Another Flashback Friday...
Continuing the series of "Flashback Fridays" - listening to an old album on my discman to and from work in order to relive and enjoy once more the tracks and times of days long gone:
Flashback Friday Number 11 - "Whatever And Ever Amen" by Ben Folds Five
Ben Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee. Three Americans called Ben Folds Five. But there's a lot more to the band than the joke behind their name. They take me back to a time of my life that started out stressful but ended on a high note. Pull up a pew and I'll explain.
I first saw Ben Folds Five on “Top Of The Pops” in the spring of 1998. They were performing “Brick” which is a very slow, mournful song about abortion. It captivated me as soon as I heard it and it made me find out as much as I could about the band. Surprised to find “Whatever And Ever Amen” in Wolverhampton Central Library, I decided to borrow it, expecting much more of the same mellow sound that I had heard on TV. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are a few mournful, chilled out tracks on the album but the majority of it encapsulates happy, funny, feelgood tracks, the like of which I had never heard before. I remember the opening track “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” totally blowing me away with its hilarious up-tempo loudness, leaving me to think that if the rest of the album followed suit, it definitely wouldn’t be a bad thing! One of the great things about the album was that it sounded so real. Recorded in Ben’s house, the band weren’t afraid to leave in their chatter of approval at the end of tracks such as “I like that one” following “One Angry Dwarf…”or “I liked that one too” following the highly under-rated “Fair”. The reality of it all reaches new heights when crickets can be heard buzzing around in the background of “Cigarette” and Ben’s phone can be heard ringing in the middle of “Steven’s Last Night In Town”. It happens exactly as the music pauses before kicking in again. It sounds so perfect you would have thought they had meant it but Rob’s laughter at this freaky moment proves just how real it all is.
I was at university when I got into Ben Folds Five and one of my assignments at that time was a 3D animation group project. Each person had to design something of attraction within the Midlands and then the 3D models had to be incorporated into an animated showcase for the tourism of the area. I designed an old steam train to promote the Severn Valley Railway and every day for around a week, our team decided to meet at my friend’s halls of residence place in order to work on the final animation. He had all the software we needed and a decent computer to render our work on. The project was getting us down as it was taking ages to generate each part of the animation and we had watched numerous movies just to pass the time while the computer did what it had to do. It was within my mate’s room that I first watched “Scream” as it happens. Anyways, I decided to take the Ben Folds Five album with me the one day to cheer us all up a bit and indeed it did. Tracks like “Song For The Dumped” and “The Battle Of Who Could Care Less” were received with a lot of enthusiasm. One memory of listening to this album today then is that it kept us all sane during times of suffering through 3D animation.
As my love for Ben Folds Five grew, they became instilled into other areas of my life at that time. I must stress that I had actually bought the album at this point by the way. I hadn't stolen it from Wolverhampton Central Library before any of you get ideas! Anyways, not wanting to sound too cheesy (but I will!), I printed off the lyrics to “Kate” next to a photograph of Kate Winslet and had it framed in my wall. Another group project at university saw us working on a virtual airport in which you could book tickets for a flight and then preview the in-flight entertainment. One of my jobs on this assignment was to find appropriate video clips and include them into the project so I created three little showcases, each of which included clips of sitcoms, news stories, movies and music videos. Wanting to have an influence on the proceedings, our project was handed in and graded very highly with “One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces” as part of the in-flight entertainment.
In due course, I would own Ben Folds Five’s debut album and also “The Unauthorised Biography of Reinhold Messner”, their wonderful follow up album to “Whatever and Ever Amen”. I took Kel to see them live at the Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall (one hell of a gig!) and everything was perfect but then they decided to split. Ben was living in Australia recording his own tracks and things fell flat. The band decided to pursue their own projects and it hurt. It hurt really bad.
There wasn’t a band like Ben Folds Five before them and there certainly hasn’t been one like them since. Their unique sound of piano, bass and drums combined to form fantastic melodies and tracks you could dance to, laugh to, muse over and feel good about. They were awesome. I find it ironic how I found their happy, funny tracks during a stressful time at university and they left my life when my relationship with Kel was growing and I couldn’t have been any happier. A strange turn of events for sure.
Around three years ago, Ben Folds toured his solo material with Neil Hannon, who had also gone solo following the split of The Divine Comedy. It was a good gig but we couldn’t help but feel that their best days had passed. Neil’s material didn’t sound as great without the rest of the Divine Comedy being there and Ben’s new stuff sounded good but it lacked the bass and drums that Robert and Darren had provided. He decided to slow down “Song For The Dumped” and he ruined it. It just wasn’t the same.
Looking back, I feel really grateful in that I got to see Ben Folds Five live in their prime but I can’t help but feel that it would be fantastic if they were still around as a trio today.
