2010 marked the untimely death of Chris Sievey, the creator and performer of cult musical act Frank Sidebottom, prompting much sadness from friends and fans. One touching response was the genuinely charming statue erected in Timperley:
Chris’s death also prompted a great many people to step forward claiming to have been fans, even though they had never quite found the time in their busy schedules to go to one of his chaotic Frank Sidebottom gigs. But perhaps that’s the nature of silly cults.
Anyway, not many people know that Chris Sievey had originally created the (cranially) larger than life character to support his ZX Spectrum home computer game The Biz; or that Mrs Merton (Caroline Aherne) started out as Frank’s sidekick on Radio Timperley (though fans prefer his anatomically-correct hand-puppet Little Frank); or that an exhibition of the wonderfully subversive drawings Chris drew his whole life appeared at the Chelsea Space Gallery in 2007; or that his whole (so-called) ‘adult’ life was like a kind of hand-to-mouth performance art show; or that he died penniless.
No, they just remember his (pre-Frank) band The Freshies and its hit single “I’m in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk”. Which sounds like this:
Until recently, the biggest Frank Sidebottom news was the release of the Kickstarter-funded film-length documentary “Being Frank”, which is currently (April 2019) playing in various art cinema venues around the UK. (Excellent reviews, by the way.) Or the “Frank Sidebottom’s Bobbins Bitter” and “Frank Sidebottom’s Timperley Rhubarb Ale”, launched at FRANKAMANIA in Wigan (a free show of Frank Sidebottom memorabilia).
But that was all so yesterday. Today is really quite different…
“BOBBINS” is the new “HEIL HITLER”
BBC News (since 2016 the spiritual home of endless Brexit debate) has today put out a news story describing how GCHQ had managed to decrypt codes (actually ciphers, but let’s not let that come between us) that Chris Sievey had embedded in the borders of a number of Frank Sidebottom-related drawings. For example, the border of this Frank Sidebottom newsletter “COM 13” reads: “The Man From Fish EP is top secret“.
Much as with Enigma decades before it, the “small but dedicated [Frank Sidebottom] following” among GCHQ staff noticed a distinctive pattern of symbols corresponding to Sidebottom’s favouritest word: “BOBBINS”. And the rest is (crypto-) history.
Inevitably, the day after GCHQ decrypted it, the cipher key was found in the back of one of Chris Sievey’s notebooks. But that’s how last laughs work. 😉
Now I think this may provide a possible comparison with the Voynich. If these cartoons were 600 years old and they hadn’t been deciphered we would be asking questions like:
What the purpose of this cipher was? i.e. why was it necessary?
What were the origins of or precedents for this kind of encipher technique?
Can we find parallels between the illustrations and earlier texts?
Is there a block-paradigm for this cipher?
Now people 600 years ago were much the same as today, yet we expect purely rational expectations for their enciphered documents that we wouldn’t expect in this instance.
Two Franks Ernest and Ivan, father and son who saw active service in both wars and who like their digitally created Sidebottom namesack are destined to remain unknown and unrecognised for their contributions to the twentieth century. What a shame that this should be so.