belated part 3
So a few months ago, I did posts where I copied some other people in bands by listening to my records and recording my thoughts. They were preceded by a flippant comment about the impossibilty of the albums ever resurfacing or getting put on iTunes. But as a result of the post, Angular offered to put all the albums on iTunes and they're out there now, soon to be followed by a new singles-and-rarities compilation and a brand new single. As the one that came out this week was the third album, I'm going to finish off what I left unfinished by listening to that one. I have chardonnay, I have strawberries and I have patience. I'll bloody need it.
WHITE ELEPHANT (3rd album)
So we've been around a while, put out the occasional single and twice thought "Oh, we seem to have accumulated an album's worth of unreleased songs here, let's call it an album, no-one will know the difference". We decide to make an album that has been planned ahead this time. I have vague ideas for a 'concept', but not the discipline to write a load of songs about the same theme. Sonically, Andrew is thinking of something lengthy and bloated; "let's skip London Calling and go straight onto our Sandinista". A blueprint emerges for an album that is half brilliant songs and half the band pissing about; think Dazzle Ships by OMD, Autoamerican by Blondie, The Who Sell Out. Andrew will cook up some instrumentals and he suggests that somewhere in the album, I should recite a short story accompanied only by the sound of rain hitting the window. What we end up with, ends up opening the album.
Death Of A Mummy's Boy. ...but I could have told you, Jamie, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. This is audacious to the point of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Our chef d'oeuvre opens with 30 seconds of a clock ticking, at which point it is joined by the ambient sound of a microphone stuck out the window- 30 more seconds of distant traffic over the tick-tock, then I barge in and announce that I have killed myself. Beat that John Cage. One of my favourite reviews said that this was a snarling guard dog trying to keep you away from the album. It probably worked. The track is some 8 minutes, a story about how I planned my suicide, carried it out, became a ghost, and found I still had to drift about London; slow, detailed and soft-spoken. The title is because we were both listening to Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man quite a lot. It was divided into chunks, and each 'chapter' has a different vocal EQ, giving it the feel of a radio play. There's a moment where I'm deciding whether to go through with it or not and my voice cracks; just through discomfort, but it sounds like I'm about to burst into tears. I'm glad I didn't ask to re-record that bit. It's probably not the greatest piece of writing but it's about loneliness; it's also taking the piss out of myself, taking the piss out of the romanticism of suicide and the egoism of the suicide (it ends with an invitation to my funeral; "maybe I'll see you there. But you won't see me". Isn't that just what the suicide wants?). If you feel like killing yourself, I thoroughly recommend doing it in a song. Everyone who hears it feels very sad but you still get to hear the birds singing/eat Haagen Dasz/watch child p0rn. It's littered with discreet references to my favourite films which no-one else will get. It's very, very odd.
The Exterminating Angel Of Greek Street. I'd like to think that this is a great POP song in any context, but after you've had to sit through eight minutes of a ticking clock and a whiny monologue, the effect is greatly amplified. Chunka-chunka-chunka drum intro and then chorus riff; it's still Vichy but if you've got this far, it's practically 'Dancing Queen'. This was inspired by meeting Scarlet and being initiated into the world of the Soho private members' club; you meet actors, novelists, journalists, directors, burlesque dancers, people off the telly, poets, jockeys, stuntmen, and they're all really friendly and really interested in you, and it's because they're all off their heads on cocaine. At first it's the most exhilirating experience, but it's fundamentally bogus and the novelty wears off. The narrator here is a puritanical barman, who one night poisons everybody's drinks and takes off into the night. The music is just right, it's like stripper muisc. It reminds me of the cowboy saloon plinky-plonky pianist they used to have in Gerry's. Andrew said he was going for a Goldfrapp parody. I had trouble recording the vocal because I was beset by hayfever and couldn't stop sniffing; but Andrew pointed out that this would cast yet another layer of ambiguity over the whole thing. I like my untrustworthy narrators.
The Greatest Gift Of All. The idea for this song came a long time before the song did. I was thinking, 'what can I do that will make everyone in the world hate me?' and the best I could come up with was a song asserting that God invented AIDS to punish the promiscuous. The trouble is that most of the world would probably agree. You play this song to 100 indifferent faces, and you realise that in this age of saturation it's impossible to offend people. Also, it's half one of those puritanical Vichy songs which is just a wish to become asexual and therefore immune to pain, and half one of those songs like 'I Control Discourse' where I'm playing the part of the illuminati drawing back the curtain and saying "here's how we control everything and fuck over you lot, aren't we clever". As a song, it's one of our most impressive but it's not one that's closest to my heart. I do like the final recording though; there was a demo version doing the rounds for ages, but for this one (brilliantly) Andrew borrowed his dad's keyboard to put on fake strings and brass sounds. By our usual standards it sounds like big-budget film stuff, whenever I hear the swelling chorus I see Eastern European mothers in headscarves ushering their children into the back of jeeps, under a panoramic darkening sky. If we're ever on the same bill as MFMO I shall angle for a collaboration. I like how in the 4th verse, the speaker dispenses with the morality talk and says- we're deterring Africa from using condoms because the world is overpopulated, there ain't enough resources, we like this standard of living and we're not prepared to give it up. Because I think that's what it boils down to. Micropenis reckoned this song sounded like Michael Jackson. I'm flattered, but I reckon they're wrong.
