina, was “Seven Little Girls…”. There followed a seventeen-year gap. Then came perhaps his magnum opus “Hello, This is Joannie”, about a bloke who has an argument with his girlfriend. She is then killed in a car-crash and he phones her apartment to hear her voice on the answering machine (making it a sort of 0898 number for necrophiles). This second hit spawned an LP, full of atrocious songs: this one is probably the worst, and may well have the most sickly lyrics ever committed to vinyl.

She walked into the hospital, when the baby was almost due.
They asked her name and she replied, "I'll leave that up to you".
My lover called me "Darling", but he didn't call me "Bride"
And I'll never be called "Mama", by the little one inside,

And she said, "I'm giving up my baby".
She didn't have to tell them more, they'd heard it all before.
"I'm giving up my baby".
The pain that soon would start, would never match the pain in her heart
(Woh-oh-woh-oh-woh-oh-woh).

That very evening, she gave birth and as soon as the baby cried
They held it up for her to see, but she turned her head aside.
"I don't want to see the baby, it's not mine to enjoy.
Please never tell me if I had, a little girl or boy".

And she said "I'm giving up my baby".
They couldn't change her mind - she wanted the papers signed
"I'm giving up my baby".
No-one bought drinks in bars, and no-one handed out the cigars.

Then suddenly, the one she loved and thought she'd lost rushed in.
He said "I love you darling, oh what a fool I've bin [sic].
Forgive me, honey, marry me" - she looked up and she smiled.
"Can't wait till I go home with you, with you and with our child".

And they said "We're not giving up our baby".
And out of tragedy, was born a fa-mil-eeee.
"We're not giving up our baby".
I know this story's true, and Mom and Dad...         
...Thank you...

Given the short period of time most normal people spend in the shower, there have been a disproportionate number of Trash movies using it to make an impression. The list below is twenty of my favourite shower scenes, though I’ve widened the description slightly to include their close cousin the bath scene as well. All those listed have something to recommend them and are mostly more than gratuitous-wet-bimbos, even if the number of socially conscious shower scenes is still very small.

“Have sex and die”. Not just a general term for the slasher genre, it’s also a pretty good summary of what you can do in a shower, according to Hollywood. The list below falls into three types: nudity (the largest in number) and violence, both of which have distinct lines of descent, plus a few which don’t really fit into either category, and may even be necessary to the plot!

The reason for the nudity is quite simple: it allows a lot of naked flesh without total gratuitousness: most people do take their clothes off when they take a shower, although I suspect women don’t really spend quite as much time soaping their breasts as is shown in films. Violence in the bathroom can be traced directly to ‘Psycho’, since when almost every lunatic-on-the-loose film worth it’s salt (and a good few others) has had at least one pseudo-artistic sequence of blood spiralling down a plughole.

There are also movie that should have had shower scenes, like ‘Videodrome’ (Debbie Harry’s was edited out, to David Croneberg’s eternal shame), and those that ought to have had shower scenes – you feel sure there was one in there somewhere but it’s just your imagination playing tricks: ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ and ‘Lust For a Vampire’, which had swimming scenes (a possible future article) or ‘Edge of Sanity’, which had virtually everything else. Here’s a top 10, in alphabetical order:

An American Werewolf in London

This film is enough to make anyone wonder about John Landis. He takes Jenny Agutter, an actress best known for her performance as a young teenage girl, dresses her up in a nurse’s uniform and then throws her into the shower with David Naughton. It seems this movie had a profound effect on Sam Raimi, as I suspect it was no coincidence Jenny played a nurse in ‘Darkman’. The experience would also seem to have been rather stimulating for David, judging from his brain-dead performances since then.

Carrie

Brian de Palma’s adaption starts with a schoolgirl shower scene. Any hopes of some pleasing titillation vanish when the blood starts dripping, as the heroine has her first period. Her classmates are naturally helpful and sympathetic – they throw sanitary towels at her. One assumes this is supposed to say something. What exactly, I’m not sure but it is quite an impressive way to start a movie.