Flashback Friday Number 11 - "Whatever And Ever Amen" by Ben Folds Five
Ben Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jessee. Three Americans called Ben Folds Five. But there's a lot more to the band than the joke behind their name. They take me back to a time of my life that started out stressful but ended on a high note. Pull up a pew and I'll explain.
I first saw Ben Folds Five on “Top Of The Pops” in the spring of 1998. They were performing “Brick” which is a very slow, mournful song about abortion. It captivated me as soon as I heard it and it made me find out as much as I could about the band. Surprised to find “Whatever And Ever Amen” in Wolverhampton Central Library, I decided to borrow it, expecting much more of the same mellow sound that I had heard on TV. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are a few mournful, chilled out tracks on the album but the majority of it encapsulates happy, funny, feelgood tracks, the like of which I had never heard before. I remember the opening track “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” totally blowing me away with its hilarious up-tempo loudness, leaving me to think that if the rest of the album followed suit, it definitely wouldn’t be a bad thing! One of the great things about the album was that it sounded so real. Recorded in Ben’s house, the band weren’t afraid to leave in their chatter of approval at the end of tracks such as “I like that one” following “One Angry Dwarf…”or “I liked that one too” following the highly under-rated “Fair”. The reality of it all reaches new heights when crickets can be heard buzzing around in the background of “Cigarette” and Ben’s phone can be heard ringing in the middle of “Steven’s Last Night In Town”. It happens exactly as the music pauses before kicking in again. It sounds so perfect you would have thought they had meant it but Rob’s laughter at this freaky moment proves just how real it all is.
I was at university when I got into Ben Folds Five and one of my assignments at that time was a 3D animation group project. Each person had to design something of attraction within the Midlands and then the 3D models had to be incorporated into an animated showcase for the tourism of the area. I designed an old steam train to promote the Severn Valley Railway and every day for around a week, our team decided to meet at my friend’s halls of residence place in order to work on the final animation. He had all the software we needed and a decent computer to render our work on. The project was getting us down as it was taking ages to generate each part of the animation and we had watched numerous movies just to pass the time while the computer did what it had to do. It was within my mate’s room that I first watched “Scream” as it happens. Anyways, I decided to take the Ben Folds Five album with me the one day to cheer us all up a bit and indeed it did. Tracks like “Song For The Dumped” and “The Battle Of Who Could Care Less” were received with a lot of enthusiasm. One memory of listening to this album today then is that it kept us all sane during times of suffering through 3D animation.
As my love for Ben Folds Five grew, they became instilled into other areas of my life at that time. I must stress that I had actually bought the album at this point by the way. I hadn't stolen it from Wolverhampton Central Library before any of you get ideas! Anyways, not wanting to sound too cheesy (but I will!), I printed off the lyrics to “Kate” next to a photograph of Kate Winslet and had it framed in my wall. Another group project at university saw us working on a virtual airport in which you could book tickets for a flight and then preview the in-flight entertainment. One of my jobs on this assignment was to find appropriate video clips and include them into the project so I created three little showcases, each of which included clips of sitcoms, news stories, movies and music videos. Wanting to have an influence on the proceedings, our project was handed in and graded very highly with “One Angry Dwarf And 200 Solemn Faces” as part of the in-flight entertainment.
In due course, I would own Ben Folds Five’s debut album and also “The Unauthorised Biography of Reinhold Messner”, their wonderful follow up album to “Whatever and Ever Amen”. I took Kel to see them live at the Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall (one hell of a gig!) and everything was perfect but then they decided to split. Ben was living in Australia recording his own tracks and things fell flat. The band decided to pursue their own projects and it hurt. It hurt really bad.
There wasn’t a band like Ben Folds Five before them and there certainly hasn’t been one like them since. Their unique sound of piano, bass and drums combined to form fantastic melodies and tracks you could dance to, laugh to, muse over and feel good about. They were awesome. I find it ironic how I found their happy, funny tracks during a stressful time at university and they left my life when my relationship with Kel was growing and I couldn’t have been any happier. A strange turn of events for sure.
Around three years ago, Ben Folds toured his solo material with Neil Hannon, who had also gone solo following the split of The Divine Comedy. It was a good gig but we couldn’t help but feel that their best days had passed. Neil’s material didn’t sound as great without the rest of the Divine Comedy being there and Ben’s new stuff sounded good but it lacked the bass and drums that Robert and Darren had provided. He decided to slow down “Song For The Dumped” and he ruined it. It just wasn’t the same.
Looking back, I feel really grateful in that I got to see Ben Folds Five live in their prime but I can’t help but feel that it would be fantastic if they were still around as a trio today.