I'm Your Pimp. After two big hitters in a row, what you need is a novelty cover version. Comes from Ian HDIF's short-lived, poorly-attened HDIF spinoff, the Northern Soul Jukebox. The bloke from the Wigan Casino had written a book with the top 500 NS singles, and Ian had the lot; with lists on each table, so you could go up and request a number. Flicking through the list, the titles all blend into each other; Your Love Is Everything To Me, I Can't Live Without You, etc. Until you come to I'm Your Pimp by the Skullsnaps. We asked for it and it was actually pretty good; had a bit of an Edwin Starr vibe, plus the legendarily silly chorus "I'm your pimp/I wear my hat to the side/and I walk with a limp". Andrew finds it an aboslute pig to play (it's the 11.5 bar chorus apparently) and I had to rewrite all the verses, but here it is. At the time I just thought it was a good joke, but later I realised that in the age of Belle du Jour and her many imitators, prostitution is perceived as a very glamorous profession; the girl goes to a 5* hotel on Park Lane, some businessman gives her a bottle of Perrier-Jouet and an hour's cunnilingus, they exchange nonchalant Wildean one-liners and everyone goes home happy. Whereas in reality, for every girl like that there's probably 100 Albanian girls brought over on the slave trade, whose life is more Elisabeth Fritzl than Daisy Buchanan. My rewrite belongs firmly in the latter camp and I like to think it strikes a blow for truthfulness.
The Dog, The Divorcee and Me. One of the last songs which we bunged on in the final sprint. I wasn't producing many lyrics and there are two on here which are our only two where the music came before the lyric. It's a disorientating listen, quite ghostly. All the distortions and off-noises, and the vocal was recorded twice with no regard for synchronicity- one appears as the lead and one is muted and whispered behind it. Listening to this one is like having a poltergeist move all your possessions around. The lyric is about living at the top of a high-rise on Stamford Hill with a totally mad 50-something landlady who had spent most of her adult life in California, got divorced, come back to nurse her cancer-beset mum and taken over the flat. Her life revolved around a (probably cancer-beset) ancient dog called Nellie, whom she would dress in a tweed suit on Sundays. She seemed to spend all my rent on writers' workshops and pooch-grooming services. One night I came home, and she was smoking crack in the kitchen with a black man in a hoodie; she told me they were setting up a fashion label called Streetblack, and she was going to wear these urban hip-hop clothes and she was going to look good in them. And she'd like my permission to use Serbian Warlord as the catwalk music at their launch. One whole year I lived there. Anyway, as always I feel better now I've released a bitter song and got it all off my chest.
Winter Forever. Yet more arrows for St. Jamie. This is one of Andrew's prettiest; twinkling, brittle and crystalline. Reminded me of Bernard Hermann when I first heard it. The lyric was written post-painful breakup, and has me telling a totally fictitious suitress to go jump a fence, because my heart has been frozen and it will be Winter Forever. I knew very well that this was a rather preposterous statement for a 24-year-old, but hoped I might get a cool song out of it. It's pretty good but I can't relate to it much anymore. The thing is that my parents are freaks of nature, who have stayed together and never split up, so I always thought that every relationship that didn't last was a mistake and a failure. Which isn't right; times have changed and I live in this fucking awful google/MTV generation where people have a 3 second attention span and if it isn't perfect or they get bored, they will change their whole life at the drop of a hat; like a dog chasing its tail, never satisfied. So if you had a good time with someone, the correct response is to be grateful for that interlude in your miserable life. Seeing Michael Gambon perform Pinter's No Man's Land on New Year's Day this year, I remembered that I'd pinched the title from the end of that play. I remembered how unhappy I'd been at the time and smiled, thinking of how happy I was with how my life had turned out. Little did I know.
Joseph Losey. A love-letter/hagiography for my favourite director, focusing for some reason on the man in his deathbed, with flashbacks to his past triumphs, and insisting that although he was surrounded by loved ones he "died alone". This one of those tracks with triumphs by dint of Andrew's music being the polar opposite to what you'd expect. It's full of handclaps and magical space-chords and reminds me of the music to a video I had when I was a kid, about the planets of the solar system. With the 'died alone' thing, I think I was trying to put across the sense of gut-wrenching angst that you get from his films; the characters inhabit a cruel, unsentimental world. The preposterous outro where I declare that he pisses over Orson Welles, Hitchcock, Bunuel and Godard is just a wish to redress the cinematic annals that usually disregard him altogether. I'm just glad I fitted in the pun, "He cast the girls and made them cry".
Little Fishes. Here endeth side Two. This is one of my all-time favourites. A few people who heard the album told me that they hated it, which of course makes me love it all the more. I gave Andrew a lyric that was an attempt to splice 'The Magnificent Seven' by the Clash with 'The Cat in the Hat' by Dr Seuss. It was so sprawling and disordered that he chopped it up in two- the verses make a song that sounds like Vera Lynn covering 'Daydream' by the Lovin Spoonful, and the choruses make a song that sounds like the best 90 second pop song Suicide never wrote. We stuck them together and this is the result. The whole describes my philosophy and worldview so perfectly that I have nothing but love for this song. Especially the bit about Jesus returning to Earth and giving the expectant crowds the latest Ladbrokes odds on Chelsea's next Champions' League fixture. I like nothing better than finishing gigs with the second part of the song and then walking offstage.