Countess Dracula

This one qualifies both under sex and violence. No-one could deny Ingrid Pitt provides the former, except she doesn’t take baths in water or sissy stuff like asses milk: she prefers the blood of virgins as a moisturiser to anything Oil of Ulay produce (dread to think what her cleaning bill for towels must be like). While it works, and she does snare herself a husband, as with all addictive substances she has to keep upping the dose or her youthful qualities evaporate, leaving her looking as you might expect someone to look who has just spent several weeks in the bath: very wrinkled.

Creepozoids

Gratuitous-wet-bimbo par excellence, with Linnea Quigley scoring highly in all three categories as the ultimate non-actress gets extremely moist in a shower scene with no relevance to the plot. It says a great deal about the movie that this is the best bit but then LQ has a lot of shower experience, most recently in her Horror Workout, where she changed the usual order of things, having the shower before the exercise.

Flesh & Blood

Although it takes place in a bath, it almost counts as a shower scene given the enormous quantity of spray flying. Jennifer Jason Leigh is Rutger Hauer’s bath toy as they do their bit for water conservation, though the amount that slops over the side makes it an easy winner of the Soggy Bath-Mat award.

Heathers

Unique among those here in that showeree Winona Ryder, being a ‘serious actress’, demurely keeps her clothes on although they get nice and clingy. The purpose of the self-inflicted cold shower is to try and bring herself back to a reality where she has murdered her best friend/worst enemy. I might add it wasn’t Winona’s first aquatic appearance, since her earlier ‘Square Dance’ had a fairly long scene with her in the bath. However, as she was supposed to be a 13-year old, it’s of limited interest to the average fan.

House on the Edge of the Park

David Hess walks into the bathroom only to find a beautiful, short-haired lady having a shower. She invites him to join her – this he does (after much drooling) and finds his back on the receiving end of a sponge. Just as we think we’re in for a treat, she leaves poor old David covered in soap, and none too pleased. Film analysts may conclude that it is this that causes David to kill, maim and torture most of the other characters in the film.

I Spit on Your Grave

Idiotic behaviour is the mainstay of the horror-movie: without people merrily wandering into the woods /basement /house when a retarded slug would have had second thoughts, the genre would be much poorer. It allows us to say the idiots deserve what happens to them. If, say, a man helps gang-rape a woman, and is then stupid enough to accept her invitation to a bit of fun in the bath, we should not be surprised when he gets his genitals cut off with a large carving knife.

Reform School Girls

Advertised with the line “Young girls and their struggle for decency, respect and a warm place to take a shower”, it’s the quantity that counts  here: of the 89:47 minute running time, 8:04 minutes or 9% of the movie are spent in the shower, washroom or other personal hygiene area, and that excludes the “fire-hose” sequence. To match this figure, you’d have to spend about 130 minutes/day cleaning yourself – while it’d mean Tube travel was more pleasant what’d it do to the morning bathroom queue?

Terror Eyes

Rachel Ward raises a few (wait for it!) smiles as she slowly undresses, leaving her clothes scattered around the flat, then takes a shower. As she caresses her body with the soap (as you do), an unknown figure stalks towards her. She notices a shape through the frosted glass, pulls the door open and lo and behold… (anyone who’s failed to see what’s coming, go and reread the Horror Cliches piece in TC~) …it’s her boyfriend. So much for suspense, eh?

This could easily have been a top 30 – here’s some more:

• Arachnophobia: Sex-mad spiders crawl along shower-rails to peek at a cute teenager. c.f. ‘Squirm’
• Blood of Doctor Jekyll: bath time for Dr Jekyll leaves him a new man: Mr.Hyde to be specific
• Cat People: Kinski’s natural, outdoor shower scene.
• Chained Heat: Sybil Danning and Linda Blair in the same shower.
• Date With An Angel: Emmanuelle Beart, complete with large fluffy wings.
• Emily: Koo Stark, would be a royal princess if things had worked differently. Also the only shower scene I’ve even seen on the Nine O’Clock News
• Hardware: Dylan McDermott demonstrates glove love to Stacey Travis.
• Immoral Tales: Countess Erszbet Bathory watches her imminent victims cleaning themselves before holding Mass and slaughtering them all.
• Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS: Dyanne Thorne in all her glory, bathing her boobs.
• Ilsa, Harem-Keeper of the Oil Sheiks: Dyanne Thorne in all her glory, bathing her boobs.
• Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia: Dyanne Thorne etc, etc but this time in the presence of five ogling men (or six, including me!). Nothing like variety, is there?

