(no subject)
Part deux.
Funnily enough, the second album came out a year before the first one. In early 2006 a label for whom we'd done a split 7" and one or two (crap) gigs, said they wanted to release a TVG album. Naturally we were a bit more enthusiastic about the one we'd just finished, plus we'd been enjoying the imaginary cachet of having this great unreleased first album in the locker- knowing nobody could beg to differ as nobody had heard it. Without further ado...
WHORES IN TAXIS (second album)
24/4/76. I like this as a sharp contrast to 'Discourse'. We're trying to do something a bit different here, it says. Starts of as one of those forlorn, slight instrumentals of Andrew's; they can give you a rest from my voice or they can set a particular mood. 30 seconds in, it's interrupted by and gradually gives way to what sounds like an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner, or a relatively close airplane taking off, getting louder and louder until the end. Underneath the static sound is some sort of bubbling noise, like something nasty boiling over in a cauldron. The visual image I get is some sort of NHS advert where a pair of pink, healthy lungs get steadily darker and darker. I have nothing to do with these instrumentals but I believe there's a heavily masked sample of George Harrison mucking about with an early synthesiser somewhere in here. Andrew didn't have a title and I cheekily suggested the date QPR were relegated from the Premier League; instead he chose a more auspicious date from happier times.
How To Become A Cult Figure. The first thing you notice is that it's been a bit better recorded than the first album. The second thing you notice is my terrible lithp. Ith all over the plathe. A very good track and a very good lyric, some great images "to see your name in lights/to see heads on spikes" and a few funny punchlines, particularly the one about supporting Punch & Judy. The words are good but this is the start of me writing too many words, a habit I may never rid myself of. Six tightly-packed verses. I'm casting myself as Billy Liar/Don Quixote, scrimping and saving for a golden ticket to stardom, dreaming of escape from serfdom; but by the end the delusion has unravelled altogether and we're playing to three people in the back of a pub. Andrew said the musical concept was "Cheeky Girls beating up Joy Division". There's a pleasant bassline bouncing along but I detect more of the latter, and the sounds have a Martin Hannett quality. I remember Andrew and Susan working deep into the winter nights on this, chain-smoking Gitanes and trying to get the hi-hat sound just right. When the drum parts cut out for my last verse, the tambourine is a nice touch. As a postscript, when our third album came out last year Marc Riley started playing this track on his 6music show. We duly posted the third album, but I think I incurred displeasure by disingenously asking if the London address on the website was the best one to use.
The Immortals. Back to terse, snappy, bite-size pop after the preceding indulgence. Simple but effective. I got the idea after visiting Montparnasse Catacombs- a half-hour underground walk past thousands and thousands of human skeletons which are shocking at first, but by the end you feel quite used to them and as desensitised as Pol Pot. It got me thinking that death is the one absolute certainty in all our lives, yet we just try not to think about it. The sexual revolution brought so many taboos out in the open, and the one thing we're discouraged from thinking about is the big taboo that looms large over all of us. With all our diet fads and plastic surgery, we're trying to openly deny death- if we spend enough we can be young forever. When elderly women have surgery to make them look young it is of course unnatural and grotesque, so I drew on the immortals from Part III of Gullivers Travels, who get to about 80 then have to live on as their bodies stop working- blind and deaf, sitting around in a nappy. Great closing line; "the silicon melts and drips out of their arse". Underrated this one.
The Loneliest Man in Ancient Rome. This is a quite dancey number, Andrew invoking Prince/Hendrix. You almost can see Rome burning as the shrieking right-hand parts kick in. Nice tune running though his chorus part. I wrote this on the brink of a brief Roman fixation when I got really into I Claudius, etc. Gibbon talks about a Decius, who when people wanted to bump off the Emperor, made such an eloquent argument for keeping the Emperor that they chose him to take over the post. He did the decent thing in power and tried to suppress Christianity, but was soon killed in battle. I transported myself back in the guise of a minor poet called Mannero, who is more Nero than Decius. It's a silly, funny story straight out of Up Pompeii (or even I Claudius), a timid, lazy fool with no ambition ending up on the throne by a series of accidents. I'd been listening to Momus' time-travel period and wanting to write a travelogue like his 'London 1888' or 'Turban Disturbance' by the King of Luxembourg.