Picnic at Dzershinsk. A lovely music-box instrumental to give people a rest from my voice (with a reprise of the ticking clock to make them think "Oh god, not again..."). My original title was 'Picnic on Pitcairn' and this is apparently what you still get if you put the CD into an Internet-connected computer. Later the picnic was set in Amritsar, where the British Empire gunned down a peaceful protest, and eventually Andrew suggested the world's most polluted city. A quick consultation of the Internet nominated Chernobyl -a bit clichéd, n'est pas?- but Dzerzhinsk came in 2nd. Russian city where the men are all impotent, the life expectancy is 42 and everyone's utterly miserable. A few months later the Daily Telegraph produced this article http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/adrian_blomfield/blog/2007/11/05/doom_and_gloom_in_dzerzhinsk_ and I was chuffed to my bollocks. I'd love to visit it one day.
Abusive Childhood Narrative. My favourite song on the album and I think the NME were correct in identifying it as the stand-out track. It was prescient in that I wrote it with the Dave Pelzer craze in mind, but still a full year before all the UK's misery memoirs started pouring out at a weekly rate. Absolutely spot on. I mentioned to Kasia that I was thinking about telling the story of some bloke who'd had a privileged, silver-spoon upbringing, then written several bestsellers in which he completely pretended he'd been abused as a child. She looked shocked and said that would be a terrible thing to do, and I knew there and then that I was onto something. All the reviews misunderstood this song, saying it was about a wicked person who made money by making up this abusive childhood. My point was that I would doff my cap to anyone with the genius and audacity to carry this off. Why not lie to people? The media lies to us on an hourly basis. If you see a gap in the market and run with it, good luck to you! I wish I was half as clever as you! It may not be our most pop tune but it sounds rather like Pulp circa Intro and that'll do nicely for me. I was a few couplets short when it came to recording so this is the only track where Andrew wrote a few of the lyrics. My favourite line is "Our civilisation is built on lies/Jesus didn't really rise". Later on I learnt that this song had a real-life counterpart. Some bloke in America wrote a junkie/convict memoir called A Million Little Pieces that had been championed by the Oprah book group; then when it was exposed as total fiction, he'd been frogmarched back onto the Oprah show for a character assassination. Yet the text they so loved hadn't changed by one word. So much for Barthes. I'll never meet that bloke and I'll never read his book, but if I did meet him I'd buy him a drink.
Tristana. More light relief, back to minimalist Vichy. I'm told that the first time Johnny heard it, he correctly idenitified the main riff as 'Voulez-vous' by Abba. This one is stark but quite disco-flavoured, and made by the mirrorball sound over the middle section. Lyrically it's an autistically straightforward synopsis of the Bunuel/Deneuve vehicle of the same name; Tristana stands aloof as Fernando Rey's dandyish rake enjoys dominion over her, then gets old and frail and becomes servile putty in her hands. Equal parts self-justification and self-hatred, but it's tied up at the end by an admission that the exploited and the exploiter are equally co-dependent and equally miserable, caught in this thing which one prescient git decided, one fine day, to label 'the human condition'.
My Mail-Order Bride. This was the single. It's dumb pop joy and just as good, by those criteria, as Serbian Warlord; yet people didn't love it to the same degree. One comes off as joyful, the other as sour and malovelent. Perhaps it's something in the human psyche that to kill 1,000,000 people is a grand old laugh, but to kill one person is a shocking abomination. Andrew's musical blueprint was "if Rape Me by Nirvana had been on the first Spandau album" and it's got a fabulous snake-charmerish riff running through it. I think it's about globalisation. The woman marries the bloke to get out of working in awful conditions in a Gap factory, the man is in it to get his pound of flesh, and they're totally (rightfully) distrustful of each other the entire time. I was quite proud that the one lyric to get quoted by the NME was "when it comes to love, you can be slave or slave trader". The long-suffering K always hated this song because it quoted the line she used the first time we broke up, and in a wish to homage ABC/make further mischief, Andrew got Louise from Micropenis to deliver it on the final version.
Poor Little Chelsea Fan. Here you see the evolution of Side Three; from abused child, to abused woman who turns the tables, to abusive husband, to murderer of a total stranger. This is a story about a Chelsea-supporting corporate exec who gets to watch Spurs v Chelsea in an 'executive box'. Chelsea destroy Spurs and he leaves with a big smile on his face; when his car breaks down somewhere in Seven Sisters, the Spurs-supporting hoodies from the local council estate clock his shirt and scarf, and he meets a violent death. It's slightly 'Common People'. Very slightly. Songs are good arenas for wish-fulfilment, and it's all too well-documented how we went 50 games or whatever it was without beating Chelsea. To his credit, Andrew was presented with a lyric that glorified football hooliganism; his first thought was 'Pet Shop Boys', but he ended up making it aound as much like Sly & The Family Stone as possible. Result, another mutant classic.
Fatalism (Teasmaid Forks A). This is another almost-improvised last minute job. I think Andrew was expecting it to be instrumental and I managed to force out a lyric whilst sitting in bed, the morning before I travelled up to record my last lot of vocals. I'd just read 'Jacques Le Fataliste' by Diderot and was still possessed by its spirit. It's more of a fragment than a full song but I think it's very good, love the interplay between the helicopter sounds and the breakdanceish drums. The only track that no reviews mentioned I think. The subtitle is Andrew's and it's better unexplained.