• Lair of the White Worm: Amanda Donohue, playing a member of the gentry and part-time snakewoman, in thigh-length leather boots I might add) tends to a bath full of Boy Scout.
• Mausoleum: Bobbie Breesee, pity about the overabundance of bubbles.
• Nekromantik: Some people have a rubber duck. Some have submarines. Some even have Jennifer Jason Leigh. Daktari Lorenz has a very dead cat.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: The perils of falling asleep in the bath.
• Nuns on the Run: Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane aren’t actually in the showers so (mercifully!) they can keep their clothes on and leave the nudity to the female students.
• Psycho: Say no more.
• Psychos In Love: a parody of the ‘Psycho’ shower scene taken to the extreme. Not much flesh on view, but funny as hell.
• Society: Billy spots his ‘sister’ doing the twist in the shower. Another step to madness for him.
• Squirm: Sex-mad worms crawl up showers, and squeeze out of nozzles to peek at a cute teenager.
• SS Experiment Camp: A Nazi experiment involving a couple making love in a 60-gallon vat of water could be construed as a bath scene…
• Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down – In which a bath toy (a clockwork frog) turns into a sex-aid. Kim Basinger will shortly reprise this scene in the Hollywood remake.
• Toolbox Murders: Ex-porn star Kelly Nicholls bathes away her aches and pains with her fingers! Accompanied by an absolutely, horribly unsuitable sound track.

Memorandum

• From: J.Chan, Head of Production, Golden Moon Film Company
• To: All Directors

It has come to my attention that attempts have been made to produce ‘artistic’ martial arts films. A long and proud tradition of films cut to ribbons by the BBFC is placed at risk by this thoughtless behaviour – the tendency of certain people to include “camerawork” and “conversation” rather than a good nunchaku sequence is to be deplored by all who care for our industry’s future. In an attempt to stem this tide, all movies must now adhere to the following rules:

1. Plate glass windows have one purpose: to be broken. Whether this is accomplished using animate or inanimate objects is left to your discretion.
2. There will be at least one scene in a restaurant, or similar setting, which provides tables to climb on, chairs to throw and plate glass windows (see 1).
3. Kicks and punches must be accompanied by the regulation sound (midway between a gunshot and an axe hitting an oak tree).
4. Falls onto hard surfaces may only be broken by more unpleasant surfaces e.g. a twenty foot leap onto concrete may, at your discretion, become a twenty foot leap through a car windscreen. All falls most be panned to completion on aforementioned surface – the camera must not cut away at any stage during the fall.
5. Bear in mind the foreign video market. Much amusement can be given to viewers by making dialogue totally undubbable. Alternatively, we have a large stock of humorous typos and mistranslations available for use in subtitled movies.
6. Historical scenes will be included wherever possible as this allows us to maintain our bulk discount at Tung’s Silly Costume Emporium. If modern settings are used, characters may be supplied with fire-arms – these must, however, either jam, run out of ammunition or be kicked from the owner’s hand within 15 (FIFTEEN) seconds of being drawn.
7. Two types of female behaviour are permitted: “vicious, sadistic bitch” and “helpless, giggly kitten”. The latter will always be cute, the former, depending upon personal sexual proclivity and the availability of cute, vicious, sadistic bitches.
8. Two plots are permitted: you-killed-my-brother-and-you-must-pay and you-are-a-drug-dealer-who-has-framed-me-and-you-must-pay.
9. Being based in an area of the world with more centuries of civilization than most, even the most bizarre plot elements can rely on historical precedent. Do not worry about audience reaction, they will be too busy wincing at the stunts (see 4) and deciphering the subtitles (see 5) to notice the plot.
10. The credits will always thank a long list of companies who have nothing obvious to do with the movie itself (e.g. the bottler of Coca-Cola). The advertising revenue gained this way will be used to support future presentations.
11. Despite large numbers of beautiful, sexy, cute (see 7) women, sex will never happen and nudity will not exist. Note: this only applies to Hong Kong nationals, decadent foreign devils are exempt and may take their clothes off if necessary to the plot or your well-being.

