Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #21 (Rollercoaster Special)
First up, a bit of housekeeping.
Sometimes you blink and almost a year goes by! In fact, almost exactly two years have elapsed since my last Track-By-Track post (here). A lot can happen in two years: that last entry was about a record by the vocalist Keith Nunnally of JM Silk fame, who sadly died just over a month ago.
I’m now picking up that series about my mix for The Ghost and will aim to finish it off before embarking on another series for a mix of mine that is due to come out soon. Since all of the internal links connecting the series together have been broken since I moved off Substack, here's an up-to-date index for convenience — the posts marked with a * are open to everyone, the others are paying subscribers only:
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #01
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #02 (Ben Liebrand Special)
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #03 (+ Datassette Q&A)*
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #04
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #05 (+ Øyvind Morken Q&A)*
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #06
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #07
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #08
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #09
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #10 (Slowjam/Fastjam Special)*
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #11
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #12 (S.A.W. Special)
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #13
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #14 (Music Theory Special)*
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #15
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #16 (Spillway Q&A w/Polycron and Kellon)*
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #17
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #18
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #19 (Discogs Digression)*
Track-By-Track: Ghostcast #20
A couple are missing cos I’d always intended to do Q&As for them, but never managed to make it happen. Maybe one day I will. But in the meantime, on to the final stretch… only five records left!
Now of course, since this next track is called ‘Fairground’, I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about rollercoasters.
When I was about 12 years old, my parents bought our household’s first PC. Before that point, my mum had a Macintosh computer to work on and I remember playing a couple of games on it, including the ever frustrating Quagmire. Around this time I also used some money I’d saved up from doing a paper round to buy a second-hand N64 along with a handful of games: Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, 1080 Snowboarding etc. But it was the arrival of the PC and, with it, proper internet, that led to my most enduring love affair with a computer game.
Two of the games I played the most on the new computer were Sim City 3000 and RollerCoaster Tycoon, both released in early 1999. The two had similar gameplay — a series of scenarios in which you had to achieve certain objectives — just in different settings. I wasn’t very good at Sim City: my infrastructure (water, power, waste management etc.) was always a bit haphazard, my economy would crash, and I’d never make it to the futuristic utopia of the ‘arcology’. But I discovered a knack for RollerCoaster Tycoon (RCT for short) and, as I became more internet savvy, I started seeking out online forums about the game to discuss tips and tricks with other, mostly teenage like me, players. I started hacking the game using community-developed custom tools, which bypassed the game’s default limits on cash and time and even allowed you to ignore standard physics. This opened up a whole universe of possibility in terms of what you could dream up and construct on screen.
Here are some examples of what I was spending hours and hours of my spare time making in the early 00s. First up, a dragon sculpture made out of hacked-together rollercoaster pieces in a medieval area I had named, rather romantically, ‘Coventry’:
Next, with apologies for the poor resolution (these are after all screenshots from over twenty years ago), a bobsled ride set in a Hanging Gardens of Babylon-themed waterpark:
And this Dante-themed ‘paradise + inferno’ entry I made for a competition to identify the ‘Best Parkmaker In The World’ (I came third):
In parallel with building my own parks, I also started to review other people’s efforts that they’d put online. (Me? Writing unsolicited reviews? Never.) I held quizzes on the forums where people had to guess a park from an unusual screenshot or from the overhead map view alone. I would also look at recreations made by American coaster fanatics of their favourite parks over the pond: Disney World Florida, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Cedar Point. Having only ever been to a few theme parks near my home in Birmingham — Drayton Manor, American Adventure and West Midlands Safari Park — I was fascinated by the tall and daring rollercoasters in those huge American parks, and dreamed of one day going on them.
Like any geeky teenager in the late 90s, around this time I also started to learn to code in HTML so that I could build my own website. And thus it was that on 26 January 2002 I launched my first site hosting my parks, reviews and assorted other thoughts, called Mantis Enterprises:
Why “Mantis”? Well, one of the rollercoasters I was obsessed with from afar was ‘Mantis’, at Cedar Point. This red, yellow and blue stand-up coaster was a taller and distinctly sexier cousin to ‘Shockwave‘ at Drayton Manor, which was famous for being Europe’s first ever stand-up coaster, but for me was more famous for giving you a bad shoulder every time you went on it. Compared to Shockwave, Mantis was sleek and elegant, or so it looked through the computer screen. Even the logo/sign was badass:
And so I decided to name my first website after this coaster, and subsequently took it as my user name on the RCT forums. It was thus under the name of ‘mantis’ that in 2003 I started work on what was to be my MAGNUM OPUS: a theme park entirely dedicated to my favourite music of the time called W.O.M.B. — I think inspired by the line in the outro of that Queens Of The Stone Age song ‘Another Love Song’:
This is W.O.M.B, the womb. And if you, my pets, learn to listen, I'll let you crawl back in.