Amnesia Day. Joe D from Angular recommends this song to everyone because "it sounds like When The Going Gets Tough by Billy Ocean". He's kinda right. It's a good piece of music and unlike most of this album, we played it live quite a lot, but I partly regret it. My two motivations were to have a go at patriotism (you happened by chance to have been born here rather than there, what are you proud of? What have you done to puff your chest out?) and to say that the way in which we hold aloft the Nazi holocaust as a gobsmacking example of something called Evil is reductive. Really it was an old-fashioned pogrom with the addition of a railway network, and when I look at our history I find it the norm rather than an exception. We've all been subconsciously trained to think of Hitler when we think of Germany, but when we think of America it's Mickey Mouse rather than Hiroshima. The krauts get the guilt and we get clean hands and consciences. So we have Remembrance Sunday once a year, and Amnesia Day the other 364. But the way I phrased it, it came out as British Empire bashing and Neil Scott was right to admonish me that "I think you'll find the murder rate was much higher in those countries pre-British Empire".
Memo From Turner. I've never liked the Rolling Stones. When Andrew was, to my surprise, up for doing I'm Your Pimp, it turned out to be a bargaining chip for also covering a bloody Mick Jagger song (from the admittedly excellent film Performance film). Actually I think our version is brilliant. Andrew said he wanted it to sound "as stilted as possible". I had one look at the lyric and thought 'I'm not singing that' so almost every line got re-written. I wasn't chuffed about doing a Mick Jagger song but I think that's what makes it what it is. To replace all the 'Mad Cyril' adlibs from the film, I filled up the long instrumental break with quotes by Dirk Bogarde from the time James Fox, covered in tie-dyed rags, denim and flowers, brought Jagger, Richards and Faithfull to the premiere of Accident; "Oh god. If you must do that sort of thing, do it in the lavatories. Do get washed, have a haircut, and choose new friends." The last minute-and-a-half consist of a guitar solo by Rob Resistance that sounds more like someone doing the hoovering than a guitar solo. Lovely waves and washes of feedback. Anyway, if you ever long to hear me lisping "You're a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of dick", now you can!
We Have An Open Relationship. This is one of the strongest songs on the album and it's a shame that it got buried at the end -track 17- where surely only the nutcases are going to hear it. Very much a live favourite nonetheless. It's a twin of '...Page 22' in that it wasn't pre-conceived but burst out of me from nowhere. The music is sombre, stately and like 'White Car In Germany' by the Associates; the lyric is an instruction in getting 70s MOR pop stars to carry out Jihad against the general public. I'm still not sure what I'm trying to say in this one but I do remember the great opening line, "I like to see a good clean hanging", sticking in my head after I watched a rubbish Western with Jimmy Stewart at 2am on BBC2 one night. People often ask how the title relates to the song and I've never given a straight answer.
The Teams That Meet In The Blue Legume. It ends with an Andrew instrumental, humming and seasick. The feeling I get from this track is what I imagine it to be like living on barbiturates (or heroin); not completely there, a bit spaced-out, seeing things. It makes me think of the more psychedelic moments from the original, 1960s, red-jumper Star Trek. The title came after I was having lunch in the very poncey yummy-mummy Church St cafe of the same name, and some Spanish goth-mettlers at the next table were plotting out a strategy for their band to achieve world domination. Apologies to Kevin Rowland. But I like how the track is pretty much the same all the way through for five minutes, and when you think time has stopped and it will go on forever, it draws to a halt with about three seconds' notice. Time gentlemen please.
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'Bonus' tracks- our new single
The Man Delusion. This the one that 'unblocked' me after the exertion of finishing WE led to a full year of writing absolutely nothing. It took the smugness of the militant atheist movement to do it; although I quite enjoyed their books when the whole thing started up, they soon turned the air a bit acrid. Attending Mr Ince's atheist love-ins at Christmas confirmed my conviction that the movement was asking for a bloody nose. The song attacks humanism more than atheism, but they seemed like good stooges on which to hang the argument. As with a few of the new songs, a lot of the ideas are actually pinched off Grauniad favourite John Gray, whose Straw Dogs and Black Mass I read and found myself quite in agreement with. I would like to kid myself that this song combines the assured expertise of late-period TVG with the raw hatred of our first album. What I like about the recording is that it sounds like a different band; the verses having a slightly out-of-tune piano sound, then the catchy chorus riff all distorted like it's come through a pencil sharpener and it makes a world of difference. Ear rape; quite horrible sounding. I played it to Ciaran and Gareth last time I went to Belfast; Ciaran called it 'punk rock' and Gareth called it 'Jefferson Airplane', so maybe it sounds like several different bands. Anyway, our first mini-manifesto for a while and hopefully a reason to be optimistic.
Flytipping. Light relief after the unforgiving Art Statement of the first track. Andrew said he was aiming for Chas & Dave, and the song is rather dominated by that big, bouncy monster riff running through it. I like the celestial, butter-wouldn't-melt intro and outro too. I had to have a few goes at recording the vocal as I needed to be "more Arthur Daley". The lyric is a freelance flytipper stating his terms to a potential client then justifying his livelihood by setting out his amoral philosophy. The steals from other songs have proved popular so far; "Flytipping deserves a quiet night/Past the leisure centre, left at the lights". I think I was provoked to write it because the corner of the quiet Hackney cul-de-sac where I then lived would acquire a new mattress/70s televsion/washing machine every two or three days, but I have a certain fondness for the narrator here. He's a bastard but he does at least live his life according to a concrete philosophy, and how many of us can claim the same?
