3 Til 6 Sun

The Song I Had In My Head At Work Today (1)

2011-10-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

On the late shift at work, I don't really have anyone to talk to or anything I really have to concentrate on. This means I can get overly analytical about the song I have in my head. So without further ado, the song I had in my head at work today (1) was a tune I've been listening to recently after not having heard it for awhile. It's a Squeeze tune called 'Tough Love', from their 1987 album Babylon & On.

This is an album I've owned a few times. I had a mint vinyl copy as a teenager and, even though I liked it, inexplicably gave it to charity at some point, most likely 'cos it wasn't cool or somesuch stupidity. I then acquired a cassette copy of it a few years later and that disappeared. Then, a couple of months ago on a daytrip to Worcester, I found a dog-eared vinyl copy in a bargain bucket for £1. I also 'acquired' every Squeeze LP on mp3 when Beki introduced me to PirateBay. Thankfully, I can now listen without any stupid teenage hang-ups about whether listening to late-80s music when no-one's looking makes me uncool (to who?).

Considering it was made in 1987 (generally a terrible vintage for music), it's a pretty good album and doesn't suffer too much from the glossy over-production and awful drum sounds that mar so many potentially good tunes from that period. Not all of it's good - closing track 'Some Americans' is a low-point, whilst others such as '853-5937' are irredeemably 80s both in sound and vision (awful video). But where it's good ('Footprints'), it's brilliant and there's plenty of hidden Beatles-influenced gems ('In Today's Room', 'Who Are You?') where great melodies survive the period production (I sound like the bloke off 'Homes Under The Hammer', I'll stop before I start punning). Another thing I've noticed from recent listening is that there's also - and I say this is as a musician rather than a chin-stroking muso - some great playing amongst the synth overdubs, particularly some of the basslines and little percussion ideas that are going on.

Strangely, considering it was one of their biggest albums, I don't think it's ever been reissued on CD in this country. Or maybe not so strange considering the random nature of Squeeze's CD reissues: After some half-arsed efforts in the late-90s, only one of their big ones ('Argybargy' - a triumph of songwriting and a true classic) has been given the 'Deluxe Edition' treatment, whilst three of their lesser-known ones were given the remastered-with-bonus-tracks overhaul about five years ago.

ANYWAY, back to 'Tough Love' (side one, track three), an accordion-laced waltz whose lyric tells the poignant story of a couple after yet another violent domestic; him sleeping his drunken rage off in the car. Chris Difford, a great lyricist anyway (except in later years when he's become perhaps too self-consciously lyrical) is on form on most of this album and most of the songs also read well as poems. I know this 'cos I spent most of the train journey back from Worcester reading them.

He's also one of the masters of the story-telling lyric (see 'Up The Junction' among many) of which this is an example. As such, it doesn't need me to explain it because it speaks so well for itself. What I really like about the lyric though, is the way that even though they appear to have resolve their differences, the words seem to set up an unsaid notion that nothing's really changed and the bloke'll probably fall off the wagon again at some point, smacking her in the face as he does so. In such a concise form as song-writing, to convey that without saying it is quite a feat. Also worthy of a mention is the metaphor at the end of the middle eight (proper, old fashioned structure y'see): 'returning like somebody's lost balloon'. There's a sadness to that image, beautifully underpinned by a downward chord change and the melancholy sounding accordion.

Which brings us to the music. Glenn Tilbrook (for it was he) is one of those songwriters who often doesn't bother using three chords when twenty will do and 'Tough Love' is no exception. The descending chord sequence frames the lyric nicely and, as the warmest and most authentically 60s sounding tune on the album, seems to be inspired by The Beatles c.For Sale/Help!/Rubber Soul. The very end is vaguely reminiscent of 'You've Got To Hide Your Love Away'.

And, talking of ends, there you have it (yes, I just started a sentence with and. And...?) Regrettably, I can't end these posts in a Beatle-esque fashion. Or can I? Oooooooh.....

Thought for the Day.1

2011-10-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve just been watching a 1921 short film by a bloke called Hans Richter called Rhythm.21. It’s little more than experimenting with the possibilities of early film, being lots of squares moving around the screen – are they going further away or is our perspective? etc. It’s very much the sort of film I would once have loved to make: Simple but experimental, with that wide-eyed freshness that comes with new art-forms. Like other films I’ve seen from round that time (Dali and Bunuel’s strange but beautiful Un Chien Andalou springs to mind), it’s a work based on pure imagination and child-like wonder at simple things – traits found in the very best psychedelic works of art.

I then realised that you couldn’t make a film like this nowadays, mostly because it’s so hard to appear completely unrealistic or ambiguous in film. Graphics are now developed to such a degree that even the most far-fetched of fantasies can look ever more ‘real’ (I’m sure you can think of your own examples of this). You don’t just have to look at films either, check out how far computer games have come in 20-odd years. I’m old enough to remember when Sonic the Hedgehog was the last word in graphic design and computers – now he looks, well, quite quaint – the relic of a more innocent gaming age, when everything was wide-eyed and fresh.