I took this acronym and made it stand for “Walkman Of My Brain”, which I thought was incredibly clever, and as if to justify that choice of motif I designed a foetus-shaped lake to go in the centre of the park’s map:
You can just about make out from that very low quality overview — the production of which I remember, incidentally, required a painstaking process of taking multiple screenshots and stitching them together in MS Paint — you can just make out that the park had four sections, each one dedicated to a different album that I owned on CD and would listen to on repeat as a teenager. Here’s a whistlestop tour of the themed areas, with text taken from the website I built to help launch the park in 2004!
Discovery, Daft Punk
After entering the park along the blood red ‘umbilical cord’ central plaza (I really did lean into the uterine theme, didn’t I), you could turn right into the Discovery area. This is how I described it:
'Discovery' is an area of colour and technology. The videos accompanying the music from the album were the main inspiration - and the videos were also recently made into a feature film, 'Interstellar 555'. The attractions are all heavily themed, and there is even a stadium where the band play live. Joining on to the area is the 'Discovery Aeronautic Facility for Training', or 'DAFT' for short. Here, guests can complete different training exercises in order to become qualified Daft-Craft pilots, and take a thrilling ride on one through the ventilation systems. This area was completed quite a long time ago, but I hope it hasn't lost any of its appeal.
Clearly I loved an acronym. Here’s a picture of the DAFT headquarters:
And here’s a picture of the B&M floorless coaster ‘Digital Love’ doing a helix around a satellite:
And the ‘Superheroes’ stadium where ‘the band play live’:
In hindsight I was a bit naive to imagine Daft Punk would want to spend their lives playing day after day in a theme park, but maybe I had made them an offer they couldn’t refuse? In any case, I remember that, using one of the hacking tools, you could actually put your own mp3s into the game files and have whatever music you wanted playing from the rides, so of course I put in clips from the album itself.
Hotel Yorba, The White Stripes
Moving onto the next area of the park, this was a hotel and leisure complex themed to The White Stripes. Yes I loved The White Stripes, so much that I built an entire red-and-white hotel featuring duelling wooden rollercoasters. Here’s what I said in 2004:
'Hotel Yorba' does exactly what it says on the tin. I was inspired by the hotels of Natelox and PyroPenguin, and decided to have a stab of my own. I wanted landscaping to play a large part, so the hotel is built into the side of a large hill. I also wanted a pair of dueling wooden coasters, and duly built them - 'The White Stripes' duelers race around and through the hotel complex. Guests reach the hotel over a bridge, and have a choice of a normal room, or a stay in the Penthouse, Royal or Star Suites. Observant visitors may also spot the Whites, staying in their own personal suite.
Here’s a picture of the Star Suite:
And here’s a picture of the duelling coasters’ brake run re-entering the station/hotel:
Again, I don’t think I really had my business head on when I had the bright idea of building a pair of wooden rollercoasters, notoriously the loudest kind of ride you can possibly imagine, right through the middle of a place where people are meant to be sleeping. But it looks pretty. And I love the idea that Meg and Jack just live in this hotel themed to them.
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips
On leaving the hotel guests would cross a bridge and enter an area themed to Pavonis Mons, the putative setting for the battle between Yoshimi and the Pink Robots. Here’s my blurb:
'Pavonis Mons' is a futuristic city-style area, based on the artwork accompanying the Yoshimi album. Indeed, some of the artwork is replicated directly, while the rest of the area draws on the city's bright colours. The main attraction is more of a saga - guests must compete against each other in a shoot-out race around the centre of the city, with the winning team getting to ride the big coaster - 'Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots'. There is little that is ordinary about the area - not least the robots that terrorise the inhabitants. There is also an island which houses an enormous steel stadium, where The Lips perform their wonderful live show!