WHITE ELEPHANT (3rd album)
So we've been around a while, put out the occasional single and twice thought "Oh, we seem to have accumulated an album's worth of unreleased songs here, let's call it an album, no-one will know the difference". We decide to make an album that has been planned ahead this time. I have vague ideas for a 'concept', but not the discipline to write a load of songs about the same theme. Sonically, Andrew is thinking of something lengthy and bloated; "let's skip London Calling and go straight onto our Sandinista". A blueprint emerges for an album that is half brilliant songs and half the band pissing about; think Dazzle Ships by OMD, Autoamerican by Blondie, The Who Sell Out. Andrew will cook up some instrumentals and he suggests that somewhere in the album, I should recite a short story accompanied only by the sound of rain hitting the window. What we end up with, ends up opening the album.
Death Of A Mummy's Boy. ...but I could have told you, Jamie, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. This is audacious to the point of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Our chef d'oeuvre opens with 30 seconds of a clock ticking, at which point it is joined by the ambient sound of a microphone stuck out the window- 30 more seconds of distant traffic over the tick-tock, then I barge in and announce that I have killed myself. Beat that John Cage. One of my favourite reviews said that this was a snarling guard dog trying to keep you away from the album. It probably worked. The track is some 8 minutes, a story about how I planned my suicide, carried it out, became a ghost, and found I still had to drift about London; slow, detailed and soft-spoken. The title is because we were both listening to Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man quite a lot. It was divided into chunks, and each 'chapter' has a different vocal EQ, giving it the feel of a radio play. There's a moment where I'm deciding whether to go through with it or not and my voice cracks; just through discomfort, but it sounds like I'm about to burst into tears. I'm glad I didn't ask to re-record that bit. It's probably not the greatest piece of writing but it's about loneliness; it's also taking the piss out of myself, taking the piss out of the romanticism of suicide and the egoism of the suicide (it ends with an invitation to my funeral; "maybe I'll see you there. But you won't see me". Isn't that just what the suicide wants?). If you feel like killing yourself, I thoroughly recommend doing it in a song. Everyone who hears it feels very sad but you still get to hear the birds singing/eat Haagen Dasz/watch child p0rn. It's littered with discreet references to my favourite films which no-one else will get. It's very, very odd.
The Exterminating Angel Of Greek Street. I'd like to think that this is a great POP song in any context, but after you've had to sit through eight minutes of a ticking clock and a whiny monologue, the effect is greatly amplified. Chunka-chunka-chunka drum intro and then chorus riff; it's still Vichy but if you've got this far, it's practically 'Dancing Queen'. This was inspired by meeting Scarlet and being initiated into the world of the Soho private members' club; you meet actors, novelists, journalists, directors, burlesque dancers, people off the telly, poets, jockeys, stuntmen, and they're all really friendly and really interested in you, and it's because they're all off their heads on cocaine. At first it's the most exhilirating experience, but it's fundamentally bogus and the novelty wears off. The narrator here is a puritanical barman, who one night poisons everybody's drinks and takes off into the night. The music is just right, it's like stripper muisc. It reminds me of the cowboy saloon plinky-plonky pianist they used to have in Gerry's. Andrew said he was going for a Goldfrapp parody. I had trouble recording the vocal because I was beset by hayfever and couldn't stop sniffing; but Andrew pointed out that this would cast yet another layer of ambiguity over the whole thing. I like my untrustworthy narrators.
The Greatest Gift Of All. The idea for this song came a long time before the song did. I was thinking, 'what can I do that will make everyone in the world hate me?' and the best I could come up with was a song asserting that God invented AIDS to punish the promiscuous. The trouble is that most of the world would probably agree. You play this song to 100 indifferent faces, and you realise that in this age of saturation it's impossible to offend people. Also, it's half one of those puritanical Vichy songs which is just a wish to become asexual and therefore immune to pain, and half one of those songs like 'I Control Discourse' where I'm playing the part of the illuminati drawing back the curtain and saying "here's how we control everything and fuck over you lot, aren't we clever". As a song, it's one of our most impressive but it's not one that's closest to my heart. I do like the final recording though; there was a demo version doing the rounds for ages, but for this one (brilliantly) Andrew borrowed his dad's keyboard to put on fake strings and brass sounds. By our usual standards it sounds like big-budget film stuff, whenever I hear the swelling chorus I see Eastern European mothers in headscarves ushering their children into the back of jeeps, under a panoramic darkening sky. If we're ever on the same bill as MFMO I shall angle for a collaboration. I like how in the 4th verse, the speaker dispenses with the morality talk and says- we're deterring Africa from using condoms because the world is overpopulated, there ain't enough resources, we like this standard of living and we're not prepared to give it up. Because I think that's what it boils down to. Micropenis reckoned this song sounded like Michael Jackson. I'm flattered, but I reckon they're wrong.