Serbian Warlord. Do do-do do-do do-do DO-do do-doo. Such a great tune and serious contender for my favourite of ours. The keyboard part never fails to put a smile on my face, it's up there with Enola Gay. Usually I'm the lyrical version of a musician who's so concerned with fancy chord changes that he neglects to put any energy, any testosterone into his music. I have a terrible habit of writing three times more words than I intend to, and getting bogged down with fully articulating my point- must explain, explain, explain. Better lyricists can express a point with one well-chosen image, or improve the song by leaving an element of mystery. This one is a winner because I picked a good catchphrase and kept dropping it in the whole way through. That's what pop songs need and unlike most of ours this one is an actual pop song. I got the idea when someone on livejournal did a poll for girls- would you prefer i) a boy who was rude, arrogant and scruffy, a messy slob who groped you in public or ii) a boy who was nice, clean-cut, faithful as a puppy and devoted to you? 90% of respondents chose i). I thought, if nasty boys get the girls wet, then genocidal tyrants must be the most lusted-after people in the world, and this Milosevic/Barry White hybrid character began to take shape in my head. Wilful cynicism. Also, Johnny gave me a compilation CD- there was a track I didn't much like, with the crooned refrain "I'll be your Corsican Dreamboat, baby"; subverting that gave me my catchphrase. I was having fun writing this album because I was using my imagination a bit more. Leaving the Shoreditch dole queue behind and going wherever I wanted. Pop as a kid dressing-up.
Oliver Cromwell in Weimar Berlin. The old chestnut of Puritanism v Decadence expressed through time-travel. Andrew had written the music for a previous lyric called 'Oliver Cromwell vs Chic' which was a bit plainer (in both versions I think it's a 0-0 draw). At the last minute I came across a library photo-book of 30s Berlin called Voluptuous Panic, and thought I could make it into a story. Despite all of this, the main influence is almost certainly The Wicker Man. The music is solemn, a slightly baroque feel to it. Goes from sublime to ridiculous in the space of two lines with a nod to the Romo manifesto ("We'll dance tonight if we're dying tomorrow") followed by that unfortunate pun about Cromwell's warts. Alex quickly picked me up on the blunder of Cromwell walking around with a religious icon in his pocket. One of our oddest.
The Male Gaze. Apologia for stalkers, voyeurs and curtain-twitchers. I really was overdoing it with the Momus. Cromwell's repressions are starting to leak out. When I was younger I idolised my crushes and here I seem to be stating a preference for the imagined version of the girl. Jolly unchivalrous. Lots of Haines allusions, two in the first line "We are all auteurs, but we don't like to talk about it" and I'm even quoting our old songs, the camera making love to Scarlett Johansson (this was post-Ghost World/Lost in Translation when she was still an actor, not a perfume advert). I also thought up a line that Andrew pointed out already existed, almost word-for-word, in a Sex Pistols song "If I ever had you you'd become real/Then you'd lose all your appeal". From the chopsticks and ticking-bomb intro through to the soaring, glittering chorus, I think the music is rather excellent. I always imagined this song would sound good on guitars.
Mickey Mouse. This lyric is more like the first album. After doing my imagined Grand Tour of Berlin, Rome and Serbia I'm back to bashing America and ranting about the capitalist spectacle. Slogans over stories. The idea came after watching a documentary about Bukowski in the ICA; they said he hated Mickey Mouse and would fly into a tantrum at his very mention. A passionate denunciation of Mickey Mouse might not be my finest hour, but it's interesting how I use him as a symbol for America and express admiration for its former days. Hard-working emigrants like the scrawnier, Chaplinesque Mickey of Steamboat Willie, starting from rags and using their guile to get on; then bloated, self-satisfied and doing nothing but consuming and polluting ("a smiling cretin with ears like dinner plates"). There's a fair bit of Scott Walker's 'Track 3' in the intro. The music has a sense of nauseous faux jollity, it's a bit green around the gills; fairground chords and drums that sound like your dad doing a spot of DIY. Reinforces the sense of Disneyland as a sterile utopia, which I presume it indeed is. This song is a sibling to 'The Immortals'. I like how the Disney characters mutate into characters from Friends at the end, but the Joy Division steal in the chorus got more attention; "Mickey Mouse waits at the gate with a smile/This is the way, step inside".