Then it struck me that one of the problems that contemporary entertainment faces is that the real and the imaginary have got mixed up. The more life-like the representations of imagination become, the more staged and artificial ‘reality’ becomes - be it reality television or the customer service in High Street shops. The more we can use computers to live our lives through, the more tenuous the relationships we build through them can become. The financial crisis was caused by the failure of money that doesn't physically exist, just numbers on a computer screen.

Will our imaginations destroy our reality? The bomb was once someone’s daydream…

The Leaving of Wolverhampton

2011-09-11T08:35:00.001-07:00

     This blog is something that's been hanging round for a couple of years but I've never done anything with. I used to put poems and lyrics and what-have-you on here, but no-one read them and I never publicised it. I've always been a little put off the idea of a blog thanks to Private Eye's dismissive attitude towards them, but then Private Eye is a national magazine with an audience and so can afford to be dismissive. I'm not a national magazine and I can't afford much beyond own-brand baked beans at the sec (I'm not a private eye either, before you ask me to keep an eye on your wife).

With university now finished and the real world slapping me and millions (well, maybe thousands) like me in the face like the smug twat it is, I thought I'd have another go at blogging. It'll give me somewhere to rant and practice sentence structure. My plan as it stands, having thought about it during a long shower this morning, is to spend the next year or so in some quiet dead-end job or other. Preferably it'll be one where no-one gives a toss and I can spend my days daydreaming, chatting with people, doing the crossword, drinking tea...you get the picture. This'll give me time to dedicate my energies to my band, The Bluebeat Arkestra, about whom you'll be hearing a lot more if I keep this thing up. If after a year, we're still not in a position to be full-time musicians, I'll try and do an MA in English or Creative Writing. With a view to what? I'll tell you later, it's more what I'm trying to escape at the moment.

People kept asking me about whether I was doing a Masters and I always said I'd love to do one, but I couldn't afford it. Then, on graduation day of all days, a few of us had a branigan (archaic word for 'piss-up' that a few of us are trying to bring back) that ended up in Wolverhampton's premier 90s nostalgia club, Babylon. Along the way we'd recruited one of our lecturers (I was going to say acquired, but that makes him sound like a road sign). Over the last few of what had been a lot of dark rum and cokes, we shouted over Spice Girls records about a mutual love of mid-90s indie vinyl, Wind in the Willows and North Wales. In amongst these subversive and frankly downright dangerous topics, he suggested there might be a way to get funding for further learning. I was aware during the graduation that people were being awarded prizes of various kinds, which meant nothing to me and which my Dad likened to a gameshow. Having done some preliminary research, looks like that's what funding and scholarships are. I wish I'd known this before the f**king ceremony!

To be honest though, the last three years have been a blur of university, pub-work, the band slowly getting off the ground, a new relationship, moving house (lots of that), a social life (not so much of that recently) and lots, LOTS of travelling between all these things on public transport. In short, I'm absolutely exhausted, mentally and physically (no stamina, these late 20-somethings). So really a year of routine quiet work, home-building (not literally) and reading; livened up with several late nights spent haring round Brum and the rest of the country to rehearsals, gigs and recording sessions - is quite a pleasant prospect at the moment. That's if I can get a quiet job, but that's a rant for another time.

Anyway, I'll sign off with a poem I wrote recently and which I'm quite pleased with. It's about the final few weeks I spent living in Wolverhampton before my girlfriend and I moved back towards Birmingham. I moved there to do my degree and spent the best part of three years living and working there, meeting some lovely people and picking up inflections of the accent which exacerbated my own Brummie tone. I also lived in a badly-maintained shithole (one shower between 24 at one point) and dealt with some right dickheads (don't want to get too rose-tinted!) but it makes you who y'are.

The title's from a Pogues song (and therefore possibly an old Irish song) called The Leaving of Liverpool which I've never really heard, I just liked the title.

THE LEAVING OF WOLVERHAMPTON

It's in the leaving of these sawdust rooms
It's the emptying of the meters.
To read and return these much-leafed books
And hold those moments in the shadow of St. Peters

It's in the words of friends we made there at the forge
It's the final crossing off on the list
To find then discard those old meeting places
With uncertainties of futures in our midst

     But in time there were times
     When there was only arriving
     From rain-sodden streets or the supermarket beat
   And life too had times when it was truly alive!
     Filled with warm evening welcomes...
                                                               ...and drunken goodnights

Now the wind whips round from where I have sailed
And the platforms stand clear
The Metro un-taken, on the back of the bus
Glass clings to the sides of the beer

It's in the turning of the newsagent signs
As the weeds reclaim the garden
Is there change in the air, or the people who breathe it?
As our too change to guard 'gainst the leaving of this town

     By mainline or branch, we fly south for the winter
     And the spring to follow its end
   By which time all this will be just memories told
     To those people yet un-met.