I'm Your Pimp. After two big hitters in a row, what you need is a novelty cover version. Comes from Ian HDIF's short-lived, poorly-attened HDIF spinoff, the Northern Soul Jukebox. The bloke from the Wigan Casino had written a book with the top 500 NS singles, and Ian had the lot; with lists on each table, so you could go up and request a number. Flicking through the list, the titles all blend into each other; Your Love Is Everything To Me, I Can't Live Without You, etc. Until you come to I'm Your Pimp by the Skullsnaps. We asked for it and it was actually pretty good; had a bit of an Edwin Starr vibe, plus the legendarily silly chorus "I'm your pimp/I wear my hat to the side/and I walk with a limp". Andrew finds it an aboslute pig to play (it's the 11.5 bar chorus apparently) and I had to rewrite all the verses, but here it is. At the time I just thought it was a good joke, but later I realised that in the age of Belle du Jour and her many imitators, prostitution is perceived as a very glamorous profession; the girl goes to a 5* hotel on Park Lane, some businessman gives her a bottle of Perrier-Jouet and an hour's cunnilingus, they exchange nonchalant Wildean one-liners and everyone goes home happy. Whereas in reality, for every girl like that there's probably 100 Albanian girls brought over on the slave trade, whose life is more Elisabeth Fritzl than Daisy Buchanan. My rewrite belongs firmly in the latter camp and I like to think it strikes a blow for truthfulness.
The Dog, The Divorcee and Me. One of the last songs which we bunged on in the final sprint. I wasn't producing many lyrics and there are two on here which are our only two where the music came before the lyric. It's a disorientating listen, quite ghostly. All the distortions and off-noises, and the vocal was recorded twice with no regard for synchronicity- one appears as the lead and one is muted and whispered behind it. Listening to this one is like having a poltergeist move all your possessions around. The lyric is about living at the top of a high-rise on Stamford Hill with a totally mad 50-something landlady who had spent most of her adult life in California, got divorced, come back to nurse her cancer-beset mum and taken over the flat. Her life revolved around a (probably cancer-beset) ancient dog called Nellie, whom she would dress in a tweed suit on Sundays. She seemed to spend all my rent on writers' workshops and pooch-grooming services. One night I came home, and she was smoking crack in the kitchen with a black man in a hoodie; she told me they were setting up a fashion label called Streetblack, and she was going to wear these urban hip-hop clothes and she was going to look good in them. And she'd like my permission to use Serbian Warlord as the catwalk music at their launch. One whole year I lived there. Anyway, as always I feel better now I've released a bitter song and got it all off my chest.
Winter Forever. Yet more arrows for St. Jamie. This is one of Andrew's prettiest; twinkling, brittle and crystalline. Reminded me of Bernard Hermann when I first heard it. The lyric was written post-painful breakup, and has me telling a totally fictitious suitress to go jump a fence, because my heart has been frozen and it will be Winter Forever. I knew very well that this was a rather preposterous statement for a 24-year-old, but hoped I might get a cool song out of it. It's pretty good but I can't relate to it much anymore. The thing is that my parents are freaks of nature, who have stayed together and never split up, so I always thought that every relationship that didn't last was a mistake and a failure. Which isn't right; times have changed and I live in this fucking awful google/MTV generation where people have a 3 second attention span and if it isn't perfect or they get bored, they will change their whole life at the drop of a hat; like a dog chasing its tail, never satisfied. So if you had a good time with someone, the correct response is to be grateful for that interlude in your miserable life. Seeing Michael Gambon perform Pinter's No Man's Land on New Year's Day this year, I remembered that I'd pinched the title from the end of that play. I remembered how unhappy I'd been at the time and smiled, thinking of how happy I was with how my life had turned out. Little did I know.
Joseph Losey. A love-letter/hagiography for my favourite director, focusing for some reason on the man in his deathbed, with flashbacks to his past triumphs, and insisting that although he was surrounded by loved ones he "died alone". This one of those tracks with triumphs by dint of Andrew's music being the polar opposite to what you'd expect. It's full of handclaps and magical space-chords and reminds me of the music to a video I had when I was a kid, about the planets of the solar system. With the 'died alone' thing, I think I was trying to put across the sense of gut-wrenching angst that you get from his films; the characters inhabit a cruel, unsentimental world. The preposterous outro where I declare that he pisses over Orson Welles, Hitchcock, Bunuel and Godard is just a wish to redress the cinematic annals that usually disregard him altogether. I'm just glad I fitted in the pun, "He cast the girls and made them cry".
Little Fishes. Here endeth side Two. This is one of my all-time favourites. A few people who heard the album told me that they hated it, which of course makes me love it all the more. I gave Andrew a lyric that was an attempt to splice 'The Magnificent Seven' by the Clash with 'The Cat in the Hat' by Dr Seuss. It was so sprawling and disordered that he chopped it up in two- the verses make a song that sounds like Vera Lynn covering 'Daydream' by the Lovin Spoonful, and the choruses make a song that sounds like the best 90 second pop song Suicide never wrote. We stuck them together and this is the result. The whole describes my philosophy and worldview so perfectly that I have nothing but love for this song. Especially the bit about Jesus returning to Earth and giving the expectant crowds the latest Ladbrokes odds on Chelsea's next Champions' League fixture. I like nothing better than finishing gigs with the second part of the song and then walking offstage.
