What I was alive for

02: October We Take it Back

Recorded February 2001, Savage Sounds, Cleobury Mortimer, Salop
Performers Pete Green (lead vocal), Rob Harris (guitar, backing vocal), Paul Roach (guitar), Stu Fletcher (bass), Chris Green (drums)
Producer Paul Savage
Released Effortless cd album January 2004; A Layer of Chips fanzine cover cd November 2008

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence


This is a song about shagging. Specifically, it's about shagging in October. It's sort of meant as a counterblast to all those songs that equate summer with sex – because there is nothing sexy at all about hot weather. Now I'm not being a filthy goth or anything. I don't mind a bit of sunshine. But the summer is for beer gardens, and cricket, and Indietracks. Not shagging. Because you're all sweaty and sticky already from the heat. Yuck. And there's so much flesh exposed to begin with that you can't really have fun, y'know, peeling off layers and that. Give me the autumn any time, just as the weather's turning and you get that first fresh tingle of winter in the air, enough to bring a little flush to the cheeks of your loved one, and a little breeze to tousle their hair a tiny bit...


But I'm getting all English and embarrassed now so that's enough with the rude. I like the autumn better than any season, regardless of rumpy-pumpy, and when I hear this song I think of living in leafy Handsworth Wood in Birmingham in 1993 and 1994. It was my second year at university and, rather than take the number 16 bus down to the corner of Handsworth Park and then the number 11 across to Perry Barr, me and my housemates used to walk over some playing fields to Old Walsall Road and go one stop on the train from Hamstead station. The fields were covered by a wind-rumpled carpet of golden and crimson leaves, and Hamstead station was a beautiful, cosy, humble little joy of a thing, with a gas fire in the ticket office and the air of a village station but ten or fifteen minutes from the city centre. (I'd be amazed if it's still staffed now.)


The whole year was a short-lived illusion of living city life from a dreamy suburban retreat: the only way we could afford to live in Handsworth Wood was in a draughty house with mice, dodgy locks and a leaky roof. But I liked it a lot, and this was where I met the future Regulars bassist Stu Fletcher in the autumn of 1993. (This photo is Stu at a gig at the Rising Sun Arts Centre in Reading in March 2001.) He was round the house a lot as he was seeing a mate off our English course who was also round the house a lot; he introduced me to the Black Country and I introduced him to The Orchids, and then we watched the '94 World Cup in the USA from the sofa. If we were watching one of those appalling and wilfully stupid Two Pints of Coupling Behaving Badly sitcoms on BBC3 it would probably be called 'male bonding'. I prefer the term 'making friends'.

Anyway. Like I was saying last week, 'October' was gonna be our second single until I persuaded everyone to put 'This is the Sound' out instead (and I wish I hadn't, because I love 'October' much better). If we'd stuck with plan A then you'd now be downloading a better-produced version than this. Half of the Effortless cd comprises demo tracks we recorded with Stu's dad's mate Paul Savage at his home studio in the middle of nowhere (well, the middle of Shropshire) and this was from our third and final visit in February 2001. Like a lot of the stuff we recorded out there, this sounds a bit thin and reedy to me now, with the bass unfathomably low in the mix. Not that we'd blame Paul Savage for this – we were an inexperienced band and found analogue recording pretty hard – but I'd have loved to have heard a recording of this song with a warmer, rounder sound (like we got at our brilliant final session with Mat Webster in Redditch in December 2001, when we recorded 'Try', 'Today at Last' and 'Pop Box 9:30' – you'll get to hear all these later).

A trawl through various archived versions of the Regulars website (which have followed me through the hard drives of several computers in the intervening years) reveals that we were writing 'October We Take it Back' in August 1999. Its live debut was exactly nine years ago, on 11 November at the Jug of Ale. I didn't write much of this song, mind you. Apart from the words, the only bit I contributed was the vocal melody; the song is built around Rob's lovely, poised riff which introduces the two verses. Another thing worth listening out for is Paul introducing an extra guitar line for the second verse (starting at 1:26), which wasn't there in the first – a good illustration of how we liked to make little changes to the arrangement to keep things interesting. Paul's guitar is what brings the chorus to life, too – a fiery little swish down the fretboard like a sparkler on Guy Fawkes' Night.

But listen to the bridge, because when I stop singing it's the best bit of the song. The first part of it, from 2:24 to 2:38, in particular. When we recorded the song Rob double-tracked his guitar here, so the same bit of tune is played once on an acoustic and once on an electric, over the top of each other, and sometimes I get these images in my head of what a bit of music looks like, and here the acoustic guitar has always sounded to me like the look of a yellowing autumn leaf while the electric has sounded like the look of a faint touch of frost along the leaf's edges and veins. I love how our Chris's double tom tap, after four bars, wakes up the rest of the instruments and beckons them back in. The second half of the bridge has a blustery, yearning sort of feel which works well too (thanks in large part to some more clever drumming), but that first half, those first eight bars – that's one of my favourite bits in the whole Regulars songbookography, that is, and it paints brightly what an effortless creative genius Rob could be.

Now, if you'll excuse me again, the autumn leaves are swirling below my window once more and there's a distinct nip in the air, so I need a cold shower.



Linky
Lyric sheet (pdf)
An account of the live debut of 'October' from the Regulars website
Bearos Records free downloads page including this song
A Google map showing the locations referred to above
Hamstead station on the excellent Rail Around Birmingham site

posted by Pete Green @ 21:34