Man at C&A

In at least one universe, Man at C&A was a song by “the English 2-Tone revival band the Specials”. When first listening to it, Callum Phillpott was surprised to see that the lyrics featured the Man in Grey, a character Phillpott whom previously believed they had invented themself much more recently. (PROSE: Annals of the Jen: One Year of Jenny Over-There: The Birthday Toaster: Notes)

Behind the scenes

The 1980 song Man at C&A actually exists. Its fairly mysterious lyrics identify singer Terry Hall's character as “the Man in Grey”, seemingly distinct from “the Man in Black”, with both of them being knowledgeable but powerless figures in the context of the Cold War abruptly erupting into a nuclear World War Three.

Warning, warning, nuclear attack! Atomic sounds designed to blow your mind! World War Three! Nuclear, nuclear attack! (…) The Man in Black, he told me the latest Moscow news about the storm across the red sea. They drove their ball-point views. I'm the Man in Grey, I'm just the Man at C&A, And I don't have a say in the war games that they play.

—Man at C&A

File:The Specials - Man At C&A

The Specials performing Man at C&A live on November 24th, 1980.

In contrast to the comical suggestion in Annals of the Jen that the in-universe counterpart of the Jenny Everywhere Man in Grey's creator Callum Phillpott was initially unaware of the connection, Phillpott revealed on the Jenny Everywhere Discord on July 8th, 2023 that they actually had the song in mind when creating an early prototype of the Man in Grey and/or Man in Black for What Went Down at Facebook in 2021.

(…) The Man in Grey definitely got tweaked a bit conceptually after that (the Man in Grey hinted at in this story is quite different to even early 925 mig), but he's been around for a while — in fact he might predate the Man in Black since a similar figure did pop up in an abandoned draft of a novella I was writing, but I can't remember which name I chose then. The story never got far (so it's entirely possible the Man in Black/Grey never left my loose story notes), but the story itself was a sort of romcom riff on Beyond the Wall of Sleep, with the Man in Whatever acting as a cold and removed eldritch matchmaker who was heavily implied or stated to be Nyarlathotep. This story was doomed to fail. This did nearly make it in to Minalopa as a subplot, but we all know what happened there. (…) It's probably a safe call to treat [What Went Down at Facebook] as a different universe. (Also, the reason it's a 50/50 chance of either being the Man in Grey or Man in Black is because I got both of these names from the Specials song Man at C&A — obviously they're quite generic names that have been used centuries prior, but that's where I got them from.

—Callum Phillpott

The Man in PROSE: What Went Down at Facebook would go on to be referenced in PROSE: The Man in Grey's Christmas Carol as “whatever grey-robed busybody worked at Facebook all those years ago…”, suggested to have been an initially-distinct individual whose identity the 925th Universe's Man in Grey had subsumed, as part of a wider claim that the Man in Grey had a tendency to subsume other people's pasts into his own, although the Man at C&A Men were not specifically referenced.