Picnic at Dzershinsk. A lovely music-box instrumental to give people a rest from my voice (with a reprise of the ticking clock to make them think "Oh god, not again..."). My original title was 'Picnic on Pitcairn' and this is apparently what you still get if you put the CD into an Internet-connected computer. Later the picnic was set in Amritsar, where the British Empire gunned down a peaceful protest, and eventually Andrew suggested the world's most polluted city. A quick consultation of the Internet nominated Chernobyl -a bit clichéd, n'est pas?- but Dzerzhinsk came in 2nd. Russian city where the men are all impotent, the life expectancy is 42 and everyone's utterly miserable. A few months later the Daily Telegraph produced this article http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/adrian_blomfield/blog/2007/11/05/doom_and_gloom_in_dzerzhinsk_ and I was chuffed to my bollocks. I'd love to visit it one day.
Abusive Childhood Narrative. My favourite song on the album and I think the NME were correct in identifying it as the stand-out track. It was prescient in that I wrote it with the Dave Pelzer craze in mind, but still a full year before all the UK's misery memoirs started pouring out at a weekly rate. Absolutely spot on. I mentioned to Kasia that I was thinking about telling the story of some bloke who'd had a privileged, silver-spoon upbringing, then written several bestsellers in which he completely pretended he'd been abused as a child. She looked shocked and said that would be a terrible thing to do, and I knew there and then that I was onto something. All the reviews misunderstood this song, saying it was about a wicked person who made money by making up this abusive childhood. My point was that I would doff my cap to anyone with the genius and audacity to carry this off. Why not lie to people? The media lies to us on an hourly basis. If you see a gap in the market and run with it, good luck to you! I wish I was half as clever as you! It may not be our most pop tune but it sounds rather like Pulp circa Intro and that'll do nicely for me. I was a few couplets short when it came to recording so this is the only track where Andrew wrote a few of the lyrics. My favourite line is "Our civilisation is built on lies/Jesus didn't really rise". Later on I learnt that this song had a real-life counterpart. Some bloke in America wrote a junkie/convict memoir called A Million Little Pieces that had been championed by the Oprah book group; then when it was exposed as total fiction, he'd been frogmarched back onto the Oprah show for a character assassination. Yet the text they so loved hadn't changed by one word. So much for Barthes. I'll never meet that bloke and I'll never read his book, but if I did meet him I'd buy him a drink.
Tristana. More light relief, back to minimalist Vichy. I'm told that the first time Johnny heard it, he correctly idenitified the main riff as 'Voulez-vous' by Abba. This one is stark but quite disco-flavoured, and made by the mirrorball sound over the middle section. Lyrically it's an autistically straightforward synopsis of the Bunuel/Deneuve vehicle of the same name; Tristana stands aloof as Fernando Rey's dandyish rake enjoys dominion over her, then gets old and frail and becomes servile putty in her hands. Equal parts self-justification and self-hatred, but it's tied up at the end by an admission that the exploited and the exploiter are equally co-dependent and equally miserable, caught in this thing which one prescient git decided, one fine day, to label 'the human condition'.
My Mail-Order Bride. This was the single. It's dumb pop joy and just as good, by those criteria, as Serbian Warlord; yet people didn't love it to the same degree. One comes off as joyful, the other as sour and malovelent. Perhaps it's something in the human psyche that to kill 1,000,000 people is a grand old laugh, but to kill one person is a shocking abomination. Andrew's musical blueprint was "if Rape Me by Nirvana had been on the first Spandau album" and it's got a fabulous snake-charmerish riff running through it. I think it's about globalisation. The woman marries the bloke to get out of working in awful conditions in a Gap factory, the man is in it to get his pound of flesh, and they're totally (rightfully) distrustful of each other the entire time. I was quite proud that the one lyric to get quoted by the NME was "when it comes to love, you can be slave or slave trader". The long-suffering K always hated this song because it quoted the line she used the first time we broke up, and in a wish to homage ABC/make further mischief, Andrew got Louise from Micropenis to deliver it on the final version.
Poor Little Chelsea Fan. Here you see the evolution of Side Three; from abused child, to abused woman who turns the tables, to abusive husband, to murderer of a total stranger. This is a story about a Chelsea-supporting corporate exec who gets to watch Spurs v Chelsea in an 'executive box'. Chelsea destroy Spurs and he leaves with a big smile on his face; when his car breaks down somewhere in Seven Sisters, the Spurs-supporting hoodies from the local council estate clock his shirt and scarf, and he meets a violent death. It's slightly 'Common People'. Very slightly. Songs are good arenas for wish-fulfilment, and it's all too well-documented how we went 50 games or whatever it was without beating Chelsea. To his credit, Andrew was presented with a lyric that glorified football hooliganism; his first thought was 'Pet Shop Boys', but he ended up making it aound as much like Sly & The Family Stone as possible. Result, another mutant classic.
Fatalism (Teasmaid Forks A). This is another almost-improvised last minute job. I think Andrew was expecting it to be instrumental and I managed to force out a lyric whilst sitting in bed, the morning before I travelled up to record my last lot of vocals. I'd just read 'Jacques Le Fataliste' by Diderot and was still possessed by its spirit. It's more of a fragment than a full song but I think it's very good, love the interplay between the helicopter sounds and the breakdanceish drums. The only track that no reviews mentioned I think. The subtitle is Andrew's and it's better unexplained.