Life Should Mean Life. And this is a sibling to '...Cult Figure'; the only two on the album we recorded with Susan and a bit more crystalline sounding. More adornments. It's pretty but sinister and I don't start until a minute in. Good to give people a rest. Call bad cop out of the room and give them a glass of water, then send him back in. It's one of those many songs where I just had a title I wanted to use. I think there was a previous attempt to use the title (a really bad one) which jokily satirised the Daily Mail mentality. This one has a larger remit, it's about the way people condense all the ills of human nature into their demonised caricature of a criminal (whether Ian Huntley or Saddam), then exclude the criminal from society and kid themselves that everything's fine now. The reference to Oedipus is apt. It strays a little with the half-baked nod to environmentalism. Not a pop hit and it never went down well at gigs, but a quite thoughtful and stately piece for us.
Your Dinner Is On Page 22. Back to 'The Male Gaze', in expressing a preference for keeping my distance and idealising the girl, rather than risking anything. Tis better to have never loved and all that. I clearly had issues with vulnerability. The first two verses are very good. Busy, dramatic, music. When I first heard it, I think I briefly insisted we should offer this song to Kylie. By this late stage in the making of the album (only 'Serbian' was yet to be written) Sarah and I had broken up after 3 years and I was renting a room from a mad person at the top of a council high-rise. No jokes in this one; in my mind I'm a great tragic figure like King Lear. I wasn't very happy at the time. Most lyrics I concoct out of an idle, mischievous whim but there are a couple that I have almost vomited out with no prior warning and no idea where it came from. This is one. If something is causing you trauma I strongly recommend making it into a pop song (or sculpture or piano concerto or oil painting or casserole, whatever it is you do). It becomes a fixed artefact and you feel distance from it. Good for closure. There's a bit in Tristram Shandy; "I feel my pulse calming as I write it down..."
People tell me this is their least favourite of the three albums. I have a real soft spot for it, perhaps because of this. It's not as quintissential or idiosyncratic as CC but it's leaner and much more assured. Several of our best songs.
LUKE HAINES IS DEAD/ELVIS & THE BEATLES (second single)
Luke Haines Is Dead. I think this is my absolute favourite. Everything just fell into place. To me this song is great cinema, from the moment that twinkling riff comes on like the theme from The Exorcist. I make the pilgrimage to my hero's spiritual home of Brighton, I hunt him down, kill him, and possibly eat him- with the aim of taking his place. Pure parricide. It unfolds in 'real' time but it feels like a confession to the cops in a film noir. As if to back up my indolent claim to the throne, this is a rich lyric, allusions crammed in like sardines. Listening back now I can spot Graham Greene, Aeschylus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Conrad, Austen, Jack & the Beanstalk and too many pop songs to mention. "I smell the blood of an Englishman!". Andrew protested that whether Luke Haines lived or died was possibly the most irrelevant issue of the age, but inside my head it was a very big deal. Nevertheless I'm grateful that he gave this one music which just crackles with suspense. The title was the opening line of Paul Morley's Oliver Twist review but to my great agitation, in between us writing and releasing the song the line was also used to grace the title of Mr Haines' retrospective box-set. The subject of the song took it in good grace and asked us to support him at the ICA (resisting the temptation to tiptoe onstage, stare at us and wander off again during this song).
Elvis & The Beatles. This song ended up being the less-heralded component of the double A-side because of its artwork (a mock-up of The Queen is Dead's sleeve, with Mussolini's corpse replacing Alain Delon), but it had the last laugh as it was picked for the 3rd Angular compilation, where people actually heard it and it was praised by the Daily Telegraph, of all people. I'm really not sure what I'm getting at in this one. I do remember the origin; I was at home for Christmas and my parents were watching some documentary about the Beatles asking to meet Bob Dylan and going to India. I might be saying that if artists get to the stadium-filling level, they can't do anything interesting because it's a banal medium. Too much fanfare and merchandise and crap suffocating the art (even though I much prefer Elvis' syrupy Las Vegas jump-suit phase to his Sun Records output). Like Serbian Warlord, it works because it's simpler; repetition of catchphrases that will hook on in the listener's brain. It's one of my less "intellectual" lyrics but it seems to make for a better song. Dumb and simple = rock and roll. This time, though, the music is not simple. Mutant but oddly majestic, a bit like a national anthem heard underwater. Dustbin lid drums, more things slapped on with each chorus, like the song is under construction as it's being played (although it does very politely go quiet for that line).