Failure to adhere to these rules will result in the offending party/parties being surrendered as our representative in the exchange deal with Merchant-Ivory.

This will be your only warning.

Julie Chan.

Ok, let’s get one thing straight. Whatever the Gulf war was about, it hadn’t got a great deal to do with protecting the integrity of a sovereign state. The Americans didn’t give a damn when Afghanistan was invaded a decade or so ago. They don’t give a damn about all the factions in Africa that attack each other with a depressing regularity. So why were they so fussed when one branch of the Salman Rushdie Depreciation Society tries to take over another? The theories mostly have to do with oil – the paranoiac need not restrict himself to these and with a little imagination can come up with some interesting alternatives:

The American Government

Most civilised nations find an outlet for national aggression in team games: the only thing that stops Scotland staging another rebellion is the opportunity to klck English ass at rugby once a year (whether we win or not!). As the American performance in the World Cup shows, they’re generally no good at team sports, save those they invented themselves like American Football. War is the exception but while Hollywood has fostered the image of a team that never loses, last time out under Coach Bush they were reduced to sitting outside the Vatican embassy in Panama, playing loud rock music at a middle aged drug baron. This is not exactly a fearsome reputation for a nation’s warriors to carry into battle.

The Defence Industry

If anyone really stood to benefit (the golden rule of conspiracism) from the war, it’s arms manafacturers. Now that the “evil empire” is busy coping with problems like famine and civil war (all since they let Paul McCartney in, but that’s another story), people were asking “Why do we need to spend $295 billion dollars a year on weapons?”, and weren’t happy with vague answers about future threats. There’s nothing like a war to boost business in everything from bombers to body-bags.

Nothing like a war to let you test things, either – before this year, the Patriot anti-missile system had been fired a mere thirteen times. Raytheon, the makers, must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of the orders flooding in for their “battle-proven” weapon, while giving grateful thanks that the Iraquis never used more state-of-the-art missiles, against which the Patriot’s efficiency is a lot more doubtful.

The British Government

Remember the Falklands? The Argentinian junta went to war to divert attention from economic problems at home and Thatcher gleefully grabbed the opportunity to recover from the worst mid-term opinion poll figures since Julius Caesar. This time, we had both reasons: people started to realise that John Major wasn’t all that different from Mrs.T and as for the economy, the worst unemployment figures in ten years received 30 seconds coverage, even on a hyper-extended 9 O’Clock News.

This theory doesn’t take into account that Britain’s influence in world affairs is limited to irrelevancies like decreeing the laws of cricket, or to odd bits of the Commonwealth where the inhabitants are waiting for a big white bird to bring Prince Philip. It is difficult to believe we could tell Iraq to invade Kuwait when we can’t even get the French to accept our lamb without petrol-roasting it first.

The Media

ITN spent the first two weeks broadcasting six hours of solid coverage every night even though there was, frankly, sod-all going on. Six hours, double time, seven days a week for those at home, not to mention the massive expenses for those lucky enough to be sent abroad. Were TV reporters responsible for starting and fanning the war, so they’d be the only people able to afford a gallon of petrol? “…and President Bush said Saddam Hussein was the son of a syphilitic camel, who enjoyed interfering with small boys. This is Kate Adie, urinating in a mosque, Mecca”.

Things you could learn from the average news bulletin during the Gulf War

1. There’s a war going on.
2. It’s somewhere in the Middle East.
3. We’re winning.
4. Definitely.
5. We’ve destroyed all the Scud launchers.
6. Apart from the ones that we haven’t.
7. Did I mention that we’re winning?