I’m starting to find this obsession — keeping my objects of musical admiration captive in a theme park and making them perform on demand — kinda creepy, and more than a little reminiscent of the plot of Interstella 5555. Anyway, here’s a picture of ‘Yoshimi’ facing off against one of the pink robots, which also acts as the support structure for a shuttle half-loop element on the big coaster:
This screenshot shows that the ride must have been a sort of flying hybrid coaster:
You can see where I’d hacked the classic boxy B&M track over the top of the Vekoma flying dutchman track — that’s because the Vekoma design didn’t allow for large inversions, so it was necessary to Frankenstein it using hacking tools.
Rooty, Basement Jaxx
And now for the final area of the park, themed to one of the bands that for me has been most enduring. I still play Basement Jaxx tunes out all the time, this year’s favourite being ‘Romeo’ (their own club version). Here’s what I had to say about the area:
'Rooty' is a real jungle, with my most complex landscaping ever. For this reason, the paths and buildings are not laid out normally, and guests are free to wander wherever they like - indeed, they must be careful not to get lost! The colours are strangely vibrant, and the theming is so dense that I expect many will find it too cluttered (I do myself, sometimes!). The main coaster is 'Bingo Bango', a steel-train woodie that traverses the entire area, diving in and out of the landscape and buildings. There are many flat ride attractions, and also two water rides (to keep cool!) - 'Broken Dreams' rapids and 'Romeo River', a double drop log flume. Look for the entertainers too - the Jaxx have brought along a few of their friends!
It would appear from this description that with ‘Bingo Bango’ I basically prophesied the rise of RMC wooden-steel hybrids almost a decade before the debut of ‘New Texas Giant’. And yet I have received no credit for this fact. Here’s a picture of said coaster wending its way through some generically tropical foliage:
And the log flume ride ‘Romeo River’:
I wish I was able to access the file to see what I meant about the Jaxx inviting some of their friends, but I can have a good guess: I probably dropped a range of entertainers around this area and gave them names like ‘Meshell Ndegeocello’ or ‘Gary Numan’. Cos I was clever like that.
Well, as I mentioned above, after a concerted marketing campaign that included building the website and splashing these screenshots on the RCT forums, I finally released W.O.M.B., to great acclaim, on 19 March 2004. I was 17 years old, just about to take my A-Levels and leave school. By the time I arrived at university that autumn I had stopped playing RCT, and I also left the message boards in favour of ones about Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem. The rollercoaster chapter of my life was closed, and I never returned to it — at least, not to the virtual part…
Two decades later, in summer 2023, after attending my first Honcho Campout, I went with my good friend Sam to Kennywood in Pittsburgh. Kennywood is one of the oldest theme parks in the world, 127 years and counting, and while we were at the park we were amused to see other gays sporting Honcho Campout t-shirts in line for the rides. In fact, there’s a surprisingly big crossover between gays, ravers and coaster fanatics. I’ve met GRCFs all over the world!
By the time 2024’s Campout came around, that Kennywood visit had given me an idea. After the festival, I could do what I’d always dreamt of doing: visit Cedar Point and ride ‘Mantis’! Sandusky, Ohio, is only a few hours’ drive from Pittsburgh, through Cleveland, and when I looked up the dates it transpired that the week after Campout would be the first week back at school in the area. Everything was falling into place. I booked the tickets for me and Sam, hired a car, and on Wednesday 21 August we drove up to the front gates. Cedar Point is one of the biggest and most popular amusement parks in the world, but there was hardly anyone around. We spent the day going on every damn rollercoaster in the park and only had to queue for longer than 10 minutes for ‘Maverick’ (incidentally my new favourite rollercoaster; we went on it twice). It was one of the best days of my life.
And what about ‘Mantis’? Well, unbeknownst to me, in the intervening decades the standing coaster design had — rightly — been deemed overly rough to ride, and Cedar Point had converted Mantis into a new floorless coaster called ‘Rougarou’. They’d also given it a new paint job, far less appealing than the striking blue-yellow-red design on ‘Mantis’. This was all very sad news to me, but of course it had been twenty years. Me and Sam went on the ride anyway and it was great. Unfortunately, any photos I had of this event were lost when I left my phone in a taxi earlier this year, so to finish off this missive here’s a photo Sam took of us in front of ‘Steel Vengeance’, also one of my new favourite coasters:
And the track from my Ghost mix that set off this entire rollercoaster reverie…
MNLTH - ‘Fairground’ [Wémè, 2017]
Loved this ramble - definitely would be queuing for the digital love coaster!