SUSPENDED ON FULL PAY (third single)
Suspended on Full Pay. Another one I think of as a mini-film. It sounds rather sleazy. I was indulging my fantasies and thinking of ways in which one could make a living without having to get out of bed every morning and go some place where you do what you're told. In the news, people who have done terrible things get "suspended on full pay" and I always thought, how the hell is that a punishment? This character is living the dream; but all he does is get drunk and sleep. Staying in the house all day, he doesn't see anyone and he gets a bit cracked in the head- why is he setting stuff on fire, why is he afraid of the postman? (actually, this all sounds uncannily close to what I'm like when I'm off work). The music gives it a sordid air. There's lots of vocal double-tracking and I'm just noticing that each speaker plays an alternate line, suggesting multiple personality disorder. It's rather good. When I recorded the vocal, Andrew's instruction was to imagine myself "a hybrid of Peter Cook and Johnny". The last line of the middle eight was originally about shoving a computer up the woman's cunt (!), but Andrew exercised his power of veto.
Whore of Babylon. No disputing which one is the B-side this time. Slightly Vichy-by-numbers; again I had the phrase in my head and really wanted to use it as a song title. Turning the story of my coming to London into a Dick Whittington/Pinocchio thing, the innocent corrupted by the ruthless ways of the big city. This may date from the time Scarlet was introducing me to all those bad people in Soho members' bars. Where the titular whore comes in I don't know. I'd been single for a while, getting bored and wondering what was next. What an advertisment, though- "I'll read your bank statements, I'll text you incessantly/I'll be the most jealous lover you've ever had". The chorus tune is very good, plundering as it does Microdisney.
Funnily enough, the second album came out a year before the first one. In early 2006 a label for whom we'd done a split 7" and one or two (crap) gigs, said they wanted to release a TVG album. Naturally we were a bit more enthusiastic about the one we'd just finished, plus we'd been enjoying the imaginary cachet of having this great unreleased first album in the locker- knowing nobody could beg to differ as nobody had heard it. Without further ado...
WHORES IN TAXIS (second album)
24/4/76. I like this as a sharp contrast to 'Discourse'. We're trying to do something a bit different here, it says. Starts of as one of those forlorn, slight instrumentals of Andrew's; they can give you a rest from my voice or they can set a particular mood. 30 seconds in, it's interrupted by and gradually gives way to what sounds like an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner, or a relatively close airplane taking off, getting louder and louder until the end. Underneath the static sound is some sort of bubbling noise, like something nasty boiling over in a cauldron. The visual image I get is some sort of NHS advert where a pair of pink, healthy lungs get steadily darker and darker. I have nothing to do with these instrumentals but I believe there's a heavily masked sample of George Harrison mucking about with an early synthesiser somewhere in here. Andrew didn't have a title and I cheekily suggested the date QPR were relegated from the Premier League; instead he chose a more auspicious date from happier times.
How To Become A Cult Figure. The first thing you notice is that it's been a bit better recorded than the first album. The second thing you notice is my terrible lithp. Ith all over the plathe. A very good track and a very good lyric, some great images "to see your name in lights/to see heads on spikes" and a few funny punchlines, particularly the one about supporting Punch & Judy. The words are good but this is the start of me writing too many words, a habit I may never rid myself of. Six tightly-packed verses. I'm casting myself as Billy Liar/Don Quixote, scrimping and saving for a golden ticket to stardom, dreaming of escape from serfdom; but by the end the delusion has unravelled altogether and we're playing to three people in the back of a pub. Andrew said the musical concept was "Cheeky Girls beating up Joy Division". There's a pleasant bassline bouncing along but I detect more of the latter, and the sounds have a Martin Hannett quality. I remember Andrew and Susan working deep into the winter nights on this, chain-smoking Gitanes and trying to get the hi-hat sound just right. When the drum parts cut out for my last verse, the tambourine is a nice touch. As a postscript, when our third album came out last year Marc Riley started playing this track on his 6music show. We duly posted the third album, but I think I incurred displeasure by disingenously asking if the London address on the website was the best one to use.