Lies, damn lies and things “compiled under reporting restrictions”

You may have noticed the whining and accusations of bias whenever TV showed coverage of bomb damage in Iraq. Conspiracy theory suggests you should worry more about what you aren’t being told than what you are. It doesn’t take much intelligence to work out that reporters on our side were just as liable to manipulation and censorship: our office has a newsfeed from Reuters and I’ve read hair-raising stories, not printed in the papers, about reporters with our troops getting arrested and/or beaten up. One curious side-effect of the censorship was that it makes the military look incompetent: the impression throughout was that it wasn’t the Iraqis that were killing our soldiers, it was accidents, and carelessness such as firing on them ourselves. Was this the same army supposedly capable of destroying over 3,000 Iraqi tanks without losing a single one of ours? It may be the first war where we’ve had reporters on both sides, but all this meant is that we got two sets of officially sanctioned propaganda and still hadn’t the faintest idea what was really going on. You’d be better informed watching ‘The Desert Song’.

The volume of news, however distorted, was admittedly impressive, for the first couple of days justifiably so: this was history in the making. However, despite them cramming 300 years of the best bits into nine months, History at school was dull and in real time it’s even worse. To be fair, it was surreally entertaining watching a city get the shit bombed out of it, particularly when they put on the night sights and the whole thing resembled a video game. Then the Iraqis got wise, and realised that it wasn’t clever having large numbers of journalists running round. Only allowing them to film undamaged parts of Baghdad didn’t help: one “this military communications tower appears to be totally unharmed” report and said tower rapidly becomes a novelty rockery.

Teach Yourself U.N-Speak: Iraq

1. “Cease-fire” (as in “immediate cease-fire”) = Chance to get our breath back.
2. “This senseless fighting is hurting both of us = We’re losing.
3. “We have no reason to attack Kuwait” = What’s the Arabic for “gullible”?
4. “God is with us” = Nobody else is.
5. “We call upon all Arabs to join us” = Help!
6. “We have it on reliable authority” = We made it up.
7. “The question of Palestinian sovereignity” = The last chance to save face.
8. “Prepare for the mother of all battles” = Sales of Nike running shoes have increased 500%.
9. “We will withdraw without conditions” = …apart from these ones.
10. “It was a civilian air-raid shelter” = A couple of civilians were passing at the time.

Otherwise, coverage was largely limited to shaky footage of Scud missiles not hitting Israel. With so much time to fill ITN got desperate and even had their anchorman reviewing the morning’s papers. By review, I mean “read out the tabloid headlines in a sarcastic tone of voice”: a gratuitous picture of a female squaddie on the front page was warmly greeted with “nice to see sexist journalism is alive and well”. Eventually ITN gave up, and left the blanket coverage to CNN and those lucky enough to have satellite TV. The American network has clearly been stockpiling pundits for some years and had enough to last a lengthy war.

Of course any programme that might conceivably cause offence were axed from the schedules. Monty Python, ‘Allo, Allo and Carry On Up the Khyber all bit the dust and it’s rumoured that the children’s serial ‘Five Children and It’ vanished because its story about a monster living in a sand-pit was considered derogatory to the Kuwaiti royal family.

To be perfectly honest, I’m glad it’s over. While I sympathise with the civilians caught up in it, both Kuwaiti and Iraqi, it all felt like someone else’s war – I never asked the Army to go in and fight. So it wasn’t long before I became fed up with endless repetitions of censored news, sick of politicians pontificating at length about the crisis and bored to tears by hour long interviews with ‘experts’. As far as I’m concerned we can now get back to more important things – now, where did I put that copy of ‘Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs’?

Teach Yourself U.N-Speak: US

1. “You have until January 15th to get out” = We have until January 15th to get ready.
2. “Join forces” (as in “It is time for the countries of the world to join  forces”) = Do what we say.
3. “Restoring the sovereign state of Kuwait” = Kicking Iraqi butt.
4. “Friendly fire” = Sorry!
5. “Flagrant breaches of international law…” = We don’t like it…
6. “…abhored by all nations” = …and neither do our lap-dogs.
7. “Multinational task force” = Our army, plus anyone else who wants a finger in the pie.
8. “War crimes” = Killing Kuwaiti civilians.
9. “Collateral damage” = Killing Iraqi civilians.
10. “It was a legitimate military target” = A couple of soldiers were passing at the time.