For almost ten years, I wanted to know what “This Vicious Cabaret” sounded like. The song appeared as the opening chapter to the second part of V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Moore wrote and (as far as I know) composed the score himself. When I first read the lyrics, way back in 1990, I desperately wanted to know how the music went. I spent almost ten years imagining how the song sounded. Every few years I would stumble upon someone who could play piano and I would ask them to play the sheet music; twice this happened, and twice the people I asked couldn’t play the song, commenting that it was written very oddly. (This may also have to do with the fact that the score sheet was for the vocals, not piano, although I didn’t realize that until many years later.) This, of course, only fueled my imagination further, fantasizing about what sort of insanely brilliant arrangement Moore devised that could confound lesser beings so consistently.
In 1999 a fellow Vendetta fan sent me a copy of David J’s V for Vendetta EP. This was just as the Napster revolution was starting, and still a few years before you could just search YouTube for “This Vicious Cabaret” and find it in 3 seconds, so you still had to put some effort into finding music. You couldn’t just e-mail an mp3, and CD burners were not yet ubiquitous. So to have someone who had a copy of J’s then-out-of-print EP, be able to burn it to CD and mail that copy to me was an extremely lucky and generous act. I remember receiving the CD in the mail and hungrily putting the disc into my CD player to listen to the song—really, finally, listen to it—after so many years.