The Immortals. Back to terse, snappy, bite-size pop after the preceding indulgence. Simple but effective. I got the idea after visiting Montparnasse Catacombs- a half-hour underground walk past thousands and thousands of human skeletons which are shocking at first, but by the end you feel quite used to them and as desensitised as Pol Pot. It got me thinking that death is the one absolute certainty in all our lives, yet we just try not to think about it. The sexual revolution brought so many taboos out in the open, and the one thing we're discouraged from thinking about is the big taboo that looms large over all of us. With all our diet fads and plastic surgery, we're trying to openly deny death- if we spend enough we can be young forever. When elderly women have surgery to make them look young it is of course unnatural and grotesque, so I drew on the immortals from Part III of Gullivers Travels, who get to about 80 then have to live on as their bodies stop working- blind and deaf, sitting around in a nappy. Great closing line; "the silicon melts and drips out of their arse". Underrated this one.
The Loneliest Man in Ancient Rome. This is a quite dancey number, Andrew invoking Prince/Hendrix. You almost can see Rome burning as the shrieking right-hand parts kick in. Nice tune running though his chorus part. I wrote this on the brink of a brief Roman fixation when I got really into I Claudius, etc. Gibbon talks about a Decius, who when people wanted to bump off the Emperor, made such an eloquent argument for keeping the Emperor that they chose him to take over the post. He did the decent thing in power and tried to suppress Christianity, but was soon killed in battle. I transported myself back in the guise of a minor poet called Mannero, who is more Nero than Decius. It's a silly, funny story straight out of Up Pompeii (or even I Claudius), a timid, lazy fool with no ambition ending up on the throne by a series of accidents. I'd been listening to Momus' time-travel period and wanting to write a travelogue like his 'London 1888' or 'Turban Disturbance' by the King of Luxembourg.
Serbian Warlord. Do do-do do-do do-do DO-do do-doo. Such a great tune and serious contender for my favourite of ours. The keyboard part never fails to put a smile on my face, it's up there with Enola Gay. Usually I'm the lyrical version of a musician who's so concerned with fancy chord changes that he neglects to put any energy, any testosterone into his music. I have a terrible habit of writing three times more words than I intend to, and getting bogged down with fully articulating my point- must explain, explain, explain. Better lyricists can express a point with one well-chosen image, or improve the song by leaving an element of mystery. This one is a winner because I picked a good catchphrase and kept dropping it in the whole way through. That's what pop songs need and unlike most of ours this one is an actual pop song. I got the idea when someone on livejournal did a poll for girls- would you prefer i) a boy who was rude, arrogant and scruffy, a messy slob who groped you in public or ii) a boy who was nice, clean-cut, faithful as a puppy and devoted to you? 90% of respondents chose i). I thought, if nasty boys get the girls wet, then genocidal tyrants must be the most lusted-after people in the world, and this Milosevic/Barry White hybrid character began to take shape in my head. Wilful cynicism. Also, Johnny gave me a compilation CD- there was a track I didn't much like, with the crooned refrain "I'll be your Corsican Dreamboat, baby"; subverting that gave me my catchphrase. I was having fun writing this album because I was using my imagination a bit more. Leaving the Shoreditch dole queue behind and going wherever I wanted. Pop as a kid dressing-up.
Oliver Cromwell in Weimar Berlin. The old chestnut of Puritanism v Decadence expressed through time-travel. Andrew had written the music for a previous lyric called 'Oliver Cromwell vs Chic' which was a bit plainer (in both versions I think it's a 0-0 draw). At the last minute I came across a library photo-book of 30s Berlin called Voluptuous Panic, and thought I could make it into a story. Despite all of this, the main influence is almost certainly The Wicker Man. The music is solemn, a slightly baroque feel to it. Goes from sublime to ridiculous in the space of two lines with a nod to the Romo manifesto ("We'll dance tonight if we're dying tomorrow") followed by that unfortunate pun about Cromwell's warts. Alex quickly picked me up on the blunder of Cromwell walking around with a religious icon in his pocket. One of our oddest.