Amnesia Day. Joe D from Angular recommends this song to everyone because "it sounds like When The Going Gets Tough by Billy Ocean". He's kinda right. It's a good piece of music and unlike most of this album, we played it live quite a lot, but I partly regret it. My two motivations were to have a go at patriotism (you happened by chance to have been born here rather than there, what are you proud of? What have you done to puff your chest out?) and to say that the way in which we hold aloft the Nazi holocaust as a gobsmacking example of something called Evil is reductive. Really it was an old-fashioned pogrom with the addition of a railway network, and when I look at our history I find it the norm rather than an exception. We've all been subconsciously trained to think of Hitler when we think of Germany, but when we think of America it's Mickey Mouse rather than Hiroshima. The krauts get the guilt and we get clean hands and consciences. So we have Remembrance Sunday once a year, and Amnesia Day the other 364. But the way I phrased it, it came out as British Empire bashing and Neil Scott was right to admonish me that "I think you'll find the murder rate was much higher in those countries pre-British Empire".
Memo From Turner. I've never liked the Rolling Stones. When Andrew was, to my surprise, up for doing I'm Your Pimp, it turned out to be a bargaining chip for also covering a bloody Mick Jagger song (from the admittedly excellent film Performance film). Actually I think our version is brilliant. Andrew said he wanted it to sound "as stilted as possible". I had one look at the lyric and thought 'I'm not singing that' so almost every line got re-written. I wasn't chuffed about doing a Mick Jagger song but I think that's what makes it what it is. To replace all the 'Mad Cyril' adlibs from the film, I filled up the long instrumental break with quotes by Dirk Bogarde from the time James Fox, covered in tie-dyed rags, denim and flowers, brought Jagger, Richards and Faithfull to the premiere of Accident; "Oh god. If you must do that sort of thing, do it in the lavatories. Do get washed, have a haircut, and choose new friends." The last minute-and-a-half consist of a guitar solo by Rob Resistance that sounds more like someone doing the hoovering than a guitar solo. Lovely waves and washes of feedback. Anyway, if you ever long to hear me lisping "You're a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of dick", now you can!
We Have An Open Relationship. This is one of the strongest songs on the album and it's a shame that it got buried at the end -track 17- where surely only the nutcases are going to hear it. Very much a live favourite nonetheless. It's a twin of '...Page 22' in that it wasn't pre-conceived but burst out of me from nowhere. The music is sombre, stately and like 'White Car In Germany' by the Associates; the lyric is an instruction in getting 70s MOR pop stars to carry out Jihad against the general public. I'm still not sure what I'm trying to say in this one but I do remember the great opening line, "I like to see a good clean hanging", sticking in my head after I watched a rubbish Western with Jimmy Stewart at 2am on BBC2 one night. People often ask how the title relates to the song and I've never given a straight answer.
The Teams That Meet In The Blue Legume. It ends with an Andrew instrumental, humming and seasick. The feeling I get from this track is what I imagine it to be like living on barbiturates (or heroin); not completely there, a bit spaced-out, seeing things. It makes me think of the more psychedelic moments from the original, 1960s, red-jumper Star Trek. The title came after I was having lunch in the very poncey yummy-mummy Church St cafe of the same name, and some Spanish goth-mettlers at the next table were plotting out a strategy for their band to achieve world domination. Apologies to Kevin Rowland. But I like how the track is pretty much the same all the way through for five minutes, and when you think time has stopped and it will go on forever, it draws to a halt with about three seconds' notice. Time gentlemen please.
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'Bonus' tracks- our new single
The Man Delusion. This the one that 'unblocked' me after the exertion of finishing WE led to a full year of writing absolutely nothing. It took the smugness of the militant atheist movement to do it; although I quite enjoyed their books when the whole thing started up, they soon turned the air a bit acrid. Attending Mr Ince's atheist love-ins at Christmas confirmed my conviction that the movement was asking for a bloody nose. The song attacks humanism more than atheism, but they seemed like good stooges on which to hang the argument. As with a few of the new songs, a lot of the ideas are actually pinched off Grauniad favourite John Gray, whose Straw Dogs and Black Mass I read and found myself quite in agreement with. I would like to kid myself that this song combines the assured expertise of late-period TVG with the raw hatred of our first album. What I like about the recording is that it sounds like a different band; the verses having a slightly out-of-tune piano sound, then the catchy chorus riff all distorted like it's come through a pencil sharpener and it makes a world of difference. Ear rape; quite horrible sounding. I played it to Ciaran and Gareth last time I went to Belfast; Ciaran called it 'punk rock' and Gareth called it 'Jefferson Airplane', so maybe it sounds like several different bands. Anyway, our first mini-manifesto for a while and hopefully a reason to be optimistic.
Flytipping. Light relief after the unforgiving Art Statement of the first track. Andrew said he was aiming for Chas & Dave, and the song is rather dominated by that big, bouncy monster riff running through it. I like the celestial, butter-wouldn't-melt intro and outro too. I had to have a few goes at recording the vocal as I needed to be "more Arthur Daley". The lyric is a freelance flytipper stating his terms to a potential client then justifying his livelihood by setting out his amoral philosophy. The steals from other songs have proved popular so far; "Flytipping deserves a quiet night/Past the leisure centre, left at the lights". I think I was provoked to write it because the corner of the quiet Hackney cul-de-sac where I then lived would acquire a new mattress/70s televsion/washing machine every two or three days, but I have a certain fondness for the narrator here. He's a bastard but he does at least live his life according to a concrete philosophy, and how many of us can claim the same?