The Male Gaze. Apologia for stalkers, voyeurs and curtain-twitchers. I really was overdoing it with the Momus. Cromwell's repressions are starting to leak out. When I was younger I idolised my crushes and here I seem to be stating a preference for the imagined version of the girl. Jolly unchivalrous. Lots of Haines allusions, two in the first line "We are all auteurs, but we don't like to talk about it" and I'm even quoting our old songs, the camera making love to Scarlett Johansson (this was post-Ghost World/Lost in Translation when she was still an actor, not a perfume advert). I also thought up a line that Andrew pointed out already existed, almost word-for-word, in a Sex Pistols song "If I ever had you you'd become real/Then you'd lose all your appeal". From the chopsticks and ticking-bomb intro through to the soaring, glittering chorus, I think the music is rather excellent. I always imagined this song would sound good on guitars.
Mickey Mouse. This lyric is more like the first album. After doing my imagined Grand Tour of Berlin, Rome and Serbia I'm back to bashing America and ranting about the capitalist spectacle. Slogans over stories. The idea came after watching a documentary about Bukowski in the ICA; they said he hated Mickey Mouse and would fly into a tantrum at his very mention. A passionate denunciation of Mickey Mouse might not be my finest hour, but it's interesting how I use him as a symbol for America and express admiration for its former days. Hard-working emigrants like the scrawnier, Chaplinesque Mickey of Steamboat Willie, starting from rags and using their guile to get on; then bloated, self-satisfied and doing nothing but consuming and polluting ("a smiling cretin with ears like dinner plates"). There's a fair bit of Scott Walker's 'Track 3' in the intro. The music has a sense of nauseous faux jollity, it's a bit green around the gills; fairground chords and drums that sound like your dad doing a spot of DIY. Reinforces the sense of Disneyland as a sterile utopia, which I presume it indeed is. This song is a sibling to 'The Immortals'. I like how the Disney characters mutate into characters from Friends at the end, but the Joy Division steal in the chorus got more attention; "Mickey Mouse waits at the gate with a smile/This is the way, step inside".
Life Should Mean Life. And this is a sibling to '...Cult Figure'; the only two on the album we recorded with Susan and a bit more crystalline sounding. More adornments. It's pretty but sinister and I don't start until a minute in. Good to give people a rest. Call bad cop out of the room and give them a glass of water, then send him back in. It's one of those many songs where I just had a title I wanted to use. I think there was a previous attempt to use the title (a really bad one) which jokily satirised the Daily Mail mentality. This one has a larger remit, it's about the way people condense all the ills of human nature into their demonised caricature of a criminal (whether Ian Huntley or Saddam), then exclude the criminal from society and kid themselves that everything's fine now. The reference to Oedipus is apt. It strays a little with the half-baked nod to environmentalism. Not a pop hit and it never went down well at gigs, but a quite thoughtful and stately piece for us.
Your Dinner Is On Page 22. Back to 'The Male Gaze', in expressing a preference for keeping my distance and idealising the girl, rather than risking anything. Tis better to have never loved and all that. I clearly had issues with vulnerability. The first two verses are very good. Busy, dramatic, music. When I first heard it, I think I briefly insisted we should offer this song to Kylie. By this late stage in the making of the album (only 'Serbian' was yet to be written) Sarah and I had broken up after 3 years and I was renting a room from a mad person at the top of a council high-rise. No jokes in this one; in my mind I'm a great tragic figure like King Lear. I wasn't very happy at the time. Most lyrics I concoct out of an idle, mischievous whim but there are a couple that I have almost vomited out with no prior warning and no idea where it came from. This is one. If something is causing you trauma I strongly recommend making it into a pop song (or sculpture or piano concerto or oil painting or casserole, whatever it is you do). It becomes a fixed artefact and you feel distance from it. Good for closure. There's a bit in Tristram Shandy; "I feel my pulse calming as I write it down..."
People tell me this is their least favourite of the three albums. I have a real soft spot for it, perhaps because of this. It's not as quintissential or idiosyncratic as CC but it's leaner and much more assured. Several of our best songs.
LUKE HAINES IS DEAD/ELVIS & THE BEATLES (second single)
Luke Haines Is Dead. I think this is my absolute favourite. Everything just fell into place. To me this song is great cinema, from the moment that twinkling riff comes on like the theme from The Exorcist. I make the pilgrimage to my hero's spiritual home of Brighton, I hunt him down, kill him, and possibly eat him- with the aim of taking his place. Pure parricide. It unfolds in 'real' time but it feels like a confession to the cops in a film noir. As if to back up my indolent claim to the throne, this is a rich lyric, allusions crammed in like sardines. Listening back now I can spot Graham Greene, Aeschylus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Conrad, Austen, Jack & the Beanstalk and too many pop songs to mention. "I smell the blood of an Englishman!". Andrew protested that whether Luke Haines lived or died was possibly the most irrelevant issue of the age, but inside my head it was a very big deal. Nevertheless I'm grateful that he gave this one music which just crackles with suspense. The title was the opening line of Paul Morley's Oliver Twist review but to my great agitation, in between us writing and releasing the song the line was also used to grace the title of Mr Haines' retrospective box-set. The subject of the song took it in good grace and asked us to support him at the ICA (resisting the temptation to tiptoe onstage, stare at us and wander off again during this song).
Elvis & The Beatles. This song ended up being the less-heralded component of the double A-side because of its artwork (a mock-up of The Queen is Dead's sleeve, with Mussolini's corpse replacing Alain Delon), but it had the last laugh as it was picked for the 3rd Angular compilation, where people actually heard it and it was praised by the Daily Telegraph, of all people. I'm really not sure what I'm getting at in this one. I do remember the origin; I was at home for Christmas and my parents were watching some documentary about the Beatles asking to meet Bob Dylan and going to India. I might be saying that if artists get to the stadium-filling level, they can't do anything interesting because it's a banal medium. Too much fanfare and merchandise and crap suffocating the art (even though I much prefer Elvis' syrupy Las Vegas jump-suit phase to his Sun Records output). Like Serbian Warlord, it works because it's simpler; repetition of catchphrases that will hook on in the listener's brain. It's one of my less "intellectual" lyrics but it seems to make for a better song. Dumb and simple = rock and roll. This time, though, the music is not simple. Mutant but oddly majestic, a bit like a national anthem heard underwater. Dustbin lid drums, more things slapped on with each chorus, like the song is under construction as it's being played (although it does very politely go quiet for that line).
SUSPENDED ON FULL PAY (third single)
Suspended on Full Pay. Another one I think of as a mini-film. It sounds rather sleazy. I was indulging my fantasies and thinking of ways in which one could make a living without having to get out of bed every morning and go some place where you do what you're told. In the news, people who have done terrible things get "suspended on full pay" and I always thought, how the hell is that a punishment? This character is living the dream; but all he does is get drunk and sleep. Staying in the house all day, he doesn't see anyone and he gets a bit cracked in the head- why is he setting stuff on fire, why is he afraid of the postman? (actually, this all sounds uncannily close to what I'm like when I'm off work). The music gives it a sordid air. There's lots of vocal double-tracking and I'm just noticing that each speaker plays an alternate line, suggesting multiple personality disorder. It's rather good. When I recorded the vocal, Andrew's instruction was to imagine myself "a hybrid of Peter Cook and Johnny". The last line of the middle eight was originally about shoving a computer up the woman's cunt (!), but Andrew exercised his power of veto.
Whore of Babylon. No disputing which one is the B-side this time. Slightly Vichy-by-numbers; again I had the phrase in my head and really wanted to use it as a song title. Turning the story of my coming to London into a Dick Whittington/Pinocchio thing, the innocent corrupted by the ruthless ways of the big city. This may date from the time Scarlet was introducing me to all those bad people in Soho members' bars. Where the titular whore comes in I don't know. I'd been single for a while, getting bored and wondering what was next. What an advertisment, though- "I'll read your bank statements, I'll text you incessantly/I'll be the most jealous lover you've ever had". The chorus tune is very good, plundering as it does Microdisney.